[agi] How long until human-level AI?
Our paper How long until human-level AI? Results from an expert assessment (based on a survey done at AGI-09) was finally accepted for publication, in the journal Technological Forecasting Social Change ... See the preprint at http://sethbaum.com/ac/fc_AI-Experts.html -- Ben Goertzel -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org My humanity is a constant self-overcoming -- Friedrich Nietzsche --- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/8660244-d750797a Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Video of talk I gave yesterday about Cosmism
Hi all, I gave a talk in Teleplace yesterday, about Cosmist philosophy and future technology. A video of the talk is here: http://telexlr8.wordpress.com/2010/09/12/ben-goertzel-on-the-cosmist-manifesto-in-teleplace-september-12/ I also put my practice version of the talk, that I did before the real talk, online here: http://www.vimeo.com/14930325 (The practice version is slower-paced than the Teleplace version, and lacks the QA at the end, but it goes through some points in a little more depth.) Of course, the Cosmist Manifesto book says it all in more detail ... links to the book are given along with the first video linked above. thx Ben Goertzel --- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/8660244-d750797a Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] I'm giving a talk on Cosmist philosophy (and related advanced technology) in the Teleplace virtual world...
It's 10AM Pacific time, Sunday September 12 2010 Be there or don't ;-) If you're interested to join the conversation, but haven't used Teleplace before, be sure to download it perhaps 15-30 minutes before the talk, so you can get used to the software. [It's much like Second Life but simpler and more focused on presentation/collaboration...] Thanks much to the great Giulio Prisco for setting it up ;) Ben Goertzel on The Cosmist Manifesto in Teleplace, September 12, 10am PST http://telexlr8.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/reminder-ben-goertzel-on-the-cosmist-manifesto-in-teleplace-september-12-10am-pst/ thx Ben --- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/8660244-d750797a Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Fwd: [singularity] NEWS: Max More is Running for Board of Humanity+
-- Forwarded message -- From: Natasha Vita-More nata...@natasha.cc Date: Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 1:02 PM Subject: [singularity] NEWS: Max More is Running for Board of Humanity+ To: singularity singular...@v2.listbox.com Friends, It is my pleasure to endorse Max More's candidacy for joining the Board of Directors of Humanity+. Today is the last day to become a member of Humanity+ in order to vote for Max as a new Board member. Voting opens this weekend! Please join now! http://humanityplus.org/join/ Thank you for your support of Max! Natasha Natasha Vita-More http://www.natasha.cc/ (If you have any questions, please email me off list.) *singularity* | Archiveshttps://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Science, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Anyone going to the Singularity Summit?
We have those fruit fly populations also, and analysis of their genetics refutes your claim ;p ... Where? References? The last I looked, all they had in addition to their long-lived groups were uncontrolled control groups, and no groups bred only from young flies. Michael rose's UCI lab has evolved flies specifically for short lifespan, but the results may not be published yet... --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Anyone going to the Singularity Summit?
I'm writing an article on the topic for H+ Magazine, which will appear in the next couple weeks ... I'll post a link to it when it appears I'm not advocating applying AI in the absence of new experiments of course. I've been working closely with Genescient, applying AI tech to analyze the genomics of their long-lived superflies, so part of my message is about the virtuous cycle achievable via synergizing AI data analysis with carefully-designed experimental evolution of model organisms... -- Ben On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 7:25 AM, Steve Richfield steve.richfi...@gmail.comwrote: Ben, On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 1:07 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: I'm speaking there, on Ai applied to life extension; and participating in a panel discussion on narrow vs. general AI... Having some interest, expertise, and experience in both areas, I find it hard to imagine much interplay at all. The present challenge is wrapped up in a lack of basic information, resulting from insufficient funds to do the needed experiments. Extrapolations have already gone WAY beyond the data, and new methods to push extrapolations even further wouldn't be worth nearly as much as just a little more hard data. Just look at Aubrey's long list of aging mechanisms. We don't now even know which predominate, or which cause others. Further, there are new candidates arising every year, e.g. Burzynski's theory that most aging is secondary to methylation of DNA receptor sites, or my theory that Aubrey's entire list could be explained by people dropping their body temperatures later in life. There are LOTS of other theories, and without experimental results, there is absolutely no way, AI or not, to sort the wheat from the chaff. Note that one of the front runners, the cosmic ray theory, could easily be tested by simply raising some mice in deep tunnels. This is high-school level stuff, yet with NO significant funding for aging research, it remains undone. Note my prior posting explaining my inability even to find a source of used mice for kids to use in high-school anti-aging experiments, all while university labs are now killing their vast numbers of such mice. So long as things remain THIS broken, anything that isn't part of the solution simply becomes a part of the very big problem, AIs included. The best that an AI could seemingly do is to pronounce Fund and facilitate basic aging research and then suspend execution pending an interrupt indicating that the needed experiments have been done. Could you provide some hint as to where you are going with this? Steve *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Anyone going to the Singularity Summit?
I should dredge up and forward past threads with them. There are some flaws in their chain of reasoning, so that it won't be all that simple to sort the few relevant from the many irrelevant mutations. There is both a huge amount of noise, and irrelevant adaptations to their environment and their treatment. They have evolved many different populations in parallel, using the same fitness criterion. This provides powerful noise filtering Even when the relevant mutations are eventually identified, it isn't clear how that will map to usable therapies for the existing population. yes, that's a complex matter Further, most of the things that kill us operate WAY too slowly to affect fruit flies, though there are some interesting dual-affecting problems. Fruit flies get all the major ailments that kill people frequently, except cancer. heart disease, neurodegenerative disease, respiratory problems, immune problems, etc. As I have posted in the past, what we have here in the present human population is about the equivalent of a fruit fly population that was bred for the shortest possible lifespan. Certainly not. We have those fruit fly populations also, and analysis of their genetics refutes your claim ;p ... ben g --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] How To Create General AI Draft2
Hi David, I read the essay I think it summarizes well some of the key issues involving the bridge between perception and cognition, and the hierarchical decomposition of natural concepts I find the ideas very harmonious with those of Jeff Hawkins, Itamar Arel, and other researchers focused on hierarchical deep learning approaches to vision with longer-term AGI ambitions I'm not sure there are any dramatic new ideas in the essay. Do you think there are? My own view is that these ideas are basically right, but handle only a modest percentage of what's needed to make a human-level, vaguely human-like AGI I.e. I don't agree that solving vision and the vision-cognition bridge is *such* a huge part of AGI, though it's certainly a nontrivial percentage... -- Ben G On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 4:44 PM, David Jones davidher...@gmail.com wrote: Hey Guys, I've been working on writing out my approach to create general AI to share and debate it with others in the field. I've attached my second draft of it in PDF format, if you guys are at all interested. It's still a work in progress and hasn't been fully edited. Please feel free to comment, positively or negatively, if you have a chance to read any of it. I'll be adding to and editing it over the next few days. I'll try to reply more professionally than I have been lately :) Sorry :S Cheers, Dave *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] How To Create General AI Draft2
On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 11:42 AM, Mike Tintner tint...@blueyonder.co.ukwrote: Ben: I don't agree that solving vision and the vision-cognition bridge is *such* a huge part of AGI, though it's certainly a nontrivial percentage Presumably because you don't envisage your AGI/computer as an independent entity? All its info. is going to have to be entered into it in a specially prepared form - and it's still going to be massively and continuously dependent on human programmers? I envisage my AGI as an independent entity, ingesting information from the world in a similar manner to how humans do (as well as through additional senses not available to humans) You misunderstood my statement. I think that vision and the vision-cognition bridge are important for AGI, but I think they're only a moderate portion of the problem, and not the hardest part... Humans and real AGI's receive virtually all their info. - certainly all their internet info - through heavily visual processing (with obvious exceptions like sound). You can't do maths and logic if you can't see them, and they have visual forms - equations and logic have visual form and use visual ideogrammatic as well as visual numerical signs. Just wh. intelligent problemsolving operations is your AGI going to do, that do NOT involve visual processing OR - the alternative - massive human assistance to substitute for that processing? *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] How To Create General AI Draft2
The human visual system doesn't evolve like that on the fly. This can be proven by the fact that we all see the same visual illusions. We all exhibit the same visual limitations in the same way. There is much evidence that the system doesn't evolve accidentally. It has a limited set of rules it uses to learn from perceptual data. That is not a proof, of course. It could be that given a general architecture, and inputs with certain statistical properties, the same internal structures inevitably self-organize I think a more deliberate approach would be more effective because we can understand why it does what it does, how it does it, and why its not working if it doesn't work. With such deliberate approaches, it is much more clear how to proceed and to reuse knowledge in many complementary ways. This is what I meant by emergence. I understand the general concept. I am reminded a bit of Poggio's hierarchical visual cortex simulations -- which do attempt to emulate the human brain's specific processing, on a neuronal cluster and inter-cluster connectivity level However, Poggio hasn't yet solved the problem of making this kind of deliberately-engineered hierarchical vision network incorporate cognition== perception feedback. At this stage it seems basically a feedforward system. So I'm curious -- what are the specific pattern-recognition modules that you will put into your system, and how will you arrange them hierarchically? -- how will you handle feedback connections (top-down) among the modules? thx ben --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] How To Create General AI Draft2
IMO the hardest part is not any particular part, but rather integration: getting all the parts to work together in a scalable, adaptive way... On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 12:48 PM, Mike Tintner tint...@blueyonder.co.ukwrote: Ben:I think that vision and the vision-cognition bridge are important for AGI, but I think they're only a moderate portion of the problem, and not the hardest part... Which is? *From:* Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org *Sent:* Monday, August 09, 2010 4:57 PM *To:* agi agi@v2.listbox.com *Subject:* Re: [agi] How To Create General AI Draft2 On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 11:42 AM, Mike Tintner tint...@blueyonder.co.ukwrote: Ben: I don't agree that solving vision and the vision-cognition bridge is *such* a huge part of AGI, though it's certainly a nontrivial percentage Presumably because you don't envisage your AGI/computer as an independent entity? All its info. is going to have to be entered into it in a specially prepared form - and it's still going to be massively and continuously dependent on human programmers? I envisage my AGI as an independent entity, ingesting information from the world in a similar manner to how humans do (as well as through additional senses not available to humans) You misunderstood my statement. I think that vision and the vision-cognition bridge are important for AGI, but I think they're only a moderate portion of the problem, and not the hardest part... Humans and real AGI's receive virtually all their info. - certainly all their internet info - through heavily visual processing (with obvious exceptions like sound). You can't do maths and logic if you can't see them, and they have visual forms - equations and logic have visual form and use visual ideogrammatic as well as visual numerical signs. Just wh. intelligent problemsolving operations is your AGI going to do, that do NOT involve visual processing OR - the alternative - massive human assistance to substitute for that processing? *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Anyone going to the Singularity Summit?
