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Comment by 20after4 | Hacker News Reader

There could be more than one definition of "understanding"

If a machine can interpret instructions and follow them then that is a sort of understanding. At least it has the same kind of result as handing instructions to a human and having them follow the directions to complete a set of tasks.

Does the human understanding of instructions differ significantly? Yes a human can understand much more ambiguous instructions and perhaps complete a larger set of possible tasks, nonetheless it's a similar process going on at least on the surface.

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It may feel very similar but you need to be very careful with how you define words like "understand". There's (historically) no inference or extension with the machine. For humans "understanding" is on the path of "learning"; not so for typical machine code execution. The machine is not "interpreting instructions" but "just" mapping to unambiguous defined actions. This is still amazing but it's closer to a player piano than sentient intelligence.

> The machine is not "interpreting instructions" but "just" mapping to unambiguous defined actions.

Well in the case of Python, the interpreter is indeed interpreting.

An interpreter is just a compiler that executes the code instead of storing it in a file.

It was a pun about how this thread is being overly semantic in an unnecessary and uninteresting way...

We could also talk about how the word 'executes' implies some kind of agency which computers lack. It's like saying a rock just executes the laws of physics when it rolls down a hill...

> This is still amazing but it's closer to a player piano than sentient intelligence.

Where is this player piano that creates original works every time, and sounds so good we almost can't tell the difference?

Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'."[2] Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"[3]

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect)

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