IBM's AI Loses To a Human Debater (cnet.com) 95
The subject under debate was whether the government should subsidize preschools. But the real question was whether a machine called IBM Debater could out-argue a top-ranked human debater. The answer, on Monday night, was no. CNET: Harish Natarajan, the grand finalist at the 2016 World Debating Championships, swayed more among an audience of hundreds toward his point of view than the AI-powered IBM Debater did toward its. Humans, at least those equipped with with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities, can still prevail when it comes to the subtleties of knowledge, persuasion and argument. It wasn't a momentous headline victory like we saw when IBM's Deep Blue computers beat the best human chess player in 1997 or Google's AlphaGo vanquish the world's best human players of the ancient game of Go in 2017. But IBM still showed that artificial intelligence can be useful in situations where there's ambiguity and debate, not just a simple score to judge who won a game. "What really struck me is the potential value of IBM Debater when [combined] with a human being," Natarajan said after the debate. IBM's AI was able to dig through mountains of information and offer useful context for that knowledge, he said.
So universities determine intelligence? (Score:2)
Are high end schools the only way to get "subtleties of knowledge, persuasion and argument".
I do like the photo though, and yes, I read the article (but didn't attend the school mentioned).
First post maybe.
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Re: So universities determine intelligence? (Score:2)
At a community college, your mileage will vary depending on the material and your self-study skills.
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Take a 'nightmare of pomposity' like Princeton or Yale: if you subtract the affirmative-action types, you're generally left with world-class professors, especially in non-wishywashy subjects unlike the Humanities.
Don't forget the importance of the students. At Princeton or Yale, you'll be surrounded by world-class students. And sometimes, students learn more from each other than they do from the professors.
The classes won't be held back by a bunch of slackers, like in high school.
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That's a good point. Majoring in actuarial science, I had a bunch of good math geeks around me and was in honors classes for non-math stuff (one was on teen Jeopardy).
High burn out/failure rate, but those who could handle the math (2nd year - calculus based statistics) were sharp. And my classmates.
Re: So universities determine intelligence? (Score:4, Interesting)
Plenty of state schools and the like also have world class professors.... At UMass I took AI with Andrew Barto who's co-authored the go-to text book for machine learning.
I took discrete math with Neil Immerman who proved NL=CoNL.
I took Abstract Algebra with Arunas Rudvalis who discovered one of the finite simple groups.
Not exactly intellectual slouches!
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And yet, they teach out of the same books, and everything on the test is either in the book, or part of the professor's bias.
Re: So universities determine intelligence? (Score:1, Insightful)
Jews? Lmao, if you are going to be a racist piece of shit at least get your racist tropes right.
Oxford and Cambridge are the kind of places the British elite are taught to hate Jews. Saying Jews run those places is like saying Jews run ISIS or the PLO.
I know you are just a weak troll but wanted to help you out since no one even bothered to down vote you to -1. As an elite troll who makes it to -1 90% of the time I figured you could use a hand. The best trolls are true and hit home. For example, tell the
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When was the last time you had a feeling that turned out to be false?
Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!
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I once thought that if the truth can be told so as to be understood it will be believed.
Ain't so easy with some people.
Weak, Slashdotters. Weak. (Score:1)
After almost 80 comments, only one master debater joke?
Slashdot has really gone downhill.
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I didn't even know that the Creeks had a written language. Did they take a hint from the Cherokee's Sequoyah?
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The Roman you are thinking of was probably Cicero. He founded a school of rhetoric which specialized in winning arguments. He wasn't really interested in whether the argument was valid, only in whether it would sway the audience.
I'm not sure that he wrote a book I rather doubt it. But he wrote numerous articles on his "art", and I'd be surprised if someone didn't gather them together into a book and say it was by Cicero. (He was famous enough that few would have the gall to claim to be the author of on
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He wrote several things that have survived as books. But I sort of doubt I would consider them books in their original form. To quote Wikipedia:
Writers in the Hellenistic-Roman culture wrote longer texts as scrolls; these were stored in boxes or shelving with small cubbyholes, similar to a modern winerack. Court records and notes were written on wax tablets, while important documents were written on papyrus or parchment. The modern English word book comes from the Proto-Germanic *bokiz, referring to the beechwood on which early written works were recorded.
Irrelevant! (Score:2)
The question is "How does one become a skilled and effective debater?", and that's not necessarily strongly correlated with intelligence. It is, however, strongly correlated with instruction and practice in debating. And for getting that, high end schools are nearly the only training ground.
And even that's nearly irrelevant, because this particular individual was chosen because he was a top level debater. That he went to Cambridge and Oxford is part of his history. Perhaps he could have gone to Podunk H
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Many schools provide transport for the debate team, but this implies that they're not going to the "prestigious" events that are necessary to be considered really good.
It is not actually possible to get from Podunk High to the top of that sort of competition unless you had significant additional resources to attend prestigious events separately from your team.
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No. And quite a few people going there will not get them either. But for somebody with the aptitude and the interest it is the most effective known way to do it.
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If it does I question the "intelligence" part of AI.
Possible bias? (Score:4, Interesting)
The victory was decided by the audience, who knew they were listening to a machine, and they may have been biased against it for that reason. A couple of people may even have had a bias for the machine's argument for that reason.
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Re:Possible bias? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Possible bias? (Score:2, Insightful)
Correction. Probably written be a PRIVILEGED white male who likes to dump on all white males. (most of whom are not as privileged). He's probably also racist and sexist but projects this on to the other white males as well. Because, obviously, if he's pointing and screaming at other white males, he must be the virtuous one.