I'm speaking there, on Ai applied to life extension; and participating in a panel discussion on narrow vs. general AI... ben g On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 4:01 PM, David Jones davidher...@gmail.com wrote: I've decided to go. I was wondering if anyone else here is. Dave *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Help requested: Making a list of (non-robotic) AGI low hanging fruit apps
His request explicitly said he is focusing on voice and vision. I think that is enough specificity... ben On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 9:22 PM, Matt Mahoney matmaho...@yahoo.com wrote: Wouldn't it depend on the other researcher's area of expertise? -- Matt Mahoney, matmaho...@yahoo.com -- *From:* Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org *To:* agi agi@v2.listbox.com *Sent:* Sat, August 7, 2010 9:10:23 PM *Subject:* [agi] Help requested: Making a list of (non-robotic) AGI low hanging fruit apps Hi, A fellow AGI researcher sent me this request, so I figured I'd throw it out to you guys I'm putting together an AGI pitch for investors and thinking of low hanging fruit applications to argue for. I'm intentionally not involving any mechanics (robots, moving parts, etc.). I'm focusing on voice (i.e. conversational agents) and perhaps vision-based systems. Hellen Keller AGI, if you will :) Along those lines, I'd like any ideas you may have that would fall under this description. I need to substantiate the case for such AGI technology by making an argument for high-value apps. All ideas are welcome. All serious responses will be appreciated!! Also, I would be grateful if we could keep this thread closely focused on direct answers to this question, rather than digressive discussions on Helen Keller, the nature of AGI, the definition of AGI versus narrow AI, the achievability or unachievability of AGI, etc. etc. If you think the question is bad or meaningless or unclear or whatever, that's fine, but please start a new thread with a different subject line to make your point. If the discussion is useful, my intention is to mine the answers into a compact list to convey to him Thanks! Ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Brief mention of bio-AGI in the Boston Globe...
Open science is, to some, humanity's best hopehttp://www.google.com/url?sa=Xq=http://www.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2010/08/02/biotech_movement_hopes_to_spur_rise_of_citizen_scientists/ct=gacad=:s1:f2:v0:d1:i0:lt:e0:p0:t1280774083:cd=sfIgD21-SMcusg=AFQjCNHAxjADEHZpOGQP6cK4G6jyO3wj2g Boston Globe “What is really needed to cure diseases and extend life,'' *Goertzel* said, “is to link together all available bio data in a vast public database, *...* -- Tip: Use a minus sign (-) in front of terms in your query that you want to exclude.Learn morehttp://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861hl=engl=source=alertsmailcd=sfIgD21-SMccad=:s1:f2:v0:d1: . Removehttp://www.google.com/alerts/remove?s=AB2Xq4hUEKvcJpGOdQ3Ohxm954kNjKjX_dH0vGghl=engl=source=alertsmailcd=sfIgD21-SMccad=:s1:f2:v0:d1:this alert. Createhttp://www.google.com/alerts?hl=engl=source=alertsmailcd=sfIgD21-SMccad=:s1:f2:v0:d1:another alert. Managehttp://www.google.com/alerts/manage?hl=engl=source=alertsmailcd=sfIgD21-SMccad=:s1:f2:v0:d1:your alerts. -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Alife
Evolving AGI via an Alife approach would be possible, but would likely take many orders of magnitude more resources than engineering AGI... I worked on Alife years ago and became frustrated that the artificial biology and artificial chemistry one uses is never as fecund as the real thing We don't understand which aspects of bio and chem are really important for the evolution of complex structures. So, approaching AGI via Alife just replaces one complex set of confusions with another ;-) ... I think that releasing some well-engineered AGI systems in an Alife type environment, and letting them advance and evolve further, would be an awesome experiment, though ;) -- Ben G On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 11:23 PM, Linas Vepstas linasveps...@gmail.com wrote: I saw the following post from Antonio Alberti, on the linked-in discussion group: ALife and AGI Dear group participants. The relation among AGI and ALife greatly interests me. However, too few recent works try to relate them. For exemple, many papers presented in AGI-09 (http://agi-conf.org/2009/) are about program learning algorithms (combining evolutionary learning and analytical learning). In AGI 2010, virtual pets have been presented by Ben Goertzel and are also another topic of this forum. There are other approaches in AGI that uses some digital evolutionary approach for AGI. For me it is a clear clue that both are related in some instance. By ALife I mean the life-as-it-could-be approach (not simulate, but to use digital environment to evolve digital organisms using digital evolution (faster than Natural one - see http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/science/stephen-hawking-%E2%80%9Chumans-have-entered-new-stage-evolution%E2%80%9D). So, I would like to propose some discussion topics regarding ALIfe and AGI: 1) What is the role of Digital Evolution (and ALife) in the AGI context? 2) Is it possible that some aspects of AGI could self-emerge from the digital evolution of intelligent autonomous agents? 3) Is there any research group trying to converge both approaches? Best Regards, and my reply was below: For your question 3), I have no idea. For question 1) I can't say I've ever heard of anyone talk about this. For question 2), I imagine the answer is yes, although the boundaries between what's Alife and what's program learning (for example) may be blurry. So, imagine, for example, a population of many different species of neurons (or should I call them automata? or maybe I should call them virtual ants?) Most of the individuals have only a few friends (a narrow social circle) -- the friendship relationship can be viewed as an axon-dendrite connection -- these friendships are semi-stable; they evolve over time, and the type quality of information exchanged in a friendship also varies. Is a social network of friends able to solve complex problems? The answer is seemingly yes, if the individuals are digital models of neurons. (To carry analogy further: different species of individuals would be analogous to different types of neurons e.g. purkinje cells vs pyramid cells vs granular vs. motor neurons. Individuals from one species may tend to be very gregarious, while those from other species might be generally xenophobic. etc.) I have no clue if anyone has ever explored genetic algorithms or related alife algos, factored together with the individuals being involved in a social network (with actual information exchange between friends). No clue as to how natural/artificial selection should work. Do anti-social individuals have a possibly redeeming role w.r.t. the organism as a whole? Do selection pressures on individuals (weak individuals are cullled) destroy social networks? Do such networks automatically evolve altruism, because a working social network with weak, altruistically-supported individuals is better than a shredded, dysfunctional social network consisting of only strong individuals? Dunno. Seems like there could be many many interesting questions. I'd be curious about the answers to Antonio's questions ... --linas --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your
Re: [agi] Pretty worldchanging
On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 5:36 AM, Panu Horsmalahti nawi...@gmail.com wrote: Availibility of the Internet actually makes school grades worse. Of course, grades does not equal education, but I don't see anything worldchanging about education because of this. - Panu Horsmalahti Hmmm I do think the Internet has worldchanging implications for education, many of which are being realized all around us as we speak... School grades are a poor measure of intellectual achievement. And of course, the Internet can be used in either wonderful or idiotic ways -- it obviously DOES have revolutionary implications for education, even if statistically few make use of it in a way that significantly manifests these implications. I see this article http://news.yahoo.com/s/ytech_wguy/20100714/tc_ytech_wguy/ytech_wguy_tc3118 linked from the above article, which provides some (not that much) data that computer or Net access may decrease test scores in some low-income families But as the article itself states, this suggests the problem is not the computers or Net, but rather the inability of many low-income parents to guide their kids in educational use of computers and the Net ... or to give their kids a broad enough general education to enable them to guide themselves in this regard... Similarly, reading has great potential to aid education -- but if all you read are romance novels and People or Fat Biker Chick magazine, you're not going to broaden your mind that much ;p ... Maybe there are some students on this email list, who are wading through all the BS and learning something about AGI, by following links and reading papers mentioned here, etc. Without the Net, how would these students learn about AGI, in practice? Such education would be far harder to come by and less effective without the Net. That's world-changing... ;-) ... Learning about AGI via online resources may not improve your school grades any, because AGI knowledge isn't tested much in school. But students learning about AGI online could change the world... -- Ben G *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Cosmist Manifesto available via Amazon.com
Hi all, My new futurist tract The Cosmist Manifesto is now available on Amazon.com, courtesy of Humanity+ Press: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0984609709/ Thanks to Natasha Vita-More for the beautiful cover, and David Orban for helping make the book happen... -- Ben -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Re: Cosmist Manifesto available via Amazon.com
Oh... and, a PDF version of the book is also available for free at http://goertzel.org/CosmistManifesto_July2010.pdf ;-) ... ben On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: Hi all, My new futurist tract The Cosmist Manifesto is now available on Amazon.com, courtesy of Humanity+ Press: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0984609709/ Thanks to Natasha Vita-More for the beautiful cover, and David Orban for helping make the book happen... -- Ben -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What is the smallest set of operations that can potentially define everything and how do you combine them ?
Well, if you want a simple but complete operator set, you can go with
-- Schonfinkel combinator plus two parentheses
or
-- S and K combinator plus two parentheses
and I suppose you could add
-- input
-- output
-- forget
statements to this, but I'm not sure what this gets you...
Actually, adding other operators doesn't necessarily
increase the search space your AI faces -- rather, it
**decreases** the search space **if** you choose the right operators, that
encapsulate regularities in the environment faced by the AI
Exemplifying this, writing programs doing humanly simple things
using S and K is a pain and involves piling a lot of S and K and parentheses
on top of each other, whereas if we introduce loops and conditionals and
such, these programs get shorter. Because loops and conditionals happen
to match the stuff that our human-written programs need to do...
A better question IMO is what set of operators and structures has the
property that the compact expressions tend to be the ones that are useful
for survival and problem-solving in the environments that humans and human-
like AIs need to cope with...
-- Ben G
On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 1:43 AM, Michael Swan ms...@voyagergaming.com wrote:
Hi,
I'm interested in combining the simplest, most derivable operations
( eg operations that cannot be defined by other operations) for creating
seed AGI's. The simplest operations combined in a multitude ways can
form extremely complex patterns, but the underlying logic may be
simple.
