Richard Loosemore wrote: There is a restriction in my case that enables me to get away without having to solve the general problem.
I am curious to know what that restriction is? Offlist would be welcomed. Thanks Anna:) On 2/19/07, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Wow, I leave off email for two days and a 55-message Religious War breaks out! ;-) I promise this is nothing to do with languages I do or do not like (i.e. it is non-religious...). As many people pointed out, programming language matters a good deal less that what you are going to use it for. In my case I am very clear about what I want to do, and it is very different from conventional AI. My own goals are to build an entire software development environment, as I said earlier, and the main reasons for this are: 1) I am working on a conceptual framework for developing a *class* of AI systems [NB: a class of systems, not just one system], and the best way to express a "framework" is by instantiating that framework in the form of a tool that allows systems within that framework to be constructed easily. 2) My intention is to do systematic experiments to investigate the behavior of systems within that class, so I need some way to easily do this systematic experimentation. I want, for example, to construct a particular mechanism and then look at the behavior of many variants of that mechanism. So, for example, a concept-learning mechanism that involves a parameter governing the number of daughter concepts that are grabbed in an abstraction event ... and I might be intersted in how the mechanism behaves when the number of daughters is 2, 3, 4, 5, or some random number in the vicinity of one of those). I need a tool that will let me quickly set up such simulation experiments without having to touch any low level code. 3) One reason that is almost tangential to AI itself, though related: I believe that conventional environments and languages are built by people who think like engineers, and do not have a good understanding of how a mind works when it is trying to comprehend the enormous complexity of computational systems. [I know, I said that in combative language: but try not to flame me just because I said it assertively ;-)]. So I am trying to use psychological principles to make the process of system design and programming into a task that does not constantly trap the designer/programmer into the most stupid of errors. I have a number of ideas in this respect, but since I am talking to some people about funding this project right now, I'd rather not go into detail. 4) I need particular primitives that are simply not available in conventional languages. The biggest example is a facility for massive asymmetric parallelism that is not going to fall flat on its face all the time (with deadlocks and livelocks). I realise that everyone and their grandmother would like to do massive parallel programming without all the usuall headaches, and that the general problem is horrendous... but I can actually solve the problem in my context because I do not have to create a general solution to the problem. There is a restriction in my case that enables me to get away without having to solve the general problem. Again, apologies for coyness: possible patent pending and all that. Richard Loosemore. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
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