> From recent comments here I can see there are still a lot of people out > there who think that building an AGI is a relatively modest-size > project, and the key to success is simply uncovering some new insight > or technique that has been overlooked thus far.
I would agree with that though the key is not so much insight as the term is commonly used but rather a willingness to accept the ugly truths of human intelligence... > IMHO this is partly a matter of necessary optimism (i.e. "we can only > afford a 4-man-year project, so let's hope that will be enough"), There was a fair ammount of that, especially when hardware was even tinier than it is today. =P > and partly a sort of bleedover from the view of human minds that > dominated the social sciences for most of the 20th century (i.e. > "infants are a blank slate, and blank slates sound pretty simple, so a > newly-written AGI must be a relatively simple program"). In some ways that is the best perspective (in contrast with Cyc which attempts to engrave everything first...) But you are right, that a topologicly flat blank slate won't work either... > complex adaptive behavior requires a complex, specialized > implementation. Always. No exceptions, no free lunches, no magic > connectoplasmic shortcuts. The brain is actually fantasticly simple... It is nothing compared with the core of a linux operating system (kernel+glibc+gcc). Heck, even the underlying PC hardware is more complex in a number of ways than the brain, it seems... The brain is very RISCy... using a relatively simple processing pattern and then repeating it millions of times. So while an adult brain has a few billion neurons, the program which produces it is only a few megabytes in size... (The entire genome is about 750 mb, most of which is beleived to be either inactive or there purely for structural reasons). > We know from the biology folks that the human mind contains at least > dozens, and probably hundreds of specialized subsystems. In the cortex, I would propose the number is 28 for the left hemisphere, and maybe another 10 or so in the right hemisphere which don't directly overlap with the ones on the left. The sense of smell is strange, but the vision and motor reflexes only constitute maybe two dozen instances of maybe 5 or so distinct design patterns. (We only need to worry about the design patterns). I do agree that a early AI praject should try to replicate as much of the functionality found in the brain as possible. I will be proposing an architecture along these lines in a few months... > The ones that computer scientists have tried to replicate, like vision > and hearing, have turned out to contain massive amounts of complexity - > computer vision alone is apparently the kind of problem that takes a > good, well-funded team several decades to solve. Consider the chess problem. The present computer Chess solutions are widely acknowleged to be much less efficient than the ones in the brain. So the complexity that you are trying to argue is necessary for AGI is merely reflective of our currently poor programming methodologies. > What this means for AI research is that any serious attempt to create > an AGI by duplicating the way human minds work would be a massive > effort, at least one and probably two orders of magnitude larger than > any software development effort ever attempted. I would say that it would require maybe a dozen highly gifted devels with maybe 20 code-grunts for the support framework. > That makes it much too big for current software engineering methods, so > the effort would almost certainly fail. Don't implement the mind, implement the brain! =P -- I WANT A DEC ALPHA!!! =) 21364: THE UNDISPUTED GOD OF ALL CPUS. http://users.rcn.com/alangrimes/ [if rcn.com doesn't work, try erols.com ] ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
