Numbers figure pretty high up on
the list of what a computer can do well. While humans often struggle to split a
restaurant bill, a modern computer can make millions of calculations in a mere
second. Humans, however, have an innate and intuitive number sense that helped
us, among other things, to build computers in the first place. Unlike a
computer, a human knows when looking at four cats, four apples and the symbol 4
that they all have one thing in common – the abstract concept of 'four' without
even having to count them. This illustrates the difference between the human
mind and the machine, and helps explain why we are not even close to developing
AIs with the broad intelligence that humans possess. But now a new study, reports
that an AI has spontaneously developed a human-like number sense.
In this study, a deep neural
network that was trained for simple visual object detection spontaneously
developed this kind of number sense. The researchers discovered that specific
units within the network suddenly 'tuned' to an abstract number – just like
real neurons in the brain might respond. It realised that a picture of four
apples is similar to a picture of four cats – because they have 'four' in
common. One really exciting thing about this research is that it shows that our
current principles of learning are quite fundamental. Some of the most
high-level aspects of thinking that people and animals demonstrate are related
deeply to the structure of the world, and our visual experience of that. It
also hints that we might be on the right track to achieve a more comprehensive,
human-level artificial intelligence.
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