I don't much like scoffing at a paper I have only skimmed in an area I know next to nothing about, but I have questions before I'd pay any attention to this result.
Surely every predator learns to do this kind of "statistical reasoning"? Hunting in some areas gives better return than in others. Foraging animals similarly with other foods. Every house dog I've ever known had an instinctive knowledge of which adult to beg for scraps from at the table for combinations of far more than two people, too.
"In the experiment, the two crows had to choose between two of these images, each corresponding to a different reward probability." The only difference between this and a predator chosing which fork in a path to take is that it's a 2D abstract image, but I'm sceptical that makes much difference to a creature that relies on its vision.
But strong weather events can also create shoreline wave surges, called meteotsunamis. Creating one requires a sustained atmospheric disturbance with a substantial pressure drop or jump. That air pressure wave also needs to move at roughly the same speed as the sea’s waves. As the waves travel together, Dusek says, “You just keep feeding energy into that wave, and it builds up and up and up.”
One of the problems faced by classical AI, he says, is that it often built its models on how the brain might work, using concepts and operations that could be derived from introspection and common sense. "Such an approach assumes that you can introspect internal states of the brain with concepts and words people use to describe objects and actions in their daily lives," he writes. "It is an appealing approach, but its results were all too often insufficient to build a model of how the biological brain really works."
This sounds pretty woolly. Yes, neural networks were loosely inspired by the concept of a neuron. That's not to say they're even an attempt to actually model consciousness. Other AI models are even less connected with cognition. The idea that there's more to be learned from better modelling the brain is almost too obvious to bother stating it. Am I misinterpreting him?
Lichess does use software to detect cheaters. I know of several kids who had accounts banned for that reason; one of them even admitted to cheating afterwards. They look at what's called average centipawn loss. The metric chess computers use to evaluate a position is measured in units of pawns, i.e. all else being equal, if I'm a pawn up, it's +2 and if I'm two pawns down it's -2. The evaluation functions are fairly subtle, considering positional features too. The traditional (pre-AI) computer algorithms were minimax algorithms: each move by white aimed to maximise this metric, and each move by black aims to minimise it. If you take the computer's evaluation of a position before and after I move, I will have played a non-ideal move frequently. The drop in evaluation is called the centipawn loss (i.e. in units of 0.01 pawns). A top level player might have an average centipawn loss of 10 per move. An amateur like me will be higher. A cheater will be lower. Hence, we can detect cheaters. You can get lucky over a game or two, but if you're consistently playing computer moves, you'll be detected. And yes, there are strategies to avoid detection, but they involve leaning on the computer less with obvious disadvantages.
I don't really get cheating at it. Wow, your computer is good at chess. Who fucking cares? I bet your car can beat me or even a top class runner in a race too.
The Twopenny Hangover. This comes a little higher than the Embankment. At the Twopenny Hangover, the lodgers sit in a row on a bench; there is a rope in front of them, and they lean on this as though leaning over a fence. A man, humorously called the valet, cuts the rope at five in the morning. I have never been there myself, but Bozo had been there often. I asked him whether anyone could possibly sleep in such an attitude, and he said that it was more comfortable than it sounded--at any rate, better than bare floor. There are similar shelters in Paris, but the charge there is only twenty-five centimes (a halfpenny) instead of twopence.
-- George Orwell, Down and Out In Paris and London.
There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Ad familiares"
