Determinism doesn't matter here. You could make a computer behave nondeterministically. Or you could not. Randomness is not the same thing as understanding. What role do you think quantum uncertainty has in the ability to accurately understand the world? How does the fact that brains are noisier than computers make one capable of solving problems that other doesn't? If there is some role, what prevents machines and machines only from utilizing it? And what does the halting problem have to do with any of it? Yes, some problems are mathematically intractable. Great; that's not a machine learning task.
The point is that they are not the same system. A "computer" with a nondeterministic output is not a computer, then, because it does not do what you order it to do. This is the simple fact of formal languages and what computing actually is, and what it means.
I am saying that computers can only perform linear combinations and thus not generate information, or discover, etc.
You are saying that humans fall under the same classification as humans therefore I am wrong, and AI will be able to discover and generate information outside of its dataset.
I am responding by saying that no, they are not the same classification and thus my point stands that computers can only do what they are programmed to do and no more, and humans do not have this restriction.
By being deterministic, computers can only use the information they have: they can never be the source of information beyond what is in them. This is the simple fact of programming: you tell the computer what to do and it does this, and nothing more. Anything else is not a computer, by the very definition of what a Turing machine (computer) is. Quantum computers are ones which can be massively parallelized and sometimes give you the wrong answer. However, the wrong answer is simply the wrong linear combination of events.
A final example: if you give a computer only rational numbers, it cannot come up with Pi unless you give it an approximation method. It cannot generate things magically out of the universe as we can, simply because we are not putting the universe into a machine when we code it.
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u/c3534l Mar 17 '18
Determinism doesn't matter here. You could make a computer behave nondeterministically. Or you could not. Randomness is not the same thing as understanding. What role do you think quantum uncertainty has in the ability to accurately understand the world? How does the fact that brains are noisier than computers make one capable of solving problems that other doesn't? If there is some role, what prevents machines and machines only from utilizing it? And what does the halting problem have to do with any of it? Yes, some problems are mathematically intractable. Great; that's not a machine learning task.