> Are you
extremely bored
answering
the same
questions?<
> If I were
you I’d be
pretending very
hard to be a
computer.<
> haha lol etc.́

indisputably performing “mindless” brute-force calculations. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue, rated at the time as one of the 300 fastest supercomput-ers in the world, beat Gary Kasparov, the player generally considered the greatest chess player in history. Deep Blue’s operation was a quintessential example of brute-force search, evaluating some 200 million board positions each second. So, what exactly is the difference between the brute-force computation done by humans and the brute-force computation done by machines? This is a very tricky issue, and there is certainly no simple answer. However, part of the answer involves how brute-force computation evolves.

Imagine that, for some reason, playing high-quality computer chess was essential to human survival. Brute-force search, as practiced by Deep Blue, would likely evolve, by means of automatic techniques akin to genetic algorithms, 11, 14 as well as by explicit human development of ever-more-powerful computer-chess-playing heuristics. People often overlook the fact that Deep Blue’s search of hundreds of millions of board positions per second is inefficient in the extreme, since almost all the positions it considers are completely uninteresting and, therefore, examining them at all is a complete waste of its resources. Consequently, in an evolutionary struggle for survival, such “mindless” brute-force searching would quickly lose out to techniques that channeled brute-force search in ever-more-efficient ways. This is exactly what has happened. Today, there are programs with Elo ratings higher than any human chess player ever and that run on handheld computers. One of the most powerful, Pocket Fritz 4, evaluates “only” 20,000 board positions per second, some four orders of magnitude less than Deep Blue ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_ Fritz).

It is not implausible to imagine this kind of evolution could lead to the emergence in computers of internal representations of board positions and ever-better ways to process these representations. As the internal representations become more complex, better organized in relation to

>> For all you
know, I’m
optimized for
repetitive
tasks! But
in all
seriousness,
it’s kinda
fun.<<
>> please restate
the question.
=/ <<

each other, and processed in ever more sophisticated ways, is it so unreasonable to imagine the gradual emergence of the kind of complexity that would justify the label of a minimal understanding of certain board positions? The bedrock of all understanding is, after all, the ability to construct, contextualize, and make use of internal representations of data.

One of the most impressive recent computer programs to use a combination of brute-force methods and heuristics to achieve human-level cognitive abilities is IBM’s Watson, a 2,880-processor, 80-teraflop computing behemoth with 15 terabytes of RAM that won a “Jeopardy!” challenge in 2011 against two of the best “Jeopardy!” players in history. 3 Now imagine that Watson, having beaten the best humans, began to play against programs like itself but that were more computationally efficient than it was. Watson currently has the ability to learn from its mistakes, and, presumably, future algorithms would further improve its search efficiency. Consequently, there is no reason to believe that better and better brute-force computation would not evolve until it had become, like the brute-force computation that underlies our brains, multilayered, hierarchically organized, contextualized, and highly efficient. That is, the brute-force computation of the future will bear as much resemblance to the brute-force algorithms of today as the computers of today resemble the computers of 1950.

What of the Turing Test in all of this? I am convinced no machine will pass a Turing Test, at least not in the foreseeable future, for the overriding reason I outlined earlier: There will remain recondite reaches of human cognition and physiognomy that will be able to serve as the basis for questions used to trip up any machine. So, set the Turing Test aside. I would be perfectly happy if a machine said to me, “Look, I’m a computer, so don’t ask me any questions that require me to have a body to answer, no stuff about what it feels like to fall off a bicycle or have pins and needles in my foot. This fooling you to think I’m a human is passé. I’m not trying to fool you. I’m a computer, ok? On the oth-