DeepMind's AlphaZero plays chess like a tornado in the junkyard

[Tom 1]

I got so triggered by your use of the word "athetist" that I missed your actual questions. :

Apologies! New to these kind of debates

 

[Tom 1]

Here is a very readable account of current abiogenesis research projects, with a brief history of the topic:
The Secret of how Life on Earth Began.

Thanks

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Indeterministic reasoning is know as "illogical" or "creativity".

I don't think that's entirely correct; determinism and logic are not directly connected that way. Logical reasoning is deterministic reasoning within a logical framework; e.g. ideally: consistent, valid, complete, and sound.

Illogical 'reasoning' and creativity can be deterministic - the former comes from reasoning within a framework that is not consistent, valid, complete, and sound, and the latter comes from abstracting and combining concepts outside their conventional frameworks of application, either randomly with selection (trial & error), or by identifying generic abstractions that match some requirement.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Why not make life easy for yourself and just concede AlphaZero did learn to play chess by itself? Because then we can continue with the question on how AlphaZero learned to play chess.

Quote from the paper:

"In this paper, we apply a similar but fully generic algorithm, which we call AlphaZero, to the games of chess and shogi as well as Go, without any additional domain knowledge except the rules of the game, demonstrating that a general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithm can achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance across many challenging domains"
​

What makes you believe someone just need to know the rules to beat a chess master is beyond me.

Wikipedia:

"Tabula rasa (/ˈtæbjələ ˈrɑːsə, -zə, ˈreɪ-/) refers to the epistemological idea that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception."​

The chess community been impressed with the 10 released games. I guess they manage to make their point at least to them. Here you can read the paper in full and explain to me why you think they not be transparent enough about how AlphaZero works.

You might be interested in ANNABELLE, a system that can learn a language and communicate using it, tabula rasa; i.e. without dictionary, syntax, or grammar provided.

Original paper and links to software & examples here.

 

[Chesterton]

*cough* Who said something about abortion earlier?

That question is your idea of an ad hom? Yes, I will bow out of this thread, mainly because we have different definitions of words, such as "reason", "choose" and "machine". This will make it nearly impossible not to talk past each other. Thank you for starting an interesting thread, though.

 

[Tom 1]

It is not a science question, but I am asking for your personal opinion about the fact that many religion sugets the origin of the universe came from a chaos. I find it quite faschinting since physics seams to suggest the basic foundation on which our reality relay is pure chaos. In fact so chaotic that that neither existence or none existence "exists" there, but only potentials. I.e. it is so choatic you cannot even talk about existence and make sense of it.



This is why I recommend Jordan Peterson's Biblical series. Jordan is a professor in clinical psychology a the University of Toronto/Canada and he attempts, starting from Genesis, to defend the moral values in the Bible based on science.

Late response as I´ve been reading more of Peterson´s work. I like his uncluttered, straightforward approach, he gets to a lot of the key points being made in the genesis account through comparisons with the basic realities of human existence, which is a useful way to approach the text I think. He’s not the first to dig psychological themes out of the biblical text, e.g. Henry Cloud and colleagues have written a lot on interpersonal boundaries based on biblical teachings, which tangentially relates to Peterson’s ideas about chaos and order. Some specific issues I think he´s a bit baffled by, as they don’t really fit into his paradigm, like some elements of what is meant by Adam and Eve being naked and unashamed, which I think are best understood from a Christian perspective, as they go beyond what Peterson is mainly getting at, I think.

Re. The notion of creation from chaos, I’ve been looking into this more. So far I think that John H Walton’s ‘the Lost World of Genesis one’ presents the most coherent argument I´ve come across. Walton interprets the genesis creation account using technical analysis of the original language and the context of general world views about cosmogony at the time, using recent translations of literary and religious texts from the ancient near east. What he concludes basically is that at that time people didn’t think of creation as material creation, as we tend to do now, but as bringing order out of chaos. So the genesis account would thus be about God establishing order, assigning roles, and then taking up his place (‘resting’) in the ‘temple’ of the universe in some sense, having provided all that is necessary for creation to function. Metaphorically in that view the creation account is about bringing order from chaos, but in behavioural/relational terms rather than presenting a process of moving from a physical state of chaos to physical order, although as it is all set within a physical universe and it interrelates the physical with the spiritual you could take that as being implicit in the text.