> If you add more matchboxes to this setup while teaching it to play something else, is it going to become intelligent eventually?
No, because the design uses a different matchbox for every possible state of the game. If you taught it to play chess, a billion matchboxes wouldn't be enough to get four moves in.[1] Yet digital computers can play chess.
On the other hand, if you switched to a completely different design that uses matchboxes to simulate an artificial neural network… a design that would require opening each matchbox on each time step…
…and pumped the number of boxes up to 100 billion (number of neurons in the human brain) or higher…
…and ran the simulation for, perhaps, trillions of time steps (need to simulate evolution, not just the operation of the brain during a single lifetime)…
…and changed the goal from playing a game to something that would require more general logical reasoning...
…then who knows, it might well become intelligent (though it's hard to be sure). But at that point I'd say the lack of believability has more to do with the difficulty of performing 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 matchbox operations, than the likelihood of achieving useful results if you did.
No, because the design uses a different matchbox for every possible state of the game. If you taught it to play chess, a billion matchboxes wouldn't be enough to get four moves in.[1] Yet digital computers can play chess.
On the other hand, if you switched to a completely different design that uses matchboxes to simulate an artificial neural network… a design that would require opening each matchbox on each time step…
…and pumped the number of boxes up to 100 billion (number of neurons in the human brain) or higher…
…and ran the simulation for, perhaps, trillions of time steps (need to simulate evolution, not just the operation of the brain during a single lifetime)…
…and changed the goal from playing a game to something that would require more general logical reasoning...
…then who knows, it might well become intelligent (though it's hard to be sure). But at that point I'd say the lack of believability has more to do with the difficulty of performing 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 matchbox operations, than the likelihood of achieving useful results if you did.
[1] http://www.bernmedical.com/blog/how-many-possible-move-combi...