Josh, I don't think your 5 steps do justice to the more sophisticated views of AGI that are out their. It does not describe how I presume a Novamente system would work. In the system I have envisioned all links in the hierarchical memory work in both directions and support top-down, and bottom-up processing, and there is also lateral implication. No miracles occur, other than massively complex spreading activation, implication, and constraint relaxation, thresholding, attention selection, and focusing, and selection and context appropriate instantiation of mental and physical behaviors.
If you have read my responses in this thread one of their common themes is how both perception up from lower levels and instantiation of higher levels concepts and behaviors is context appropriate. Being context appropriate involves a combination of both bottom-up, top-down, and lateral implication. So I don't view your alleged missing conceptual piece to be actually missing from the better AGI thinking. But until we actually try building systems like Novamenti are larger versions of Joscha Bach's MicroPsi architecture we won't know for sure exactly how complex getting the bottom-up, top-down, and lateral implications and constraints to all work together well will be. I'm hoping and expecting it will just be a quite complicated AI engineering task, made much easier by cheap hardware which will make search the space of possible solutions much cheaper and faster --- but it might become a full blown major conceptual piece. Ed Porter -----Original Message----- From: J Storrs Hall, PhD [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, April 21, 2008 4:18 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] WHAT ARE THE MISSING CONCEPTUAL PIECES IN AGI? (Aplogies for inadvertent empty reply to this :-) On Saturday 19 April 2008 11:35:43 am, Ed Porter wrote: > WHAT ARE THE MISSING CONCEPTUAL PIECES IN AGI? In a single word: feedback. At a very high level of abstraction, most the AGI (and AI for that matter) schemes I've seen can be caricatured as follows: 1. Receive data from sensors. 2. Interpret into higher-level concepts. 3. Then a miracle occurs. 4. Interpret high-level actions from 3 into motor commands. 5. Send to motors. What's wrong with this? It implicitly assumes that data flows from 1 to 5 in waterfall fashion, and that feedback, if any, occurs either within 3 or as a loop thru the external world. Problem is, in brains, there are actually more nerve fibers transmitting data from higher numbers to lower, i.e. backwards, than forwards. I think that the interpretation of sensory input is a much more active process than we AGIers realize, and that doing things requires a lot more sensing. Here's a quip that feels like it has some relevance: "What's the difference between a physicist and an engineer? A physicist is someone who spends all his time building machinery, to help him write an equation. An engineer is someone who spends all his time writing equations, in order to build machinery." Josh ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?&; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
