Re: So what we are saying is
"If that's the case, where is the actual AI? It's just a complex rules engine."
Pretty much. At the end of the day it is just software after all, albeit the complexity being in the learned weights rather than hard coded programming. They're really little more than massive interlinked if-then decisions trees based on summed weights and I suspect in theory you could convert one into standard code but in practice it would be next to impossible for all but the simplest toy examples.
The other problem neural nets - and other methods have - is overfitting the training data. Ie they simply learn to recognise the training data and not much else. Give them a training example and they'll be spot on, give them something they haven't seen before and they'll produce some rubbish as output. As I've only dabbled I can't remember how this is remedied, but obviously it is.
Suffice to say its an extremely complex field most of the low level details of which are beyond me and probably 95% of even good coders, and while you often see comedy geeks with wacky haircuts and questionable t-shirts or slick smarmy bros discussing this stuff one should not judge by appearances - those geeks and bros quite often have hardcore MScs and Phds and behind the facade are borderline geniuses.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
