Re: Computer 3-goD

[P3D Gregory J. Wageman <gjw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Gabriel,

>Don't be to quick with the impossible. Dr.T was of course just
>hypostatizing about the press the button 2d to 3d. In any case you would
>need a powerful computer to go with that powerful software. You might
>be aware that there are programs that can render 3d from 2 2d pics, but
>you mention with 1 2d pic, this also exists but is verrrry crude and in 
>its infancy just like chess was a couple of years ago. They said a
>computer couldn't play chess and now it's near championship rank.

Translating a single 2D image into a 3D image requires the computer to
recognize the *content* of the image in order to determine what the
various shapes in the image are, which are connected and which are
overlapping, and thus decide which elements would naturally be in the
foreground and which in the background.  This requires reasoning and
judgement.  I'm not sure at  what age a human being acquires these
skills, but you're talking about a computer with at least the
cognitive abilities of an older child! 

Just getting a computer to recognize simple silhouette images in
random rotational positions has been difficult enough for the machine
vision experts, never mind complete free-image context recognition!
To what program are you alluding that can do this?  I don't believe
there is one.

Computers also don't play chess anything at all like people do.  Most
computer chess algorithms are brute-force implementations that rely
on the speed and "perfect" memory of the computer to play out every
possible variation of legal move, evaluate the resulting position,
play out every legal answering move, etc., and "prune" this tree of
possibilites down to the moves that give the best end-result.  People
don't do this kind of processing.  And these computers didn't "learn"
to play chess, they were programmed to by human intelligences!

>How can I say this? Easy how did you manage to transform
>the 2d pics to 3d. Basically our brains are just like computers and
>when they can make a massive parralel computer that replicates our
>brain, watch out. Now we can debate if a computer will ever be as
>powerful as our brain and IMO it will.

Our brains are also nothing like computers.  Did you ever "forget"
something, only to recall it a some later time?  A computer that did
that would be considered broken.  On the other hand, stored-program
digital computers have absolutely no imagination or intuition.  There's
been some speculation that the human brain uses quantum phenomena at
the lowest level, which is where our creativity and 'randomness'
come from.  The closest thing to the human brain in computer-land is the
neural network, and that is only a crude approximation of a few tens
of neurons.

An probably ant has more thinking ability than the most sophisticated
computer.

        -Greg W.


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