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How Much of the World Is It Possible to Model?

Dan Rockmore, the director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Sciences at Dartmouth College, writing for The New Yorker: Recently, statistical modelling has taken on a new kind of importance as the engine of artificial intelligence -- specifically in the form of the deep neural networks that ...

These systems sift vast corpora of text to create a statistical model of written expression, realized as the likelihood of given words occurring in particular contexts. Rather than trying to encode a principled theory of how we produce writing, they are a vertiginous form of curve fitting; the largest models find the best ways to connect hundreds of thousands of simple mathematical neurons, using trillions of parameters.They create a vast data structure akin to a tangle of Christmas lights whose on-off patterns attempt to capture a chunk of historical word usage. Eugene Wigner, the physicist who noted the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics," restricted his awe and wonder to its ability to describe the inanimate world.

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