I wonder if varying combinations of the smallest set of operations:
{ , memory (= for memory assignment), ==, (a logical way to
combine them), (input, output), () brackets }
can potentially learn and define everything.
Assume all input is from numbers.
We want the smallest set of elements, because less elements mean less
combinations which mean less chance of hitting combinatorial explosion.
helps for generalisation, reducing combinations.
memory(=) is for hash look ups, what should one remember? What can be
discarded?
== This does a comparison between 2 values x == y is 1 if x and y are
exactly the same. Returns 0 if they are not the same.
(a logical way to combine them) Any non-narrow algorithm that reduces
the raw data into a simpler state will do. Philosophically like
Solomonoff Induction. This is the hardest part. What is the most optimal
way of combining the above set of operations?
() brackets are used to order operations.
Conditionals (only if statements) + memory assignment are the only valid
form of logic - ie no loops. Just repeat code if you want loops.
If you think that the set above cannot define everything, then what is
the smallest set of operations that can potentially define everything?
--
Some proofs / Thought experiments :
1) Can , ==, (), and memory define other logical operations like
(AND gate) ?
I propose that x==y==1 defines xy
xy x==y==1
00 = 0 0==0==1 = 0
10 = 0 1==0==1 = 0
01 = 0 0==1==1 = 0
11 = 1 1==1==1 = 1
It means can be completely defined using == therefore is not
one of the smallest possible general concepts. can be potentially
learnt from ==.
-
2) Write a algorithm that can define 1 using only ,==, ().
Multiple answers
a) discrete 1 could use
x == 1
b) continuous 1.0 could use this rule
For those not familiar with C++, ! means not
(x 0.9) !(x 1.1) expanding gives ( getting rid of ! and )
(x 0.9) == ((x 1.1) == 0) == 1 note !x can be defined in terms
of == like so x == 0.
(b) is a generalisation, and expansion of the definition of (a) and can
be scaled by changing the values 0.9 and 1.1 to fit what others
would generally define as being 1.
---
agi
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--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
CTO, Genescient Corp
Vice Chairman, Humanity+
Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute
External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China
b...@goertzel.org
I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if
we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is
sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
---
agi
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Re: [agi] Solomonoff Induction is Not Universal and Probability is not Prediction
On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 7:49 AM, Jim Bromer jimbro...@gmail.com wrote: Abram, Solomoff Induction would produce poor predictions if it could be used to compute them. Solomonoff induction is a mathematical, not verbal, construct. Based on the most obvious mapping from the verbal terms you've used above into mathematical definitions in terms of which Solomonoff induction is constructed, the above statement of yours is FALSE. If you're going to argue against a mathematical theorem, your argument must be mathematical not verbal. Please explain one of 1) which step in the proof about Solomonoff induction's effectiveness you believe is in error 2) which of the assumptions of this proof you think is inapplicable to real intelligence [apart from the assumption of infinite or massive compute resources] Otherwise, your statement is in the same category as the statement by the protagonist of Dostoesvky's Notes from the Underground -- I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. ;-) Secondly, since it cannot be computed it is useless. Third, it is not the sort of thing that is useful for AGI in the first place. I agree with these two statements -- ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Solomonoff Induction is Not Universal and Probability is not Prediction
On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 8:38 AM, Matt Mahoney matmaho...@yahoo.com wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: Secondly, since it cannot be computed it is useless. Third, it is not the sort of thing that is useful for AGI in the first place. I agree with these two statements The principle of Solomonoff induction can be applied to computable subsets of the (infinite) hypothesis space. For example, if you are using a neural network to make predictions, the principle says to use the smallest network that computes the past training data. Yes, of course various versions of Occam's Razor are useful in practice, and we use an Occam bias in MOSES inside OpenCog for example But as you know, these are not exactly the same as Solomonoff Induction, though they're based on the same idea... -- Ben --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Solomonoff Induction is Not Universal and Probability is not Prediction
To make this discussion more concrete, please look at http://www.vetta.org/documents/disSol.pdf Section 2.5 gives a simple version of the proof that Solomonoff induction is a powerful learning algorithm in principle, and Section 2.6 explains why it is not practically useful. What part of that paper do you think is wrong? thx ben On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 9:54 AM, Jim Bromer jimbro...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 7:56 AM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: If you're going to argue against a mathematical theorem, your argument must be mathematical not verbal. Please explain one of 1) which step in the proof about Solomonoff induction's effectiveness you believe is in error 2) which of the assumptions of this proof you think is inapplicable to real intelligence [apart from the assumption of infinite or massive compute resources] Solomonoff Induction is not a provable Theorem, it is therefore a conjecture. It cannot be computed, it cannot be verified. There are many mathematical theorems that require the use of limits to prove them for example, and I accept those proofs. (Some people might not.) But there is no evidence that Solmonoff Induction would tend toward some limits. Now maybe the conjectured abstraction can be verified through some other means, but I have yet to see an adequate explanation of that in any terms. The idea that I have to answer your challenges using only the terms you specify is noise. Look at 2. What does that say about your Theorem. I am working on 1 but I just said: I haven't yet been able to find a way that could be used to prove that Solomonoff Induction does not do what Matt claims it does. Z What is not clear is that no one has objected to my characterization of the conjecture as I have been able to work it out for myself. It requires an infinite set of infinitely computed probabilities of each infinite string. If this characterization is correct, then Matt has been using the term string ambiguously. As a primary sample space: A particular string. And as a compound sample space: All the possible individual cases of the substring compounded into one. No one has yet to tell of his mathematical experiments of using a Turing simulator to see what a finite iteration of all possible programs of a given length would actually look like. I will finish this later. On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 7:49 AM, Jim Bromer jimbro...@gmail.com wrote: Abram, Solomoff Induction would produce poor predictions if it could be used to compute them. Solomonoff induction is a mathematical, not verbal, construct. Based on the most obvious mapping from the verbal terms you've used above into mathematical definitions in terms of which Solomonoff induction is constructed, the above statement of yours is FALSE. If you're going to argue against a mathematical theorem, your argument must be mathematical not verbal. Please explain one of 1) which step in the proof about Solomonoff induction's effectiveness you believe is in error 2) which of the assumptions of this proof you think is inapplicable to real intelligence [apart from the assumption of infinite or massive compute resources] Otherwise, your statement is in the same category as the statement by the protagonist of Dostoesvky's Notes from the Underground -- I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. ;-) Secondly, since it cannot be computed it is useless. Third, it is not the sort of thing that is useful for AGI in the first place. I agree with these two statements -- ben G *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com/ *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org “When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Solomonoff Induction is Not Universal and Probability is not Prediction
I don't think Solomonoff induction is a particularly useful direction for AI, I was just taking issue with the statement made that it is not capable of correct prediction given adequate resources... On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 11:35 AM, David Jones davidher...@gmail.com wrote: Although I haven't studied Solomonoff induction yet, although I plan to read up on it, I've realized that people seem to be making the same mistake I was. People are trying to find one silver bullet method of induction or learning that works for everything. I've begun to realize that its OK if something doesn't work for everything. As long as it works on a large enough subset of problems to be useful. If you can figure out how to construct justifiable methods of induction for enough problems that you need to solve, then that is sufficient for AGI. This is the same mistake I made and it was the point I was trying to make in the recent email I sent. I kept trying to come up with algorithms for doing things and I could always find a test case to break it. So, now I've begun to realize that it's ok if it breaks sometimes! The question is, can you define an algorithm that breaks gracefully and which can figure out what problems it can be applied to and what problems it should not be applied to. If you can do that, then you can solve the problems where it is applicable, and avoid the problems where it is not. This is perfectly OK! You don't have to find a silver bullet method of induction or inference that works for everything! Dave On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 10:49 AM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: To make this discussion more concrete, please look at http://www.vetta.org/documents/disSol.pdf Section 2.5 gives a simple version of the proof that Solomonoff induction is a powerful learning algorithm in principle, and Section 2.6 explains why it is not practically useful. What part of that paper do you think is wrong? thx ben On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 9:54 AM, Jim Bromer jimbro...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 7:56 AM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: If you're going to argue against a mathematical theorem, your argument must be mathematical not verbal. Please explain one of 1) which step in the proof about Solomonoff induction's effectiveness you believe is in error 2) which of the assumptions of this proof you think is inapplicable to real intelligence [apart from the assumption of infinite or massive compute resources] Solomonoff Induction is not a provable Theorem, it is therefore a conjecture. It cannot be computed, it cannot be verified. There are many mathematical theorems that require the use of limits to prove them for example, and I accept those proofs. (Some people might not.) But there is no evidence that Solmonoff Induction would tend toward some limits. Now maybe the conjectured abstraction can be verified through some other means, but I have yet to see an adequate explanation of that in any terms. The idea that I have to answer your challenges using only the terms you specify is noise. Look at 2. What does that say about your Theorem. I am working on 1 but I just said: I haven't yet been able to find a way that could be used to prove that Solomonoff Induction does not do what Matt claims it does. Z What is not clear is that no one has objected to my characterization of the conjecture as I have been able to work it out for myself. It requires an infinite set of infinitely computed probabilities of each infinite string. If this characterization is correct, then Matt has been using the term string ambiguously. As a primary sample space: A particular string. And as a compound sample space: All the possible individual cases of the substring compounded into one. No one has yet to tell of his mathematical experiments of using a Turing simulator to see what a finite iteration of all possible programs of a given length would actually look like. I will finish this later. On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 7:49 AM, Jim Bromer jimbro...@gmail.comwrote: Abram, Solomoff Induction would produce poor predictions if it could be used to compute them. Solomonoff induction is a mathematical, not verbal, construct. Based on the most obvious mapping from the verbal terms you've used above into mathematical definitions in terms of which Solomonoff induction is constructed, the above statement of yours is FALSE. If you're going to argue against a mathematical theorem, your argument must be mathematical not verbal. Please explain one of 1) which step in the proof about Solomonoff induction's effectiveness you believe is in error 2) which of the assumptions of this proof you think is inapplicable to real intelligence [apart from the assumption of infinite or massive compute resources] Otherwise, your statement is in the same category as the statement by the protagonist of Dostoesvky's
[agi] My Sing. U lecture on AGI blogged at Wired UK:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-07/9/singularity-university-robotics-ai --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] My Sing. U lecture on AGI blogged at Wired UK:
I gave the lecture via Skype from my house in Maryland I learned that NASA has a crap Internet connection 8-D On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 2:50 PM, The Wizard key.unive...@gmail.com wrote: How was your overall experience there, anything you learn that is worth mentioning? On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-07/9/singularity-university-robotics-ai --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Carlos A Mejia Taking life one singularity at a time. www.Transalchemy.com *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org I admit that two times two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, two times two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] New KurzweilAI.net site... with my silly article sillier chatbot ;-p ;) ....
