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Monday, May 13, 2024

The best analogy for artificial intelligence (AI)


AI is basically the same as a room full of monkeys and typewriters eventually producing Shakespeare. There is a funny clip from The Simpsons along those lines:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loMEF18Ir4s

Interestingly enough, this experiment was tried in real life on a small scale. It resulted in several damaged keyboards and several pages consisting entirely of the letter s.

Today's computers are descended from the code-breaking machines of WW2. Those too could be described as a room full of monkeys and typewriters.

The process of using a room full of monkeys and typewriters to create something sensible is better known as a brute force search. For example, if you are trying to guess a 4-digit passcode, there are 10,000 possible combinations (10 x 10 x 10 x 10 = 10^4). This can be narrowed down in various ways given that some passcodes are more popular than others. 

The computing power of a typical smartphone could guess all 10,000 passcodes in much less than a second. Thus, devices which are accessed by other devices need much longer "passcodes" to be secure. Today, that process is called RSA and relies on the fact that as of today there is no efficient way to factorize (find the prime factors) very large semiprime numbers (numbers with only two prime factors). That could change in the future. 

To make another analogy, there has always been an arms race of better locks and lock-pickers. In the same way, there has been a race between better codes and better codebreakers. 

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