I disagree. There are educated guesses. Wild guesses. And good guesses.
Chuck, don't know how learned you are in antiquities. But what would be your answer to
the question of a word that's synonymous with "teacher", but in actualitu
it's origin was the name of a literary character from 2500 years ago. It may or may
not help to mention it's from Homer's Odyssey. If you sidn't outright know the
amswer, could you make a good guess? Would you take a wild guess? There is in actuality a
data set, as in english there are a dinite number of synonyms for teacher. But a person
may not be aware of all the possibilities, so that becomes irrelevant.
It seems at this point that AI can only look shit up. I don't doubt that eventually
these things will learn how to reason to whatever degree. But this point won't be
reached until the damned things can make food guesses. But so much bullshit is being
programmed into these things already, in the ways they are taught how to think, I really
have to believe we're all going to need bunkers before long.
On Tuesday, January 17, 2023, 11:56:46 AM EST, Chuck Guzis via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 1/16/23 22:23, Chris via cctalk wrote:
But which of those constitutes guessing? The computer
would likely have beaten me to the answer by at least a second :). It's easy enough to
look up, for a computer that is. But in that instance a computer wouldn't need to
guess. And for me, there were no multiple choices. It was hardly an educated guess - I
never read the friggin book as I was supposed to! (the Odyssey). But the answer was a word
I was familiar with from childhood, never actually knowing what it's origin was
(mentor).
"Guessing" is nothing more than an estimate of the likely answer based
on an incomplete dataset. If you had, for example, no dataset at all,
"Blueberries" would be as good a guess as any to every question.
--Chuck