Gigaom – AI Minute December 11

Transcript

There are a number of problems that have been shown to be unsolvable by a computer. One of the famous ones is the halting problem. The halting problem says, "Can a computer look at a bunch of code and figure out if there's an infinite loop in there?" Is it going to churn forever and never get an answer? I mean there are obviously simple cases where anything can look at it and say, “Yes, that's just an infinite loop,” but there's no algorithm which can, for all occurrences of programs, tell you if they're going to run forever.

This is why computers often get in infinite loops and just sit there churning, because they don’t have any mechanism for not knowing that in one minute the solution will come, so they don’t. Now the interesting thing about all of these problems that we have proven that computers cannot solve, we haven't yet proven that humans cannot solve. Now that may just simply be that we don't really have a mechanism for describing how humans think and therefore we can't really develop such proofs. But it may be that humans can in fact solve certain problems that computers cannot. If this is true then it would indicate that our brains or perhaps our minds are more than simple computational devices.