ICYMI: Did HAL commit murder?


The whole point of heuristic programming is that it defies the problem of combinatorial explosion —which we cannot mathematically solve by sheer increase in computing speed and size —by taking risky chances, truncating its searches in ways that must leave it open to error, however low the probability. 

The saving clause, “by any practical definition of the words,” restores sanity. 

HAL may indeed be ultra­reliable without being literally foolproof, a fact whose importance Alan Turing pointed out in 1946, at the dawn of the computer age, thereby pre­futing Roger Penrose’s 1989 criticisms of artificial intelligence: "In other words then, if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelli­gent. There are several theorems which say almost exactly that. But these theorems say nothing about how much intelligence may be displayed if a machine makes no pretence at infallibility."   



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