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Upon further reflection, I can say something...

Posted By: Chuck Bower
Date: Thursday, 2 May 2013, at 5:37 p.m.

In Response To: Upon further reflection, I can say something... (Timothy Chow)

I'm no longer sure we're talking about the same thing. A lot of work has gone into speech recognition. Fine.

My point was that a neural net bot can't now (and I suspect ever) explain why it makes plays which would be useful for a human. Let me go back a couple decades for a close example (IMO):

In the late 80's and early 90's there was a piece of backgammon software called "Expert Backgammon for the PC" ("EXBG" was its nick). It was taught to play backgammon by humans, using human thinking. Oversimplifying -- "hit a blot", "make a point", "race when you're ahead", "duplicate opponents good numbers". It was used by top players but mostly because it could do rollouts which had a chance of being correct. At that time it was considered to play at about the equivalent of an middle-range Intermediate. (I don't know if anyone has ever analyzed it with modern tools. I'm wildly guessing its PR would be 12-15 by today's measure.)

THAT was the kind of program that could convey the message (I think) Phil is asking for because it thinks like humans. But starting with the not widely available TD-Gammon and its clones, bots don't think like humans. Their 'reasoning' (if that's a word we may even use in this situation) aren't like ours.

The final chapter of EXBG was written in 1994. I was in Dallas for World Cup week and asked Tom Weaver (co-developer and by that time sole maintainer of EXBG) if he could send me a fresh floppy (!) of the code since their primitive security procedures had caused me to lose my ability to use it when I changed harddrives/computers. He said something like "I could do that but don't you want the new version, which is just about ready for release?" The fact that I never received either is likely tied to the fact that in summer 1994, Jellyfish was just being released.

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