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Ch. 23: Limits
[^] Chapter Outlines
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<<Ch. 16: Databases
  1. Turing Test
    1. Can a computer think?
    2. Turing's answer: Can it respond well enough to fool an expert?
    3. Not yet.
  2. Game playing.
    1. Uses a tree of boards.
    2. Computer searches tree for the best result.
    3. Parallel computers makes the search faster.
    4. Historical study helps trim the explosion.
    5. Chess
      1. Kasparov beat Deep Blue in 1996.
      2. Improved Deep Blue won in 1997.
      3. An interesting essay
    6. Winning at chess = intelligence?
      1. The chess computer is very specialized.
      2. Chess is something computers are good at.
      3. The language skills of a normal 3-year-old are far beyond what a computer can do.
      4. Is it the computer that's intelligent, or the engineers who built it?
  3. Are computers creative?
    1. Programs to create pictures.
    2. High-level rules + random number generation.
    3. Can creativity follow a pattern?
  4. Universality.
    1. All general-purpose computers can solve the same set of problems.
    2. Some cannot be solved: The halting problem.
    3. Generally believed that no computer can solve any of these problems.
  5. Complexity.
    1. Some problems are harder than others.
      1. Our CD sorting algorithm is O(n2). Better ones are n log n
      2. To go through and print the name of each CD would be n
    2. NP-complete problems
      1. Includes some useful problems, such as the shortest (or cheapest) route to visit n cities.
      2. The NP-complete problems are thought to unsolvable better than 2n.
      3. This makes the pretty much impractical forever.
<<Ch. 16: Databases