Moravec's paradox
observation that perception requires more computation than reasoning
Moravec's paradox is the observation that, as Hans Moravec wrote in 1988, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility".
This counterintuitive pattern may happen because skills that appear effortless to humans, such as recognizing faces or walking, required millions of years of evolution to develop, while abstract reasoning abilities like mathematics are evolutionarily recent. This observation was articulated in the 1980s by Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others.
Similarly, Minsky emphasized that the most difficult human skills to reverse engineer are those that are below the level of conscious awareness. "In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best", he wrote, and added: "we're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly". Steven Pinker wrote in 1994 that "the main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard".
Biological basis of human skills
One possible explanation of the paradox, offered by Moravec, is based on evolution. All human skills are implemented biologically, using machinery designed by the process of natural selection. In the course of their evolution, natural selection has tended to preserve design improvements and optimizations. The older a skill is, the more time natural selection has had to improve the design.
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This entry incorporates text from “Moravec's paradox” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.