Check out my article on the H+ Summit http://www.kurzweilai.net/h-summit-harvard-the-rise-of-the-citizen-scientist and also the Ramona4 chatbot that Novamente LLC built for Ray Kurzweil a while back http://www.kurzweilai.net/ramona4/ramona.html It's not AGI at all; but it's pretty funny ;-) -- Ben -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org “When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A Primary Distinction for an AGI
AGI. Jim Bromer *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org “When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Huge Progress on the Core of AGI
those that more incorrect expectations. The idea I came up with earlier this month regarding high frame rates to reduce uncertainty is still applicable. It is important that all generated hypotheses have as low uncertainty as possible given our constraints and resources available. I thought I'd share my progress with you all. I'll be testing the ideas on test cases such as the ones I mentioned in the coming days and weeks. Dave *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org “When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Huge Progress on the Core of AGI
For visual perception, there are many reasons to think that a hierarchical architecture can be effective... this is one of the things you may find in dealing with real visual data but not with these toy examples... E.g. in a spatiotemporal predictive hierarchy, the idea would be to create a predictive module (using an Occam heuristic, as you suggest) corresponding to each of a host of observed spatiotemporal regions, with modules corresponding to larger regions occurring higher up in the hierarchy... ben On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 10:09 AM, David Jones davidher...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks Ben, Right, explanatory reasoning not new at all (also called abduction and inference to the best explanation). But, what seems to be elusive is a precise and algorithm method for implementing explanatory reasoning and solving real problems, such as sensory perception. This is what I'm hoping to solve. The theory has been there a while... How to effectively implement it in a general way though, as far as I can tell, has never been solved. Dave On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: Hi, I certainly agree with this method, but of course it's not original at all, it's pretty much the basis of algorithmic learning theory, right? Hutter's AIXI for instance works [very roughly speaking] by choosing the most compact program that, based on historical data, would have yielded maximum reward So yeah, this is the right idea... and your simple examples of it are nice... Eric Baum's whole book What Is thought is sort of an explanation of this idea in a human biology and psychology and AI context ;) ben On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 1:31 AM, David Jones davidher...@gmail.comwrote: A method for comparing hypotheses in explanatory-based reasoning: * We prefer the hypothesis or explanation that ***expects* more observations. If both explanations expect the same observations, then the simpler of the two is preferred (because the unnecessary terms of the more complicated explanation do not add to the predictive power).* *Why are expected events so important?* They are a measure of 1) explanatory power and 2) predictive power. The more predictive and the more explanatory a hypothesis is, the more likely the hypothesis is when compared to a competing hypothesis. Here are two case studies I've been analyzing from sensory perception of simplified visual input: The goal of the case studies is to answer the following: How do you generate the most likely motion hypothesis in a way that is general and applicable to AGI? *Case Study 1)* Here is a link to an example: animated gif of two black squares move from left to righthttp://practicalai.org/images/CaseStudy1.gif. *Description: *Two black squares are moving in unison from left to right across a white screen. In each frame the black squares shift to the right so that square 1 steals square 2's original position and square two moves an equal distance to the right. *Case Study 2) *Here is a link to an example: the interrupted squarehttp://practicalai.org/images/CaseStudy2.gif. *Description:* A single square is moving from left to right. Suddenly in the third frame, a single black square is added in the middle of the expected path of the original black square. This second square just stays there. So, what happened? Did the square moving from left to right keep moving? Or did it stop and then another square suddenly appeared and moved from left to right? *Here is a simplified version of how we solve case study 1: *The important hypotheses to consider are: 1) the square from frame 1 of the video that has a very close position to the square from frame 2 should be matched (we hypothesize that they are the same square and that any difference in position is motion). So, what happens is that in each two frames of the video, we only match one square. The other square goes unmatched. 2) We do the same thing as in hypothesis #1, but this time we also match the remaining squares and hypothesize motion as follows: the first square jumps over the second square from left to right. We hypothesize that this happens over and over in each frame of the video. Square 2 stops and square 1 jumps over it over and over again. 3) We hypothesize that both squares move to the right in unison. This is the correct hypothesis. So, why should we prefer the correct hypothesis, #3 over the other two? Well, first of all, #3 is correct because it has the most explanatory power of the three and is the simplest of the three. Simpler is better because, with the given evidence and information, there is no reason to desire a more complicated hypothesis such as #2. So, the answer to the question is because explanation #3 expects the most observations, such as: 1) the consistent relative positions of the squares in each frame are expected. 2) It also expects their new positions in each from based on velocity
Re: [agi] Huge Progress on the Core of AGI
To put it more succinctly, Dave Ben Hutter are doing the wrong subject - narrow AI. Looking for the one right prediction/ explanation is narrow AI. Being able to generate more and more possible explanations, wh. could all be valid, is AGI. The former is rational, uniform thinking. The latter is creative, polyform thinking. Or, if you prefer, it's convergent vs divergent thinking, the difference between wh. still seems to escape Dave Ben most AGI-ers. You are misrepresenting my approach, which is not based on looking for the one right prediction/explanation OpenCog relies heavily on evolutionary learning and probabilistic inference, both of which naturally generate a massive number of alternative possible explanations in nearly every instance... -- Ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Huge Progress on the Core of AGI
on it it shows you representative bars for each window. How do we add and combine this complex behavior learning, explanation, recognition and understanding into our system? Answer: The way that such things are learned is by making observations, learning patterns and then connecting the patterns in a way that is consistent, explanatory and likely. Example: Clicking the notepad icon causes a notepad window to appear with no content. If we previously had a notepad window open, it may seem like clicking the icon just clears the content by the instance is the same. But, this cannot be the case because if we click the icon when no notepad window previously existed, it will be blank. based on these two experiences we can construct an explanatory hypothesis such that: clicking the icon simply opens a blank window. We also get evidence for this conclusion when we see the two windows side by side. If we see the old window with the content still intact we will realize that clicking the icon did not seem to have cleared it. Dave On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 12:39 PM, Jim Bromer jimbro...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Mike Tintner tint...@blueyonder.co.uk wrote: Jim :This illustrates one of the things wrong with the dreary instantiations of the prevailing mind set of a group. It is only a matter of time until you discover (through experiment) how absurd it is to celebrate the triumph of an overly simplistic solution to a problem that is, by its very potential, full of possibilities] To put it more succinctly, Dave Ben Hutter are doing the wrong subject - narrow AI. Looking for the one right prediction/ explanation is narrow AI. Being able to generate more and more possible explanations, wh. could all be valid, is AGI. The former is rational, uniform thinking. The latter is creative, polyform thinking. Or, if you prefer, it's convergent vs divergent thinking, the difference between wh. still seems to escape Dave Ben most AGI-ers. Well, I agree with what (I think) Mike was trying to get at, except that I understood that Ben, Hutter and especially David were not only talking about prediction as a specification of a single prediction when many possible predictions (ie expectations) were appropriate for consideration. For some reason none of you seem to ever talk about methods that could be used to react to a situation with the flexibility to integrate the recognition of different combinations of familiar events and to classify unusual events so they could be interpreted as more familiar *kinds* of events or as novel forms of events which might be then be integrated. For me, that seems to be one of the unsolved problems. Being able to say that the squares move to the right in unison is a better description than saying the squares are dancing the irish jig is not really cutting edge. As far as David's comment that he was only dealing with the core issues, I am sorry but you were not dealing with the core issues of contemporary AGI programming. You were dealing with a primitive problem that has been considered for many years, but it is not a core research issue. Yes we have to work with simple examples to explain what we are talking about, but there is a difference between an abstract problem that may be central to your recent work and a core research issue that hasn't really been solved. The entire problem of dealing with complicated situations is that these narrow AI methods haven't really worked. That is the core issue. Jim Bromer *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org “When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http
Re: [agi] Hutter - A fundamental misdirection?
