>> I don't think I agree with any of this.
>>
>> Pick any two locations in London. Ask a London cabbie how to get from
>> one to the other. I guarantee they can do it faster than any satnav
>> computer.
>>
>> Pick up a picture of Harrison Ford. Show it to a bunch of people. Almost
>> all of them will instantly be able to tell you who it's a picture of.
>> Now try getting a computer to figure that out. Good luck with that.
>
> Not a contradiction to my point; note that /those/ types of
> "calculations" require almost exactly the /opposite/ of precision. Which
> is the domain /computers/ suck at.

>> The human brain is really very, very good at certain tasks. Quite
>> astonishingly good, when you actually think about it. But it's very bad
>> at certain other tasks.
>
> Exactly. And among those "certain other tasks" is virtually anything
> involving precise computations.

To quote myself again: I don't agree with any of this.

Try walking across the room. Trust me, this requires some pretty damned 
precise computations. Don't believe me? Drink some alcohol, and try the 
same task. Hard, isn't it? You know robotics engineers have struggled 
for years to make a bipedal robot that can perform the same apparently 
trivial task?

Balance is hard. A few grams one side or the other and you fall over. 
That sounds pretty precise to me. And yet people ride bicycles. How many 
robots have you seen ride a bicycle?

You say people can't recognise a familiar face with /certainty/, but I 
reject that. A computer might look at a face and rate the probability of 
it belonging to various people, but when I see a person I know, I *know* 
exactly who I'm looking at. Instantly. What's more, when I see a 
computer-generated image of Davy Jones, I recognise it as resembling 
Bill Nighy. How many computer facial recognition programs can do that? 
Again, sounds pretty damned accurate to me.

There are computer programs that compute a "fingerprint" of a piece of 
music, and can supposedly recognise the same recording that has been 
altered slightly. But a human listener can recognise the same piece of 
music performed by a completely different group, and a totally unrelated 
style. No computer can do that. And it's not just that humans use more 
"fuzzy" and less "precise" matching to do their recognition; if that 
were the case, the matching would just be really unreliable. But 
actually, humans are REALLY FRIGGING GOOD at this stuff.

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