AI is better at history than maths or physics

This is counter-intuitive at first sight - though not so surprising when you think about it.

Can an AI Get Into the University of Tokyo?

[...] At Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII), in Tokyo, a research team is trying to create an artificial intelligence program that has enough smarts to pass Japan’s most rigorous entrance exams. The AI will start by taking the standardized test administered to all secondary school students; once it masters that test, it will move on to the more difficult University of Tokyo exam.

[...] Even in the standardized test, each subject poses distinct challenges. The math portion, where an AI might be expected to excel, is made more complicated because the questions are presented as word problems, which the Todai Robot must translate into equations that it can solve. Physics is difficult too, because it presumes that the robot understands the rules of the universe. When equipped with a set of rules, however, the AI can simulate the scenario posed in a given question—for example, the trajectory of a missile—to arrive at the correct answer.

Surprisingly, the Todai Robot turned out to be a star student in history, where its natural-language-processing skills really shine. Miyao, who leads the work on language processing, explains that the AI can find the answers to questions by searching a database that includes textbooks and Wikipedia.

IEEE Spectrum September 2013

Presumably this only works for the most straightforward of history questions. One could imagine probing questions that couldn't be answered from textbooks or wikipedia.

R.I.P. Fred Dretske

Via Simon D’Alfonso blog I've heard that Fred Dretske has died.

I've blogged about ideas from Dretske quite a few times over the years.

Communicating information faster than light

The New Scientist has been agonising about reality again. The cover of the issue of 3 August 2013 advertises the article thus:

Reality

Relativity

Causality

Free Will

One of them is wrong. But which?

Michael Brooks, "Reality Checked" New Scientist Volume 219 No 2928.
Online version: Quantum weirdness: The battle for the basis of reality accessed 1/9/13

It comes down to entanglement in quantum mechanics requiring the violation of causality because it requires the communication of information faster than the speed of light. I've discussed this before (see my posts labelled causality) and my speculation was that whatever it is that is sent faster than the speed of light is not really information, and therefore there wasn't a problem.

Well this latest article argues quite explicitly that that get-out has been proved to be wrong.

Relativity only forbids an influence propagating above light speed when it carries information. So what if some weird phenomenon unknown to physicists could break relativity, connect two entangled particles, while being information-free?

We have even less idea what that sort of influence might look like. Chances are it doesn't matter: since last year, this escape route back to normality has also been blocked off. Together with Gisin and others, Jean-Daniel Bancal at the University of Geneva worked through what would happen within a network of four senders and receivers that could synchronise their measurements of entangled photons. In this theoretical set-up, influences could travel through space-time at whatever speed they liked, just as long as they contained no information.

And it failed to reproduce reality. There was no way any physical mechanism of any stamp could produce the quantum correlations seen in experiments unless hidden influences within the network could also send information at above light speed (Nature Physics, vol 8, p 867). 

I remember the moment at school when I first got really excited by physics. It was during an A-level physics lesson when I was introduced to relativity and the idea that time itself was relative, that time in a moving object passed at a different 'rate' than time in a stationary object (so to speak). It was the discovery that our every day common-sense interpretation of reality could be wrong - and that physics knew better. Of course that aspect of relativity is no big deal any more. That's to say, I've got used to it and realised that the world still makes perfect sense with the speed of light rather than time as the universal reference.

I'm back there now, though, losing my footing in reality. Now that physicists are closing off the escape routes.  Can I comprehend a universe that doesn't respect causality? Or one without free-will?