Artificial Intelligence: Why Chess Was Easier Than Laundry
From search and game playing to Bayesian reasoning, neural networks and reinforcement learning: the ideas that make machines act intelligently, and where they surprise us.
Try 3 questions
1. Why did AI beat chess champions decades before robots could reliably fold laundry?
- Perception and movement are hard to compute
- Chess has relatively few possible positions
- Folding laundry follows hidden secret rules
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Answer: Perception and movement are hard to compute
Moravec's paradox: skills evolution polished over millions of years, like seeing and handling objects, are far harder to program than abstract reasoning.
2. In AI, what makes an agent 'rational'?
- It maximizes its expected success
- It reasons exactly the way humans do
- It never makes any mistakes at all
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Answer: It maximizes its expected success
Rationality means choosing the action with the best expected outcome based on what the agent perceives and knows, even if luck turns out badly.
3. Why is poker called a 'partially observable' environment, while chess is fully observable?
- Poker hands last fewer moves than chess
- Players can't see their opponents' cards
- Poker has more players at each table
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Answer: Players can't see their opponents' cards
In chess the whole board is visible; in poker hidden cards force the agent to reason about what it cannot see.
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