The approach to discover the rules of all thinking and putting them in a computer failed by and large, instead programmers started looking more in detail at how human brains worked

Sure, that makes a lot of sense!

In the beginning they simply modeled neurons as input-output machines, firing and not firing as ones and zeroes

That’s … simplistic? Right?

A bit, but again it did have serious early successes. A computational model of a single neuron was quite useful

An artificial neuron simulated in a computer could actually already solve a lot of problems, even though quite simple ones

So how did that work?

Well it would have a series of inputs, filter them by recognizing a pattern, and then provide as output whether the input belonged to a certain category of not

Not sure I get this … 😞😞

Sorry … Imagine you put a lot of points in a plane. Such a single neuron can classify them by drawing a single straight line among them

Ah, ok. So it can tell whether they are above or below some threshold

Exactly! Now that is indeed still quite simple, but now imagine combining a lot of those together …. ☺️☺️

Oh, wow, of course! So you can draw a lot of lines! Meaning finding a lot of patterns?

Yep, very complex pattern detection, but …                                          

… it sounded too good to be true, right? 😀

Oh, no! Not at all! It is just that if you string together artificial neurons in a network, it becomes pretty hard to tell how it works exactly

Huh? You build a thing and don’t know how it works?

That was a big criticism. But if you think about it, it seems obvious: we don’t yet fully understand how brains work, so we build an artificial brain …

… ok, but how can you build an artificial brain if you don’t know how it works?

Well, we use the very simple artificial neuron model, which we do understand, and string a lot of them together. But you can’t program that like an ordinary computer

So how do you do that then?

We make it learn. We don’t have a general rule for solving all problems, but we have a general rule for learning how to solve problems

The information, the knowledge how to solve a problem, is all distributed through the network.

There is no step-by-step algorithm   🙄                                                 

OK, so it works in a very different way from the earlier approach where we tried to find a universal recipe

Right. The problem now is that we can’t always explain what it is doing or how it works

… so it is just like the brain …  🧠

Ha! That’s right! The model is as mysterious as the thing itself           

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonini%27s_paradox                            

So when we talk about AI nowadays, is it all neural networks?

Mostly yes. Things like Machine Learning work with this approach. We train a neural network to recognize patterns in a large dataset. And then do something “intelligent” with it                   

So is AGI more realistic with this newer approach?

No, not really.                                                                                             

… oh come on! … 😆