[Beowulf] Wired article about Go machine

Peter St. John peter.st.john at gmail.com
Wed Mar 18 06:56:26 PDT 2009


This article at Wired is about Go playing computers:
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/gobrain.html
Includes a pic of a 24 node cluster at Santa Cruz, and a YouTube video of a
famous game set to music :-)

My beef, which started with Ken Thompson saying he was disappointed by how
little we learned about human cognition from chess computers, is about
statements like this:

"People hoped that if we had a strong Go program, it would teach us how our
minds work. But that's not the case," said Bob
Hearn<http://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Erah/>,
a Dartmouth College artificial intelligence programmer. "We just threw brute
force at a program we thought required intellect."

And yet the article points out:

[our brain is an]...efficiently configured biological processor — sporting
1015 neural connections, capable of 1016 calculations per second

Our brains do brute-force massively distributed computing. We just aren't
conscious of most of it.

Peter
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20090318/14d97d87/attachment.html>


More information about the Beowulf mailing list