Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 37 of 171
Grabbing a coffee cup is harder than chess
Yale University AI researcher and philosopher Drew McDermott points out that current AI systems tend to work in narrow domains and outperform humans only in areas such as chess and numerical computation, where there are clear ground rules. He says, “A robot that can walk into a room, spy a chessboard, and ask if anyone wants to play is still far in the future.” Simple things that humans take for granted, like walking down stairs, actually require enormously complex processes that the human brain solves in both parallel and real time. We only began to appreciate how complicated these things are when we tried to build robots that could do them. The simple act of reaching out to grab a coffee cup is in reality much harder to compute than how to fork the Queen and protect the Bishop.