Connectionists: ChatGPT’s “understanding” of maps and infographics

[poole]

> On Feb 17, 2024, at 1:08 PM, David H Kirshner <dkirsh at lsu.edu> wrote:
> 
> [CAUTION: Non-UBC Email]
> You’re right, David.
> I should have said “Back in Alan Turing’s time when the possibility of AI meant the possibility of symbolic AI, ….”

In Turing's time, from what I can see (I wan’t alive then ;^) neural networks were more trendy than symbolic approaches. Turing’s paper was 1950. McCulloch and Pitts seminal work was 1943. Minsky’s thesis on neural networks was written in 1952. (Schmidhuber has great resources on the history of NNs and AI on his website). 

There was lots of neural network hype in the 1950’s:

"The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. …The service said it would …build the first of its Perceptron thinking machines that will be able to read and write. It is expected to be finished in about a year at a cost of $100,000."
– New York Times [1958]

It was later in the 1950’s that they came to realize that AI needed representations, lead by Minsky and McCarthy, whick lead to the rise of symbolic approaches.. (It is interesting that a major NN conference ICLR is about representations). 

I am sure there are people who know the history better than me, who might like to provide more persoective.

David


>  ——
> David Poole,  
> Department of Computer Science,   
> University of British Columbia,   
> https://cs.ubc.ca/~poole
> poole at cs.ubc.ca