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If they had professional debate judges
"...swayed more among an audience of hundreds toward his point of view than the AI-powered IBM Debater did"
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They should have second round in which they try to convince a room full of AIs of a position.
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Did my Make Humans Great Again hat give me away?
Another sign of systemic racism! (Score:1)
Debate? (Score:2)
Even when we are discussing things like medical treatment of seniors with all the motions involved, the option that results in the most positive outcome for the largest group of people is always the right one.
The ONLY arena I see Debate as useful is in the Political aren
Re:Debate? (Score:4, Insightful)
When dealing with people, numbers are not the end all, be all. There are times when the quantitatively correct solution may not necessarily be the qualitatively correct one. Say for example there is a disease that can be treated through regular yet painful treatments at the cost of $1 million. There is a cure for the disease, with a one-time application that costs $1.5 million. Quantitatively the treatment course is the best option as it it cheaper. However, qualitatively, the cure is the best option as it reduces suffering.
For a more real world example, let's looks at the Titanic sinking and the classic "women and children first". From a purely quantitative point of view, it would have more optimal to prioritize men and women of economical or child-bearing productive age as they have the most benefit to society, then the children, and finally the elderly. However, no one would accept that solution as the most optimal one, neither then nor now.
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In practice, it was "Women, Children, and the Rich" first. I bet if the life rafts were somehow damaged in an accident today, leaving not enough space, it would be the same. The ship employees would save Jeff Bezos over Joe Nobody, forced with a choice.
But I generally agree with your point. Politics often ends up being about social and emotional factors. For example, it's common hear to "he/she hates America" or along the lines
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In practice, it was "Women, Children, and the Rich" first. I bet if the life rafts were somehow damaged in an accident today, leaving not enough space, it would be the same. The ship employees would save Jeff Bezos over Joe Nobody, forced with a choice.
But I generally agree with your point. Politics often ends up being about social and emotional factors. For example, it's common hear to "he/she hates America" or along the lines of "he/she hates blue/red culture". That's about one's alleged internal motivations, biases, background, not raw numbers.
Is he/she "one of us" is probably the biggest factor in politics.
It would say it wasn't a conscious decision so much as a product of the ship layout (the wealthier people were closer to the lifeboats) and ingrained social conditioning with the poorer people "waiting their turn" and the crew defaulting to non-emergency policies. When/if 2nd and 3rd class passengers made it to the deck they were loaded into the boats alongside the wealthy. I believe they even started loading female crew into the boats as well if I remember correctly. It was also a product of luck on whi
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Say for example there is a disease that can be treated through regular yet painful treatments at the cost of $1 million. There is a cure for the disease, with a one-time application that costs $1.5 million. Quantitatively the treatment course is the best option as it it cheaper. However, qualitatively, the cure is the best option as it reduces suffering.
Is it? How much suffering might be involved in producing that extra half-million dollars needed for the more expensive cure?
Re:Debate? Yes. (Score:2)
> Why are we trying to teach machines the ability to debate?
> The ONLY arena I see Debate as useful is in the Political arena, where you can cherry pick your statistics and studies to try to prove your side.
You are basically saying that future AI is impossible, that computers can only do computation, statistics and algorithms (like chess, go, or image recognition), and that humans contain some magical power that may not be replicated by a non-human machine.
You assume that the Turing test will never be
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Nobody gets that most positive outcome. So no, that does not follow from his logic.
The better way to argue this is:
1. "Most positive outcome" and "largest group of people" can run at cross-purposes. Eg. if everybody has equal resources, vs. half of people having double resources and half having none, a smaller group of people have a more positive outcome. Somehow you have to normalize. Eg. you can multiply the utility of the outcome by the number of people who achieve that.
2. "Positive outcome" is sub
We're safe! (Score:2)
As long as we can still convincingly argue to a robot army that they shouldn't "kill all humans" better than Hitlerbot 9500, the human race is safe. On a side note, I really wish people would stop their work on Hitlerbot 9500. Come on people, it's already over 9000!
We're so screwed (Score:3)
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Neoliberal thinking. (Score:1)
I think the outcome is rather a testament to how deeply neoliberal thinking has washed our brains, after +70 years of constant indoctrination [wikipedia.org].
To get a real measure, you should at least run the test twice, with both sides changing roles, no?
It doesn't have to beat the best debater (Score:2)
It only has to "beat" (i.e. persuade) the average voter. Then it - or whoever controls it - will become our overlord.
Or, if it wants to truly show its worth, it has to be able to put up a convincing argument with the accounts committee as to why it should receive future funding. Once it can do that, then it will be able to take over the world. The only remaining problem might occur if it encountered a better version of itself on the budget-holder's side - arguing that IT should get the financing, not IBM
it's a robot (Score:2)
Who decided the winner? (Score:2)
I just can't not... (Score:1)
Size of debate (Score:2)
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Was this a mass debate?
No, but clearly, the human was a master debater.
anyone that actually works in ML knows (Score:1)
Mill ion (Score:2)
and a whopping 768GB of memory
"Or over a million times more than anybody will ever need!"
The competition was rigged ... (Score:2)
Debate doesn't have a clear winner. Like gymnastics, Miss America, and America's Got Talent, it's a popularity contest with voters. What would the results have been if the voters were AI programs instead of humans? The competition was rigged to be biased in favor of humans.
What would have been more interesting is a Turing Test-like method for judging, where the judges can only read transcripts of the debate. After all, a computer's elocution is dependent on the skill of a human proxy or reliant on clunk
Must have been a really good debater. (Score:2)
A great debater, even.
Perhaps a master-level debater.
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More like a journeyman debater, given it lost.