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Or people who say "The computer thinks...". No it's a machine that only does what people make it do.


We've seen that threshold crossed with neural agents like AlphaGo which can be reasonably described as thinking. It decides if moves are good or bad after a little pause for processing, its decisions improve with time, it has an opinion on the state of play, the opinion is formed using basically the same data as a human, different iterations of the neural network can have a different opinion but there is a link between it and the previous one.

I don't see a test that majorly distinguishes it from a human. It appears to be following the same process with a few tweaks around the edges. There are some exceptions in the 2-5 situations in Go where a human can actually use optimised logic to determine what will happen; but they aren't the meat of the game.


> We've seen that threshold crossed with neural agents like AlphaGo which can be reasonably described as thinking.

I don't recall ever reading in a technical paper, or in an interview, a leader in the field of ANNs claim they were thinking. If you have, I'd like to see a reference. Most are fairly honest about the differences between artificial neurons and real ones, and between human cognition and what ANNs are doing with data.


Is “thought” even a well defined scientific term? I doubt neuroscientists write about it either.


Chess is one of those areas where humans have developed computer-like abilities, such as exhaustive search. What's interesting is the appearance of intuition-like movement in modern chess computers, but is it ... intuition?


I feel that's just a semantics rabbit hole. "Think" is too broad of a term to be picky about.




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