I've played, and marvelled at, the $10 20Q game, and wondered how they created something so smart and so cheap. Turns out the answer was time - based on a learning program that's been running since 1988.

And time, too, is what gives life intelligence, through Darwinian processes of advantage. If the dinosaurs hadn't been 'wiped out', how would their intelligence have developed? If the Roman Empire hadn't collapsed and been replaced by a fundamentalist religion, would man have had heavier-than-air flight in the 8th century instead of the 20th?

Perhaps it would have been the 25th instead of the 20th. The Western European civilization has been a miraculous and unprecedented thing, and the Church was one of the main ingredients. It's impossible to say how things would have turned out without it, but the average historical outcome for a people of collapsed civilization seems to have been rather grim.

Hmm. Why was this downvoted?

Don't ask questions like that.

Excellent read. Just excellent. I know this comment is a little pointless, but there's just nothing to add.

Yea I'm a big fan of his writing. His writing gives me ideas and let's me think about a variety of topics.

referring to 20Q as a mind seems stretching things a bit far. 20Q is just a huge decision tree that has been built by trial and error.

What exactly do you think a mind is? The definition you gave is not far from the biological definition (much debated on, by the way, and mixed with the forever escaping concept of consciousness.)

inference is different from a static tree.

I would say the system that was used to build and train 20Q is a mind.

Keep in mind (heh) that calling something a mind doesn't mean "human level consciousness".