Hi Steve, A few comments... 1) Nobody is trying to implement Hutter's AIXI design, it's a mathematical design intended as a proof of principle 2) Within Hutter's framework, one calculates the shortest program that explains the data, where shortest is measured on Turing machine M. Given a sufficient number of observations, the choice of M doesn't matter and AIXI will eventually learn any computable reward pattern. However, choosing the right M can greatly accelerate learning. In the case of a physical AGI system, choosing M to incorporate the correct laws of physics would obviously accelerate learning considerably. 3) Many AGI designs try to incorporate prior understanding of the structure properties of the physical world, in various ways. I have a whole chapter on this in my forthcoming book on OpenCog E.g. OpenCog's design includes a physics-engine, which is used directly and to aid with inferential extrapolations... So I agree with most of your points, but I don't find them original except in phrasing ;) ... ben On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 2:30 PM, Steve Richfield steve.richfi...@gmail.comwrote: Ben, et al, *I think I may finally grok the fundamental misdirection that current AGI thinking has taken! *This is a bit subtle, and hence subject to misunderstanding. Therefore I will first attempt to explain what I see, WITHOUT so much trying to convince you (or anyone) that it is necessarily correct. Once I convey my vision, then let the chips fall where they may. On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 6:35 AM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: Hutter's AIXI for instance works [very roughly speaking] by choosing the most compact program that, based on historical data, would have yielded maximum reward ... and there it is! What did I see? Example applicable to the lengthy following discussion: 1 - 2 2 - 2 3 - 2 4 - 2 5 - ? What is ?. Now, I'll tell you that the left column represents the distance along a 4.5 unit long table, and the right column represents the distance above the floor that you will be as your walk the length of the table. Knowing this, without ANY supporting physical experience, I would guess ? to be zero, or maybe a little more if I were to step off of the table and land onto something lower, like the shoes that I left there. In an imaginary world where a GI boots up with a complete understanding of physics, etc., we wouldn't prefer the simplest program at all, but rather the simplest representation of the real world that is not physics/math *in *consistent with our observations. All observations would be presumed to be consistent with the response curves of our sensors, showing a world in which Newton's laws prevail, etc. Armed with these presumptions, our physics-complete AGI would look for the simplest set of *UN*observed phenomena that explained the observed phenomena. This theory of a physics-complete AGI seems undeniable, but of course, we are NOT born physics-complete - or are we?! This all comes down to the limits of representational math. At great risk of hand-waving on a keyboard, I'll try to explain by pseudo-translating the concepts into NN/AGI terms. We all know about layering and columns in neural systems, and understand Bayesian math. However, let's dig a little deeper into exactly what is being represented by the outputs (or terms for died-in-the-wool AGIers). All physical quantities are well known to have value, significance, and dimensionality. Neurons/Terms (N/T) could easily be protein-tagged as to the dimensionality that their functionality is capable of producing, so that only compatible N/Ts could connect to them. However, let's dig a little deeper into dimensionality Physicists think we live in an MKS (Meters, Kilograms, Seconds) world, and that all dimensionality can be reduced to MKS. For physics purposes they may be right (see challenge below), but maybe for information processing purposes, they are missing some important things. *Challenge to MKS:* Note that some physicists and most astronomers utilize *dimensional analysis* where they experimentally play with the dimensions of observations to inductively find manipulations that would yield the dimensions of unobservable quantities, e.g. the mass of a star, and then run the numbers through the same manipulation to see if the results at least have the right exponent. However, many/most such manipulations produce nonsense, so they simply use this technique to jump from observations to a list of prospective results with wildly different exponents, and discard the results with the ridiculous exponents to find the correct result. The frequent failures of this process indirectly demonstrates that there is more to dimensionality (and hence physics) than just MKS. Let's accept that, and presume that neurons must have already dealt with whatever is missing from current thought. Consider, there is some (hopefully finite) set of reasonable
Re: [agi] Reward function vs utility
You can always build the utility function into the assumed universal Turing machine underlying the definition of algorithmic information... I guess this will improve learning rate by some additive constant, in the long run ;) ben On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Joshua Fox joshuat...@gmail.com wrote: This has probably been discussed at length, so I will appreciate a reference on this: Why does Legg's definition of intelligence (following on Hutters' AIXI and related work) involve a reward function rather than a utility function? For this purpose, reward is a function of the word state/history which is unknown to the agent while a utility function is known to the agent. Even if we replace the former with the latter, we can still have a definition of intelligence that integrates optimization capacity over possible all utility functions. What is the real significance of the difference between the two types of functions here? Joshua *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org “When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hutter - A fundamental misdirection?
Steve, I know what dimensional analysis is, but it would be great if you could give an example of how it's useful for everyday commonsense reasoning such as, say, a service robot might need to do to figure out how to clean a house... thx ben On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 6:43 PM, Steve Richfield steve.richfi...@gmail.comwrote: Ben, What I saw as my central thesis is that propagating carefully conceived dimensionality information along with classical information could greatly improve the cognitive process, by FORCING reasonable physics WITHOUT having to understand (by present concepts of what understanding means) physics. Hutter was just a foil to explain my thought. Note again my comments regarding how physicists and astronomers understand some processes though dimensional analysis that involves NONE of the sorts of understanding that you might think necessary, yet can predictably come up with the right answers. Are you up on the basics of dimensional analysis? The reality is that it is quite imperfect, but is often able to yield a short list of answers, with the correct one being somewhere in the list. Usually, the wrong answers are wildly wrong (they are probably computing something, but NOT what you might be interested in), and are hence easily eliminated. I suspect that neurons might be doing much the same, as could formulaic implementations like (most) present AGI efforts. This might explain natural architecture and guide human architectural efforts. In short, instead of a pot of neurons, we might instead have a pot of dozens of types of neurons that each have their own complex rules regarding what other types of neurons they can connect to, and how they process information. Architecture might involve deciding how many of each type to provide, and what types to put adjacent to what other types, rather than the more detailed concept now usually thought to exist. Thanks for helping me wring my thought out here. Steve = On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 2:49 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: Hi Steve, A few comments... 1) Nobody is trying to implement Hutter's AIXI design, it's a mathematical design intended as a proof of principle 2) Within Hutter's framework, one calculates the shortest program that explains the data, where shortest is measured on Turing machine M. Given a sufficient number of observations, the choice of M doesn't matter and AIXI will eventually learn any computable reward pattern. However, choosing the right M can greatly accelerate learning. In the case of a physical AGI system, choosing M to incorporate the correct laws of physics would obviously accelerate learning considerably. 3) Many AGI designs try to incorporate prior understanding of the structure properties of the physical world, in various ways. I have a whole chapter on this in my forthcoming book on OpenCog E.g. OpenCog's design includes a physics-engine, which is used directly and to aid with inferential extrapolations... So I agree with most of your points, but I don't find them original except in phrasing ;) ... ben On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 2:30 PM, Steve Richfield steve.richfi...@gmail.com wrote: Ben, et al, *I think I may finally grok the fundamental misdirection that current AGI thinking has taken! *This is a bit subtle, and hence subject to misunderstanding. Therefore I will first attempt to explain what I see, WITHOUT so much trying to convince you (or anyone) that it is necessarily correct. Once I convey my vision, then let the chips fall where they may. On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 6:35 AM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: Hutter's AIXI for instance works [very roughly speaking] by choosing the most compact program that, based on historical data, would have yielded maximum reward ... and there it is! What did I see? Example applicable to the lengthy following discussion: 1 - 2 2 - 2 3 - 2 4 - 2 5 - ? What is ?. Now, I'll tell you that the left column represents the distance along a 4.5 unit long table, and the right column represents the distance above the floor that you will be as your walk the length of the table. Knowing this, without ANY supporting physical experience, I would guess ? to be zero, or maybe a little more if I were to step off of the table and land onto something lower, like the shoes that I left there. In an imaginary world where a GI boots up with a complete understanding of physics, etc., we wouldn't prefer the simplest program at all, but rather the simplest representation of the real world that is not physics/math *in*consistent with our observations. All observations would be presumed to be consistent with the response curves of our sensors, showing a world in which Newton's laws prevail, etc. Armed with these presumptions, our physics-complete AGI would look for the simplest set of *UN*observed phenomena that explained the observed phenomena. This theory
Re: [agi] Huge Progress on the Core of AGI
to the real world of AGI problems. You should get to know it. And as this example (and my rock wall problem) indicate, these problems can be as simple and accessible as fairly easy narrow AI problems. *From:* Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org *Sent:* Sunday, June 27, 2010 7:33 PM *To:* agi agi@v2.listbox.com *Subject:* Re: [agi] Huge Progress on the Core of AGI That's a rather bizarre suggestion Mike ... I'm quite sure a simple narrow AI system could be constructed to beat humans at Pong ;p ... without teaching us much of anything about intelligence... Very likely a narrow-AI machine learning system could *learn* by experience to beat humans at Pong ... also without teaching us much of anything about intelligence... Pong is almost surely a toy domain ... ben g On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Mike Tintner tint...@blueyonder.co.ukwrote: Try ping-pong - as per the computer game. Just a line (/bat) and a square(/ball) representing your opponent - and you have a line(/bat) to play against them Now you've got a relatively simple true AGI visual problem - because if the opponent returns the ball somewhat as a real human AGI does, (without the complexities of spin etc just presumably repeatedly changing the direction (and perhaps the speed) of the returned ball) - then you have a fundamentally *unpredictable* object. How will your program learn to play that opponent - bearing in mind that the opponent is likely to keep changing and even evolving strategy? Your approach will have to be fundamentally different from how a program learns to play a board game, where all the possibilities are predictable. In the real world, past performance is not a [sure] guide to future performance. Bayes doesn't apply. That's the real issue here - it's not one of simplicity/complexity - it's that your chosen worlds all consist of objects that are predictable, because they behave consistently, are shaped consistently, and come in consistent, closed sets - and can only basically behave in one way at any given point. AGI is about dealing with the real world of objects that are unpredictable because they behave inconsistently,even contradictorily, are shaped inconsistently and come in inconsistent, open sets - and can behave in multi-/poly-ways at any given point. These differences apply at all levels from the most complex to the simplest. Dealing with consistent (and regular) objects is no preparation for dealing with inconsistent, irregular objects.It's a fundamental error Real AGI animals and humans were clearly designed to deal with a world of objects that have some consistencies but overall are inconsistent, irregular and come in open sets. The perfect regularities and consistencies of geometrical figures and mechanical motion (and boxes moving across a screen) were only invented very recently. *From:* David Jones davidher...@gmail.com *Sent:* Sunday, June 27, 2010 5:57 PM *To:* agi agi@v2.listbox.com *Subject:* Re: [agi] Huge Progress on the Core of AGI Jim, Two things. 1) If the method I have suggested works for the most simple case, it is quite straight forward to add complexity and then ask, how do I solve it now. If you can't solve that case, there is no way in hell you will solve the full AGI problem. This is how I intend to figure out how to solve such a massive problem. You cannot tackle the whole thing all at once. I've tried it and it doesn't work because you can't focus on anything. It is like a Rubik's cube. You turn one piece to get the color orange in place, but at the same time you are screwing up the other colors. Now imagine that times 1000. You simply can't do it. So, you start with a simple demonstration of the difficulties and show how to solve a small puzzle, such as a Rubik's cube with 4 little cubes to a side instead of 6. Then you can show how to solve 2 sides of a rubiks cube, etc. Eventually, it will be clear how to solve the whole problem because by the time you're done, you have a complete understanding of what is going on and how to go about solving it. 2) I haven't mentioned a method for matching expected behavior to observations and bypassing the default algorithms, but I have figured out quite a lot about how to do it. I'll give you an example from my own notes below. What I've realized is that the AI creates *expectations* (again). When those expectations are matched, the AI does not do its default processing and analysis. It doesn't do the default matching that it normally does when it has no other knowledge. It starts with an existing hypothesis. When unexpected observations or inconsistencies occur, then the AI will have a *reason* or *cue* (these words again... very important concepts) to look for a better hypothesis. Only then, should it look for another hypothesis. My notes: How does the ai learn and figure out how to explain complex unforseen behaviors that are not preprogrammable
Re: [agi] Hutter - A fundamental misdirection?
