Mammon Posted August 6, 2008 Report Share Posted August 6, 2008 This article came up in a chat session last night. And after reading it this morning I've noticed that a lot of the findings and statements about memory and the mind go hand-in-hand with Objectivism, for example... Miller showed that people can contemplate only five to nine items at a time. By packing hierarchies of information into chunks, Simon argued, chess masters could get around this limitation, because by using this method, they could access five to nine chunks rather than the same number of smaller details. Isn't this Crow Epistemology in a nutshell? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eriatarka Posted August 6, 2008 Report Share Posted August 6, 2008 (edited) As someone more interested in machine learning, I tend to take this kind of research with a grain of salt. If psychologists/philosophers/whoever had any real idea of how grandmasters play chess, then they should be able to design a computer program using these principles which played at a decent level (rather than just using pure brute force like modern programs do). Hubert Dreyfus once said that computer programming keeps people honest, and I largely agree - when you actually have to sit down and design+implement an algorithm, you need to be absolutely clear about whats going on at every stage - you cant just wave your hands and talk about 'abstraction'/'pattern recognition'/'concept formation' without giving precise and definitive definitions of what these things mean, and explain exactly how theyre done. Since noone has ever managed to do this in chess (or even in simpler games), my guess is that psychologists only have a vague idea of whats actually going on inside the head of a grandmaster. The way that a good human player can just sit down at a chess/go board and immediately 'see' the best move without doing extensive reading ahead is an extremely curious and deep phenomena which modern artificial intelligence is unable to replicate (to my knowledge), and I think we have a long way to go before we fully understand how its done. Edited August 6, 2008 by eriatarka Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidOdden Posted August 6, 2008 Report Share Posted August 6, 2008 Isn't this Crow Epistemology in a nutshell?George Miller's results are well-known; I find it entirely believable that this is the professor of psychology that Rand was referring to. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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