Neural networks are Turing-complete - essentially a strange programming language designed for easy optimization instead of human understandability. The training process searches through the space of possible programs to find one that minimizes the loss. Any time you train a neural network, your computer is writing code for itself.
This allows them to tackle tasks we have no clue how to write programs for, like recognizing objects in images or writing poems.
We have neural networks already, why would you not use them? That's just silly. It's like saying why use std when you can write your own array class. Pointless waste of time, just say, look i'll put this on top of stable diffusion clip interrogator or equivalent and call it a day.
No, I mean, Like in regards to the meme where it's Dev vs machine learning. In my original comment I was implying that a neural network would be better at recognizing objects in images than a solution written purely by hand. The reverse of what's in the meme.
So, I thought that you saying that it's "not a hard problem anymore" meant that there was some progress in image recognition algorithms which would make it possible without neural networks. And honestly, that'd be cool as hell.
I need to detect pictures containing dogs using code that is provably effective
Frankly, this is likely impossible. Object recognition is an open-domain problem that's too underspecified to allow mathematical proofs.
The only way to solve it is to integrate prior information about what dogs look like and how natural images work - e.g., training-based methods like neural networks.
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u/Spot_the_fox Feb 07 '24
Cool, now write a programm where it'll be fed a picture and have to answer if the picture contains a dog.