On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 7:09 PM, Steve Richfield steve.richfi...@gmail.comwrote: Ben, On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: know what dimensional analysis is, but it would be great if you could give an example of how it's useful for everyday commonsense reasoning such as, say, a service robot might need to do to figure out how to clean a house... How much detergent will it need to clean the floors? Hmmm, we need to know ounces. We have the length and width of the floor, and the bottle says to use 1 oz/M^2. How could we manipulate two M-dimensioned quantities and 1 oz/M^2 dimensioned quantity to get oz? The only way would seem to be to multiply all three numbers together to get ounces. This WITHOUT understanding things like surface area, utilization, etc. I think that the El Salvadorean maids who come to clean my house occasionally, solve this problem without any dimensional analysis or any quantitative reasoning at all... Probably they solve it based on nearest-neighbor matching against past experiences cleaning other dirty floors with water in similarly sized and shaped buckets... -- ben g --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The problem with AGI per Sloman
Yes... the idea underlying Sloman's quote is why the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science was invented a few decades ago... ben g On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 12:05 PM, Jim Bromer jimbro...@gmail.com wrote: Both of you are wrong. (Where did that quote come from by the way. What year did he write or say that.) An inadequate understanding of the problems is exactly what has to be expected by researchers (both professional and amateurs) when they are facing a completely novel pursuit. That is why we have endless discussions like these. What happened over and over again in AI research is that the amazing advances in computer technology always seemed to suggest that similar advances in AI must be just off the horizon. And the reality is that there have been major advances in AI. In the 1970's a critic stated that he wouldn't believe that AI was possible until a computer was able to beat him in chess. Well, guess what happened and guess what conclusion he did not derive from the experience. One of the problems with critics is that they can be as far off as those whose optimism is absurdly unwarranted. If a broader multi-disciplinary effort was the obstacle to creating AGI, we would have AGI by now. It should be clear to anyone who examines the history of AI or the present day reach of computer programming that a multi-discipline effort is not the key to creating effective AGI. Computers have become pervasive in modern day life, and if it was just a matter of getting people with different kinds of interests involved, it would have been done by now. It is a little like saying that the key to safe deep sea drilling is to rely on the expertise of companies that make billions and billions of dollars and which stand to lose billions by mistakes. While that should make sense, if you look a little more closely, you can see that it doesn't quite work out that way in the real world. Jim Bromer On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 7:33 AM, Mike Tintner tint...@blueyonder.co.ukwrote: One of the problems of AI researchers is that too often they start off with an inadequate understanding of the *problems* and believe that solutions are only a few years away. We need an educational system that not only teaches techniques and solutions, but also an understanding of problems and their difficulty — which can come from a broader multi-disciplinary education. That could speed up progress. A. Sloman ( who else keeps saying that?) *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com/ *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC CTO, Genescient Corp Vice Chairman, Humanity+ Advisor, Singularity University and Singularity Institute External Research Professor, Xiamen University, China b...@goertzel.org “When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
Yes, I'm expecting the AI to make tools from blocks and beads No, i'm not attempting to make a detailed simulation of the human brain/body, just trying to use vaguely humanlike embodiment and high-level mind-architecture together with computer science algorithms, to achieve AGI On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 5:56 AM, William Pearson wil.pear...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/1/9 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: This is an attempt to articulate a virtual world infrastructure that will be adequate for the development of human-level AGI http://www.goertzel.org/papers/BlocksNBeadsWorld.pdf goertzel.org seems to be down. So I can't refresh my memory of the paper. Most of the paper is taken up by conceptual and requirements issues, but at the end specific world-design proposals are made. This complements my earlier paper on AGI Preschool. It attempts to define what kind of underlying virtual world infrastructure an effective AGI preschool would minimally require. In some ways this question is under defined. It depends what the learning system is like. If it is like a human brain it would need a sufficiently (lawfully) changing world to stimulate its neural plasticity (rain, seasons, new buildings, death of pets, growth of its own body). That is a never ending series of connectible but new situations to push the brain in different directions. Cat's eyes deprived of stimulation go blind, so a brain in an unstimulating environment might fail to develop. So I would say that not only are certain dynamics important but there should also be a large variety of externally presented examples. Consider for example learning electronics, the metaphor of rivers and dams is often used to teach it, but if the only example of fluid dynamics you have come across is a flat pool of beads, then you might not get the metaphor. Similarly a kettle boiling dry might be used to teach about part of the water cycle. There may be lots of other subconscious analogies of these sorts that have to be made when we are young that we don't know about. It would be my worry when implementing a virtual world for AI development. If it is not like a human brain (in this respect), then the question is a lot harder. Also are you expecting the AIs to make tools out of the blocks and beads? Will --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org This is no place to stop -- half way between ape and angel -- Benjamin Disraeli --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
Hi, Since I can now get to the paper some further thoughts. Concepts that would seem hard to form in your world is organic growth and phase changes of materials. Also naive chemistry would seem to be somewhat important (cooking, dissolving materials, burning: these are things that a pre-schooler would come into contact more at home than in structured pre-school). Actually, you could probably get plantlike growth using beads, via methods similar to L-systems (used in graphics for simulating plant growth) Woody plants could be obtained using a combination of blocks and beads, as well.. Phase changes would probably arise via phase transitions in bead conglomerates, with the control parameters driven by changes in adhesion However, naive chemistry would exist only in a far more primitive form than in the real world, I'll have to admit. This is just a shortcoming of the BlocksNBeadsWorld, and I think it's an acceptable one... ben --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
Indeed... but cake-baking just won't have the same nuances ;-) On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:08 AM, Russell Wallace russell.wall...@gmail.com wrote: Melting and boiling at least should be doable: assign every bead a temperature, and let solid interbead bonds turn liquid above a certain temperature and disappear completely above some higher temperature. --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org This is no place to stop -- half way between ape and angel -- Benjamin Disraeli --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
Actually, I view that as a matter for the AGI system, not the world. Different AGI systems hooked up to the same world may choose to receive different inputs from it Binocular vision, for instance, is not necessary in a virtual world, and some AGIs might want to use it whereas others don't... On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Philip Hunt cabala...@googlemail.com wrote: 2009/1/9 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: Hi all, I intend to submit the following paper to JAGI shortly, but I figured I'd run it past you folks on this list first, and incorporate any useful feedback into the draft I submit Perhaps the paper could go into more detail about what sensory input the AGI would have. E.g. you might specify that its vision system would consist of 2 pixelmaps (binocular vision) each 1000x1000 pixels, in three colours and 16 bits of intensity, updated 20 times per second. Of course, you may want to specify the visual system differently, but it's useful to say so and make your assumptions concrete. -- Philip Hunt, cabala...@googlemail.com Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org This is no place to stop -- half way between ape and angel -- Benjamin Disraeli --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
Matt, The complexity of a simulated environment is tricky to estimate, if the environment contains complex self-organizing dynamics, random number generation, and complex human interactions ... ben On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Matt Mahoney matmaho...@yahoo.com wrote: My response to Ben's paper is to be cautious about drawing conclusions from simulated environments. Human level AGI has an algorithmic complexity of 10^9 bits (as estimated by Landauer). It is not possible to learn this much information from an environment that is less complex. If a baby AI did perform well in a simplified simulation of the world, it would not imply that the same system would work in the real world. It would be like training a language model on a simple, artificial language and then concluding that the system could be scaled up to learn English. This is a lesson from my dissertation work in network intrusion anomaly detection. This was a machine learning task in which the system was trained on attack-free network traffic, and then identified anything out of the ordinary as malicious. For development and testing, we used the 1999 MIT-DARPA Lincoln Labs data set consisting of 5 weeks of synthetic network traffic with hundreds of labeled attacks. The test set developers took great care to make the data as realistic as possible. They collected statistics from real networks, built an isolated network of 4 real computers running different operating systems, and thousands of simulated computers that generated HTTP requests to public websites and mailing lists, and generated synthetic email using English word bigram frequencies, and other kinds of traffic. In my work I discovered a simple algorithm that beat the best intrusion detection systems available at the time. I parsed network packets into individual 1-4 byte fields, recorded all the values that ever occurred at least once in training, and flagged any new value in the test data as suspicious, with a score inversely proportional to the size of the set of values observed in training and proportional to the time since the previous anomaly. Not surprisingly, the simple algorithm failed on real network traffic. There were too many false alarms for it to be even remotely useful. The reason it worked on the synthetic traffic was that it was algorithmically simple compared to real traffic. For example, one of the most effective tests was the TTL value, a counter that decrements with each IP routing hop, intended to prevent routing loops. It turned out that most of the attacks were simulated from a machine that was one hop further away than the machines simulating normal traffic. A problem like that could have been fixed, but there were a dozen others that I found, and probably many that I didn't find. It's not that the test set developers weren't careful. They spent probably $1 million developing it (several people over 2 years). It's that you can't simulate the high complexity of thousands of computers and human users with anything less than that. Simple problems have simple solutions, but that's not AGI. -- Matt Mahoney, matmaho...@yahoo.com --- On Fri, 1/9/09, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: From: Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org Subject: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It? To: agi@v2.listbox.com Date: Friday, January 9, 2009, 5:58 PM Hi all, I intend to submit the following paper to JAGI shortly, but I figured I'd run it past you folks on this list first, and incorporate any useful feedback into the draft I submit This is an attempt to articulate a virtual world infrastructure that will be adequate for the development of human-level AGI http://www.goertzel.org/papers/BlocksNBeadsWorld.pdf Most of the paper is taken up by conceptual and requirements issues, but at the end specific world-design proposals are made. This complements my earlier paper on AGI Preschool. It attempts to define what kind of underlying virtual world infrastructure an effective AGI preschool would minimally require. thx Ben G -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org This is no place to stop -- half way between ape and angel -- Benjamin Disraeli --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https
