Jean-Paul, Although complexity is one of the areas associated with AI where I have less knowledge than many on the list, I was aware of the general distinction you are making.
What I was pointing out in my email to Richard Loosemore what that the definitions in his paper "Complex Systems, Artificial Intelligence and Theoretical Psychology," for "irreducible computability" and "global-local interconnect" themselves are not totally clear about this distinction, and as a result, when Richard says that those two issues are an unavoidable part of AGI design that must be much more deeply understood before AGI can advance, by the more loose definitions which would cover the types of complexity involved in large matrix calculations and the design of a massive supercomputer, of course those issues would arise in AGI design, but its no big deal because we have a long history of dealing with them. But in my email to Richard I said I was assuming he was not using this more loose definitions of these words, because if he were, they would not present the unexpected difficulties of the type he has been predicting. I said I though he was dealing with more the potentially unruly type of complexity, I assume you were talking about. I am aware of that type of complexity being a potential problem, but I have designed my system to hopefully control it. A modern-day well functioning economy is complex (people at the Santa Fe Institute often cite economies as examples of complex systems), but it is often amazingly unchaotic considering how loosely it is organized and how many individual entities it has in it, and how many transitions it is constantly undergoing. Unsually, unless something bangs on it hard (such as having the price of a major commodity all of a sudden triple), it has a fair amount of stability, while constantly creating new winners and losers (which is a productive form of mini-chaos). Of course in the absence of regulation it is naturally prone to boom and bust cycles. So the system would need regulation. Most of my system operates on a message passing system with little concern for synchronization, it does not require low latencies, most of its units, operate under fairly similar code. But hopefully when you get it all working together it will be fairly dynamic, but that dynamism with be under multiple controls. I think we are going to have to get such systems up and running to find you just how hard or easy they will be to control, which I acknowledged in my email to Richard. I think that once we do we will be in a much better position to think about what is needed to control them. I believe such control will be one of the major intellectual challenges to getting AGI to function at a human-level. This issue is not only preventing runaway conditions, it is optimizing the intelligence of the inferencing, which I think will be even more import and diffiducle. (There are all sorts of damping mechanisms and selective biasing mechanism that should be able to prevent many types of chaotic behaviors.) But I am quite confident with multiple teams working on it, these control problems could be largely overcome in several years, with the systems themselves doing most of the learning. Even a little OpenCog AGI on a PC, could be interesting first indication of the extent to which complexity will present control problems. As I said if you had 3G of ram for representation, that should allow about 50 million atoms. Over time you would probably end up with at least hundreds of thousand of complex patterns, and it would be interesting to see how easy it would be to properly control them, and get them to work together as a properly functioning thought economy in what ever small interactive world they developed their self-organizing pattern base. Of course on such a PC based system you would only, on average, be able to do about 10million pattern to pattern activations a second, so you would be talking about a fairly trivial system, but with say 100K patterns, it would be a good first indication of how easy or hard agi systems will be to control. Ed Porter -----Original Message----- From: Jean-Paul Van Belle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 1:34 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: [agi] None of you seem to be able ... Hi Ed You seem to have missed what many A(G)I people (Ben, Richard, etc.) mean by 'complexity' (as opposed to the common usage of complex meaning difficult). It is not the *number* of calculations or interconnects that gives rise to complexity or chaos, but their nature. E.g. calculating the eigen-values of a n=10^10000 matrix is *very* difficult but not complex. So the large matrix calculations, map-reduces or BleuGene configuration are very simple. A map-reduce or matrix calculation is typically one line of code (at least in Python - which is where Google probably gets the idea from :) To make them complex, you need to go beyond. E.g. a 500K-node 3 layer neural network is simplistic (not simple:), chaining only 10K NNs together (each with 10K input/outputs) in a random network (with only a few of these NNs serving as input or output modules) would produce complex behaviour, especially if for each iteration, the input vector changes dynamically. Note that the latter has FAR FEWER interconnects i.e. would need much fewer calculations but its behaviour would be impossible to predict (you can only simulate it) whereas the behaviour of the 500K is much more easily understood. BlueGene has a simple architecture, a network of computers who do mainly the same thing (e.g the GooglePlex) has predictive behaviour, however if each computer acts/behaves very differently (I guess on the internet we could classify users into a number of distinct agent-like behaviours), you'll get complex behaviour. It's the difference in complexity between a 8Gbit RAM chip and say an old P3 CPU chip. The latter has less than one-hundredth of the transistors but is far more complex and displays interesting behaviour, the former doesn't. Jean-Paul >>> On 2007/12/05 at 23:12, in message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Ed Porter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Yes, my vision of a human AGI would be a very complex machine. Yes, > a lot of its outputs could only be made with human level reasonableness > after a very large amount of computation. I know of no shortcuts around the > need to do such complex computation. So it arguably falls in to what you > say Wolfram calls "computational irreducibility." > But the same could be said for any of many types of computations, > such as large matrix equations or Google's map-reduces, which are routinely > performed on supercomputers. > So if that is how you define irreducibility, its not that big a > deal. It just means you have to do a lot of computing to get an answer, > which I have assumed all along for AGI (Remember I am the one pushing for > breaking the small hardware mindset.) But it doesn't mean we don't know how > to do such computing or that we have to do a lot more complexity research, > of the type suggested in your paper, before we can successfully designing > AGIs. [...] > Although it is easy to design system where the systems behavior > would be sufficiently chaotic that such design would be impossible, it seems > likely that it is also possible to design complex system in which the > behavior is not so chaotic or unpredictable. Take the internet. Something > like 10^8 computers talk to each other, and in general it works as designed. > Take IBM's supercomputer BlueGene L, 64K dual core processor computer each > with at least 256MBytes all capable of receiving and passing messages at > 4Ghz on each of over 3 dimensions, and capable of performing 100's of > trillions of FLOP/sec. Such a system probably contains at least 10^14 > non-linear separately functional elements, and yet it works as designed. If > there is a global-local disconnect in the BlueGene L, which there could be > depending on your definition, it is not a problem for most of the > computation it does. -- Research Associate: CITANDA Post-Graduate Section Head Department of Information Systems Phone: (+27)-(0)21-6504256 Fax: (+27)-(0)21-6502280 Office: Leslie Commerce 4.21 ----- 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/?&; ----- 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/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=73161338-0d54a9
