Running out of places to move the goalposts to

2 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by nickdrozd
(nickdrozd.github.io)

8 Comments

andy99

9 hours ago

I just commented about this in another thread. I know there has been some walking back e.g. of the significance of a Turing test but I think overall the goalposts for AI have shifted in the other way, to narrowing down the definition of intelligence to something like “being really good at some set of defined tasks” which coincidentally is basically the strong point of neural networks.

We seem hyperfocused on finding more tasks to train neural networks to do. This of course leads to a moving goalpost effect like in the article, but they’re moving along an axis that doesn’t measure intelligence.

My other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46445511

nickdrozd

9 hours ago

What would be a better way to measure intelligence?

bediger4000

9 hours ago

The article mentions a personal goalpost involving Busy Beavers.

Mine is: write a nroff document that executes at least one macro, and is a quine.

nickdrozd

8 hours ago

How would your views about AI change if that goal were achieved? When my personal goal was reached, I found myself a little bit at a loss for words.

bediger4000

8 hours ago

That's a good question, one I thought of, but have put off grappling with.

Based on what LLMs have given me for answers so far, I'd look harder for the human-written source of the nroff code. I have written what I believe to be the only quine in the GPP macro processing language, LLMs only refer me to my code if I ask for a GPP quine. Google, Meta, OpenAI really have strip mined the entire web.

If I genuinely thought anything creative or new appeared, I'd probably be at a loss as well.

nickdrozd

7 hours ago

I gave a few attempts with ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Neither of them could get it right. So this goalpost can remain in place for the time being.

(I am assuming that the task is actually possible to accomplish. If it isn't possible, then it isn't a very good goalpost!)

bediger4000

7 hours ago

It should be possible. nroff macro language has looping, string interpolation, functions and if/then/else. That macro language should be turing complete. People have written file-infecting virus malware with it, I believe, which indicate that a quine should be possible. I personally have made several attempts at an nroff quine over the years with no success.

If it's not possible, I'd love to see an explanation, so that task can quite weighing on me.

nickdrozd

4 hours ago

Here is an attempt:

  .de Q
  .nf
  .na
  .pso awk 'BEGIN{bs=sprintf("%c",92); pre=bs"&"} {out=pre; for(i=1;i<=length($0);i++){c=substr($0,i,1); if(c==bs) out=out bs bs; else out=out c} print out}' "\n[.F]"
  .ex
  ..
  .Q
Invoke with:

  nroff -U -Tascii quine.roff | sed -Ez '$ s/\n+$//'
Possibly relies too much on awk + sed. So maybe not A+, but better than nothing.