Re: [agi] [WAS The Smushaby] The Logic of Creativity
and structured) methods by which one could achieve some procedural goal, and then he declares that logic (in this greater sense that I believe acknowledged) was incapable of achieving it. Let's take a flying house. I have to say that there was a very great chance that I misunderstood what Mike was saying, since I believe that he effectively said that a computer program, using logically derived systems could not come to the point where it could creatively draw a picture of a flying house like a child might. If that was what he was saying then it is very strange. Obviously, one could program a computer to draw a flying house. So right away, his point must have been under stated, because that means that a computer program using computer logic (somewhere within this greater sense of the term) could follow a program designed to get it to draw a flying house. So right away, Mike's challenge can't be taken seriously. If we can use logical design to get the computer program to draw a flying house, we can find more creative ways to get it to the same point. Do you understand what I am saying? You aren't actually going to challenge me to write a rather insipid program that will draw a flying house for you are you? You accept the statement that I could do that if I wanted to right? If you do accept that statement, then you should be able to accept the fact that I could also write a more elaborate computer program to do the same thing, only it might, for example, do so only after the words house and flying were input. I think you understand that I could write a slightly more elaborate computer program to do the something like that. Ok, now I could keep making it more complicated and eventually I could get to the point where where it could take parts of pictures that it was exposed to and draw them in more creative combinations. If it was exposed to pictures of airplanes flying, and if it was exposed to pictures of houses, it might,. through quasi random experimentation try drawing a picture of the airplane flying past the house as if the house was an immense mountain, and then it might try some clouds as landscaping for the house and then it might try a cloud with a driveway, garbage can and a chimney, and eventually it might even draw a picture of a house with wings. All I need to do that is to use some shape detecting algorithms that have been developed for graphics programs and are used all the time by graphic artists that can approximately determine the shape of the house and airplane in the different pictures and then it would just be a matter of time before it could (and would) try to draw a flying house. Which step do you doubt, or did I completely misunderstand you? 1. I could (I hope I don't have to) write a program that could draw a flying house. 2. I could make it slightly more elaborate so, for example, that it would only draw the flying house if the words 'house' and 'flying' were input. 3. I could vary the program in many other ways. Now suppose that I showed you one of these programs. After that I could make it more complicated so that it went through a slightly more creative process than the program you saw the previous time. 4. I could continue to make the program more and more complicated. I could, (with a lot of graphics techniques that I know about but haven't actually mastered) write the program so that if it was exposed to pictures of houses and to pictures of flying, would have the ability to eventually draw a picture of a flying house (along with a lot of other creative efforts that you have not) even thought of. But the thing is, that I can do this without using advanced AGI techniques! So, I must retain the recognition that I may not have been able to understand you because what you are saying is not totally reasonable to me. Jim Bromer --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org This is no place to stop -- half way between ape and angel -- Benjamin Disraeli --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] initial reaction to A2I2's call center product
AGI company A2I2 has released a product for automating call center functionality, see... http://www.smartaction.com/index.html Based on reading the website here is my initial reaction Certainly, automating a higher and higher percentage of call center functionality is a worthy goal, and a place one would expect AGI technology to be able to play a role. Current automated call center systems either provide extremely crude functionality, or else require extensive domain customization prior to each deployment; and they still show serious shortcomings even after such customization, due largely to their inability to interpret the user's statements in terms of an appropriate contextual understanding. The promise AGI technology offers for this domain is the possibility of responding to user statements with the contextual understanding that only general intelligence can bring. The extent to which A2I2 has really solved this very difficult problem, however, is impossible to assess without actually trying the product. What they have might be an incremental improvement over existing technologies, or it might be a quantum leap forward; based on the information provided, there is no way to tell. For example http://www.tuvox.com/ is a quite sophisticated competitor and it would be interesting to see a head to head competition between their system and A2I2's. The available materials tell little about the underlying technology. Claims such as Functionally, it recognizes speech, understands the caller's meaning and intent, remembers the evolving context of the conversation, and obtains information in real time from databases and websites. are evocative but could be interpreted in many different ways. Interpreted most broadly, this would imply that A2I2 has achieved a human-level AI system; but if this were the case, there would be better things to do with it than automate call centers. Based on the available information, it's not clear just how narrowly one must interpret these assertions to obtain agreement with the truth. What is clear is that they are taking an adaptive learning based approach rather than an approach based on extensive hand-coding of linguistic resources, which is interesting, and vaguely reminiscent of Robert Hecht-Nielsen's neural net approach to language processing. ben g --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
The problem with simulations that run slower than real time is that they aren't much good for running AIs interactively with humans... and for AGI we want the combination of social and physical interaction However, I agree that for an initial prototype implementation of bead physics that would be the best approach... On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 5:30 AM, Russell Wallace russell.wall...@gmail.com wrote: I think this sort of virtual world is an excellent idea. I agree with Benjamin Johnston's idea of a unified object model where everything consists of beads. I notice you mentioned distributing the computation. This would certainly be valuable in the long run, but for the first version I would suggest having each simulation instance run on a single machine with the fastest physics capable GPU on the market, and accepting that it will still run slower than real time. Let an experiment be an overnight run, and use multiple machines by running multiple experiments at the same time. That would make the programming for the first version more tractable. --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org This is no place to stop -- half way between ape and angel -- Benjamin Disraeli --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] time-sensitive issue: voting members sought to participate in upcoming election for H+ (World Transhumanist Association)
Hi all, Some of you may be aware of the organization called the World Transhumanist Association, and currently in the process of being rebranded as H+ aka Humanity+ I've been on the board of the organization since the middle of the year and among other things have been helping out with the management of the H+ magazine http://www.hplusmagazine.com/ whose first issue got nearly 600,000 downloads. The organization is in a phase of rapid growth and change, and I'm hoping it can grow beyond its roots to become a major force in spreading futurist memes throughout the world... ... which brings us to the purpose of the current message the Humanity+ (formerly World Transhumanist Association) Board elections begin tomorrow, Monday January 11th. To vote in the elections, you need to be a Supporting or Sustaining Member. Eight seats are open. If you have any interest in such things, it would be great if you could renew your membership or become a member by tonight so that you can vote in next week's elections. Here are the candidates running: http://www.transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/more/hbrdc/ I'd like to especially recommend supporting the first eight candidates listed at the URL: Sonia Arrison, George Dvorsky, Patri Friedman, Ben Goertzel (big surprise), Stephane Gounari, Todd Huffman, Jonas Lamis, and Mike LaTorra. Sorry for the short notice, but if you see this in time and have the interest, I hope you'll become a member by tonight so that you can vote next week. You can renew / become a member here for $25-$50 (please see middle of page with the 1 Year or 2 Year buttons): http://transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/join/ thx Ben --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Nathan Cook nathan.c...@gmail.com wrote: What about vibration? We have specialized mechanoreceptors to detect vibration (actually vibration and pressure - presumably there's processing to separate the two). It's vibration that lets us feel fine texture, via the stick-slip friction between fingertip and object. Actually, letting beads vibrate at various frequencies would seem perfectly reasonable ... and could lead to interesting behaviors in sets of flexibly coupled beads. I think this would be a good addition to the model, thanks! On a related note, even a very fine powder of very low friction feels different to water - how can you capture the sensation of water using beads and blocks of a reasonably large size? The objective of a CogDevWorld such as BlocksNBeadsWorld is explicitly **not** to precisely simulate the sensations of being in the real world. My question to you is: What important cognitive ability is drastically more easily developable given a world that contains a distinction between fluids and various sorts of bead-conglomerates? -- Ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
The model feels underspecified to me, but I'm OK with that, the ideas conveyed. It doesn't feel fair to insist there's no fluid dynamics modeled though ;-) Yes, the next step would be to write out detailed equations for the model. I didn't do that in the paper because I figured that would be a fairly empty exercise unless I also implemented some kind of simple simulation of the model. With this sort of thing, it's easy to write down equations that look good, but one doesn't really know if they make sense till one's run some simulations, done some parameter tuning, etc. Which seems like a quite fun exercise, but I just didn't get to it yet... actually it would be sensible to do this together with some nice visualization... ben --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=126863270-d7b0b0 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
Hi all, I intend to submit the following paper to JAGI shortly, but I figured I'd run it past you folks on this list first, and incorporate any useful feedback into the draft I submit This is an attempt to articulate a virtual world infrastructure that will be adequate for the development of human-level AGI http://www.goertzel.org/papers/BlocksNBeadsWorld.pdf Most of the paper is taken up by conceptual and requirements issues, but at the end specific world-design proposals are made. This complements my earlier paper on AGI Preschool. It attempts to define what kind of underlying virtual world infrastructure an effective AGI preschool would minimally require. thx Ben G -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What Must a World Be That a Humanlike Intelligence May Develop In It?
It's actually mentioned there, though not emphasized... there's a section on senses... ben g On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 8:10 PM, Eric Burton brila...@gmail.com wrote: Goertzel this is an interesting line of investigation. What about in world sound perception? On 1/9/09, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: Hi all, I intend to submit the following paper to JAGI shortly, but I figured I'd run it past you folks on this list first, and incorporate any useful feedback into the draft I submit This is an attempt to articulate a virtual world infrastructure that will be adequate for the development of human-level AGI http://www.goertzel.org/papers/BlocksNBeadsWorld.pdf Most of the paper is taken up by conceptual and requirements issues, but at the end specific world-design proposals are made. This complements my earlier paper on AGI Preschool. It attempts to define what kind of underlying virtual world infrastructure an effective AGI preschool would minimally require. thx Ben G -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The Smushaby of Flatway.
