A profile of Geoffrey Hinton (2018)

https://torontolife.com/tech/ai-superstars-google-facebook-apple-studied-guy/

by tosh • 7 years ago

105 35 7 years ago

toxik• 7 years ago

I always find it so difficult to read popsci biographies of my own expert subjects. Hinton did not invent neural networks. Hinton is an amazing researcher and scholar to be sure, but this is clearly hyperbole.

Edit: I turns out I misread the article, it merely suggests his chosen approach was neural networks, rather than that neural networks are his idea. I think honestly it’s written ambiguously by intent.

layoutIfNeeded• 7 years ago

And yet we merrily accept stuff they write outside our expertise :)

anonytrary2• 7 years ago

This is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect[0]. People believe things about stuff they don't know, even if the source is wrong about stuff they do know.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

coziestSoup• 7 years ago

A lot of such articles exaggerate many of the specifics in favor of a dramatic storyline. I find that I enjoy them most when I treat them like based-on-real-events documentaries - Not taking them too seriously, but picking up interesting little facts and ideas along the way.

tripzilch• 7 years ago

Except you won't know which are facts and which are dramatized factoids.

52-6F-62• 7 years ago

In the late ’50s, a Cornell scientist named Frank Rosenblatt had proposed the world’s first neural network machine. It was called the Perceptron, and it had a simple objective—to recognize images.

This is right in the article. They don't attribute neural networks to Hinton—they just note that he worked with them.

TheGrassyKnoll• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron

inimino• 7 years ago

It describes how he had the idea as a teenager, inspired by a friend's description of holograms. In the next paragraph, the idea had already been tried as the perceptron, and had been disproven. It's ambiguous because that's how ideas are; the same idea will come to more than one person quite frequently.

dmix• 7 years ago

the same idea will come to more than one person quite frequently

This seems to happen as often as not. And sometimes the ones in the not category are that way for a reason!

jefft255• 7 years ago

I don’t like how they oppose deep learning with « logic based AI ». When Hinton got great results, he wasn’t competing against logic based AI but rather other machine learning approaches like SVMs.

etangent• 7 years ago

Sure, but for someone who does not know what an SVM is, the big-picture takeaway is that a particular version of "soft" statistical learning (deep learning) had succeeded where "hard logic" approach failed.

justicezyx• 7 years ago

Just asking: hard logic failed in what area?

nextos• 7 years ago

Me neither. In fact, both will be important components of future AI. I like to see deep learning as intuition, and logic-based AI as formal reasoning.

Intuition allows systems to avoid search problems, to some extent. Formal reasoning introduces structure.

buboard2• 7 years ago

I dont think he was competing. ANNs and boltzmann machines in the 80s seemed was an exploratory field not really part of statistical ML. At the time people were indeed competing with logic-based AI. SVMs came later and even then i believe, NNs had a different history and were not motivated from competition to SOTA techniques like SVMs. When the success of trainig came after the mid-2000s that's when ANNs started being called "ML". At least that's my memory

kiterunner23462• 7 years ago

Indeed, he wasn't competing. In fact, he wasn't moving; he kept doing what he had always been doing until, luckily, something, that he had nothing to do with, changed and allowed NN methods to work better. So I view him as essentially standing still, frozen in time, like a clock stuck at 6 o'clock. And, just like that clock, he would inevitably be correct (at least twice a day). He had nothing to do with the tools (higher memory & CPU speeds) that made his methods work, he just kept doing the same thing over and over until, one day, by accident, something important changed: his lab bought newer, faster computers.

He's not exactly Louis Pasteur is what I'm saying!

Upvoter33• 7 years ago

Well, Hinton himself makes a big deal of this in his Turing award speech. See: https://fcrc.acm.org/turing-lecture-at-fcrc-2019

strin• 7 years ago

Hinton has said that when he was growing up, his mother gave him two choices: “Be an academic or be a failure.” His family tree is branch-breakingly weighted with scientists. His great-great-grandfather was George Boole, founder of Boolean logic, familiar to anyone who has done a “Boolean search.” One of George Boole’s sons-in-law was Charles Howard Hinton, Geoffrey’s great-grandfather, a mathematician and sci-fi writer who coined the concept of a “tesseract” (a four-dimensional object we can see in the 3-D world as a cube—well known to all readers of the classic children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time), and who ended up in the U.S.

Interesting fact from reading this that normally gets neglected in media.

opportune2• 7 years ago

It's actually quite common.

One of the most tried and true routes to getting into the best academia-oriented colleges (Harvard, MIT, Caltech, etc.) is to win one of the big science fairs. I am not sure what they are called or who their sponsors are these days, but they used be sponsored by Westinghouse, Intel, and Siemens. Anyway, if you look at bios of winners or semifinalists, they almost always have a close relative in academia. Which in these competitions is actually a massive competitive advantage since your relative can get you into labs, access to equipment, and push you towards fruitful projects they quietly are guiding from the background.

Same with a lot of the international olympiads, very often the kids come from intense tiger parent families that are already in academia or do everything they can to get their kids the best physics/math/whatever tutors (the main exceptions to this are usually kids in large metro areas going to top magnet schools).

And then of course once you're in these top academic institutes, your relatives can further help you network and get into the best labs, show you how to get the best fellowships and academic internships to set you up for top grad schools, etc. Plus now that you have a top olympiad/science fair your credentials will give you a big plus in competing against others without them

Bostonian• 7 years ago

I agree that academics at research universities can provide more opportunities for their children, but they are also bequeathing genes for higher IQ to their children, and I'd guess that the genetic influence is at least as strong as the environmental one. Adoption studies have generally found that the academic achievement of adoptees is more correlated to the educational level of their biological than their adoptive parents.

jjcc• 7 years ago

His aunt is the first foreigner who got "Chinese green card"(Permenent Residency in China). Very famous couple in China long time ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Hinton

notfashion• 7 years ago

Charles Howard Hinton is actually a very prominent figure in the history of eccentric mathematicians. Anyone who read Rudy Rucker's book about the fourth dimension in the 90s knew about the earlier Hinton's bigamy and superstitions.

https://books.google.ie/books?id=8J0djs-FK_8C&pg=PA65&lpg=PA...

http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2009/06/08/alicia-boole-charl...

A profile of Geoffrey Hinton (2018)

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