Comment by guhidalg
9 days ago
I wouldn't call pattern matching intelligence, I would call it something closer to "trainability" or "educatable" but not intelligence. You can train a person to do a task without understanding why they have to do it like that, but when confronted with a new never-before-seen situation they have to understand the physical laws of the universe to find a solution.
Ask ChatGPT to answer something that no one on the internet has done before and it will struggle to come up with a solution.
Pattern matching leads to compression- once you identified a pattern you can compress the original information by some amount by replacing it with the identified pattern. Patterns are symbols of the information that was there originally; so manipulating patterns is the same as manipulating symbols. Compressing information by finding hidden connections, then operating on abstract representations of the original information, reorganising this information according to other patterns... this sounds a lot like intelligence.
Exactly! And once you compress a pattern, it can became a piece of a larger pattern.
What precludes pattern matching from understanding the physical laws? You see a ball hit a wall, and it bounces back. Congratulations, you learned the abstract pattern:
x->|
x|
x<-|