If it was just a matter of writing the code, then it would have been done 50 years ago. if proving Fermat's Last theorem was just a matter of doing math, it would have been done 150 years ago ;-p obviously, all hard problems that can be solved have already been solved... ??? --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hypercomputation and AGI
It seems to come down to the simplicity measure... if you can have simplicity(Turing program P that generates lookup table T) simplicity(compressed lookup table T) then the Turing program P can be considered part of a scientific explanation... On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 10:02 AM, William Pearson wil.pear...@gmail.comwrote: 2008/12/29 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: Hi, I expanded a previous blog entry of mine on hypercomputation and AGI into a conference paper on the topic ... here is a rough draft, on which I'd appreciate commentary from anyone who's knowledgeable on the subject: http://goertzel.org/papers/CognitiveInformaticsHypercomputationPaper.pdf I'm still a bit fuzzy about your argument. So I am going to ask a question to hopefully clarify things somewhat. Couldn't you use similar arguments to say that we can't use science to distinguish between finite state machines and Turing machines? And thus question the usefulness of Turing Machines for science? As if you are talking about a finite data sets these can always be represented by a compressed giant look up table. Will --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hypercomputation and AGI
I'm heading off on a vacation for 4-5 days [with occasional email access] and will probably respond to this when i get back ... just wanted to let you know I'm not ignoring the question ;-) ben On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 1:26 PM, William Pearson wil.pear...@gmail.comwrote: 2008/12/30 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: It seems to come down to the simplicity measure... if you can have simplicity(Turing program P that generates lookup table T) simplicity(compressed lookup table T) then the Turing program P can be considered part of a scientific explanation... Can you clarify what type of language this is in? You mention L-expressions however that is not very clear what that means. lambda expressions I'm guessing. If you start with a language that has infinity built in to its fabric, TMs will be simple, however if you started with a language that only allowed FSM to be specified e.g. regular expressions, you wouldn't be able to simply specify TMs, as you need to represent an infinitely long tape in order to define a TM. Is this analogous to the argument at the end of section 3? It is that bit that is the least clear as far as I am concerned. Will --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Hypercomputation and AGI
Hi, I expanded a previous blog entry of mine on hypercomputation and AGI into a conference paper on the topic ... here is a rough draft, on which I'd appreciate commentary from anyone who's knowledgeable on the subject: http://goertzel.org/papers/CognitiveInformaticsHypercomputationPaper.pdf This is a theoretical rather than practical paper, although it does attempt to explore some of the practical implications as well -- e.g., in the hypothesis that intelligence does require hypercomputation, how might one go about creating AGI? I come to a somewhat surprising conclusion, which is that -- even if intelligence fundamentally requires hypercomputation -- it could still be possible to create an AI via making Turing computer programs ... it just wouldn't be possible to do this in a manner guided entirely by science; one would need to use some other sort of guidance too, such as chance, imitation or intuition... -- Ben G -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Hypercomputation and AGI
Well, some of the papers in the references of my paper give formal mathematical definitions of hypercomputation, though my paper is brief and conceptual and not of that nature. So although the generic concept may be muddled, there are certainly some fully precise variants of it. This paper surveys various formally defined varieties of hypercomputing, though I haven't read it closely.. http://www.amirrorclear.net/academic/papers/many-forms.pdf Anyway the argument in my paper is pretty strong and applies to any variant with power beyond that of ordinary Turing machines, it would seem... -- ben g On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 4:18 PM, J. Andrew Rogers and...@ceruleansystems.com wrote: On Dec 29, 2008, at 10:45 AM, Ben Goertzel wrote: I expanded a previous blog entry of mine on hypercomputation and AGI into a conference paper on the topic ... here is a rough draft, on which I'd appreciate commentary from anyone who's knowledgeable on the subject: http://goertzel.org/papers/CognitiveInformaticsHypercomputationPaper.pdf This is a theoretical rather than practical paper, although it does attempt to explore some of the practical implications as well -- e.g., in the hypothesis that intelligence does require hypercomputation, how might one go about creating AGI? I come to a somewhat surprising conclusion, which is that -- even if intelligence fundamentally requires hypercomputation -- it could still be possible to create an AI via making Turing computer programs ... it just wouldn't be possible to do this in a manner guided entirely by science; one would need to use some other sort of guidance too, such as chance, imitation or intuition... As more of a meta-comment, the whole notion of hypercomputation seems to be muddled, insofar as super-recursive algorithms may be a limited example of it. I was doing a lot of work with inductive Turing machines several years ago, and most of the differences seemed to be definitional e.g. what constitutes an algorithm or answer. For most practical purposes, the price of implementing them in conventional discrete space is the introduction of some (usually acceptable) error. But if they approximate to the point of functional convergence on a normal Turing machine... As best I have been able to tell, and I have not really been paying attention because the arguments seem to mostly be people talking past each other, is that ITMs raise some interesting philosophical questions regarding hypercomputation. We cannot implement a *strict* hypercomputer, but to what extent does it count if we can asymptotically converge on the functional consequences of a hypercomputer using a normal computer? It suspect it will be hard to evict the belief in Penrosian magic from the error bars in any case. Cheers, J. Andrew Rogers --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Universal intelligence test benchmark
Consciousness of X is: the idea or feeling that X is correlated with Consciousness of X ;-) ben g On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 4:23 PM, Matt Mahoney matmaho...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Mon, 12/29/08, John G. Rose johnr...@polyplexic.com wrote: What does consciousness have to do with the rest of your argument? Multi-agent systems should need individual consciousness to achieve advanced levels of collective intelligence. So if you are programming a multi-agent system, potentially a compressor, having consciousness in the agents could have an intelligence amplifying effect instead of having non-conscious agents. Or some sort of primitive consciousness component since higher level consciousness has not really been programmed yet. Agree? No. What do you mean by consciousness? Some people use consciousness and intelligence interchangeably. If that is the case, then you are just using a circular argument. If not, then what is the difference? -- Matt Mahoney, matmaho...@yahoo.com --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Real-world vs. universal prior (was Re: [agi] Universal intelligence test benchmark)
David, Good point... I'll revise the essay to account for it... The truth is, we just don't know -- but in taking the virtual world approach to AGI, we're very much **hoping** that a subset of human everyday physical reality is good enough. .. ben On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 6:46 AM, David Hart dh...@cogical.com wrote: On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: I wrote down my thoughts on this in a little more detail here (with some pastings from these emails plus some new info): http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/2008/12/subtle-structure-of-physical-world.html I really liked this essay. I'm curious about the clarity of terms 'real world' and 'physical world' in some places. It seems that, to make its point, the essay requires 'real world' and 'physical world' mean only 'practical' or 'familiar physical reality', depending on context. Whereas, if 'real world' is reserved for a very broad definition of realities including physical realities (including classical, quantum mechanical and relativistic time and distance scales), peculiar human cultural realities, and other definable realities, it will be easier in follow-up essays to discuss AGI systems that can natively think simultaneously about any multitude of interrelated realities (a trick that humans are really bad at). I hope this makes sense... -dave -- *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Real-world vs. universal prior (was Re: [agi] Universal intelligence test benchmark)
Dave -- See mildly revised version, where I replaced real world with everyday world (and defined the latter term explicitly), and added a final section relevant to the distinctions between the everyday world, simulated everyday worlds, and other portions of the physical world. http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/2008/12/subtle-structure-of-physical-world.html -- Ben On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 8:28 AM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: David, Good point... I'll revise the essay to account for it... The truth is, we just don't know -- but in taking the virtual world approach to AGI, we're very much **hoping** that a subset of human everyday physical reality is good enough. .. ben On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 6:46 AM, David Hart dh...@cogical.com wrote: On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: I wrote down my thoughts on this in a little more detail here (with some pastings from these emails plus some new info): http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/2008/12/subtle-structure-of-physical-world.html I really liked this essay. I'm curious about the clarity of terms 'real world' and 'physical world' in some places. It seems that, to make its point, the essay requires 'real world' and 'physical world' mean only 'practical' or 'familiar physical reality', depending on context. Whereas, if 'real world' is reserved for a very broad definition of realities including physical realities (including classical, quantum mechanical and relativistic time and distance scales), peculiar human cultural realities, and other definable realities, it will be easier in follow-up essays to discuss AGI systems that can natively think simultaneously about any multitude of interrelated realities (a trick that humans are really bad at). I hope this makes sense... -dave -- *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Real-world vs. universal prior (was Re: [agi] Universal intelligence test benchmark)
The question is how much detail about the world needs to be captured in a simulation in order to support humanlike cognitive development. As a single example, Piagetan conservation of volume experiments are often done with water, which would suggest you need to have fluid dynamics in your simulation to support that kind of experiment. But you don't necessarily, because you can do those same experiments with fairly large beads, via using Newtonian mechanics to simulate the rolling-around of the beads. So it's not clear whether fluidics is needed in the sim world to enable humanlike cognitive development, versus whether beads rolling around is good enough (at the moment I suspect the latter) As I'm planning to write a paper on this stuff, I don't want to diver time to writing a long email about it. As for which subset of a physical reality: my specific idea is to simulate a real-world preschool, with enough fidelity that AIs can carry out the same learning tasks that human kids carry out in a real preschool. On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 9:56 AM, Mike Tintner tint...@blueyonder.co.ukwrote: Ben: in taking the virtual world approach to AGI, we're very much **hoping** that a subset of human everyday physical reality is good enough. .. Ben, Which subset(s)? The idea that you can virtually recreate any part or processes of reality seems horribly flawed - and unexamined. Take the development of intelligence. You seem (from recent exchanges) to accept that there is very roughly some natural order to the development of intelligence. So for example, you can't learn about planets universes, if you haven't first learned about simple objects like stones and balls - nor about politics, governments and international relations if you haven't first learned about language, speech/conversation, emotions, other minds much more. Now we - science - have some ideas about this natural order - about how we have to develop from understanding simple to complex things. But overall our picture is pathetic and hugely gapped. For science to produce an extensive picture of development here would - at a guess - take at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions of scientists, and many thousands (or millions) of discoveries, and many changes of competing paradigms. What are the chances then of an individual like you, or team of individuals, being able to design a coherent, practical order of intellectual development for an artificial, virtual agent straight off in a few years ? The same applies to any part of reality. We - science - may have a detailed picture of how some pieces of objects, like stones and water, work. But again our overall ability to model how all those particles, atoms and molecules interrelate in any given object, and how the object as a whole behaves, is still very limited. We still have all kinds of gaps in our picture of water. Scientific models are always far from the real thing. Again, to come anywhere near completing those models will take new armies of scientists. What are the chances then of a few individuals being able to correctly model the behaviour of any objects in the real world on a flat screen? IOW the short cut you hope for is probably the longest way round you could possibly choose. Robotics - forgetting altogether about formally modelling the world - and just interacting with it directly, is actually shorter by far. So I doubt whether you have ever seriously examined how you would recreate a *particular* subset of reality.in any detail - as simple even, say, as a ball - as opposed to the general idea. Have you? [Nb We're talking here about composite models of objects - so it's easy enough to create a reasonable picture of a ball bouncing on a hard surface, but what happens when your agent sits on it, or rubs it on his shirt, or bounces it on water, or sand, or throws it at another ball in mid-air, or (as we've partly discussed) plays with it like an infant ?] -- *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Universal intelligence test benchmark
I'll try to answer this one... 1) In a nutshell, the algorithmic info. definition of intelligence is like this: Intelligence is the ability of a system to achieve a goal that is randomly selected from the space of all computable goals, according to some defined probability distribution on computable-goal space. 2) Of course, if one had a system that was highly intelligent according to the above definition, it would be a great compressor. 3) There are theorems stating that if you have a great compressor, then by wrapping a little code around it, you can get a system that will be highly intelligent according to the algorithmic info. definition. The catch is that this system (as constructed in the theorems) will use insanely, infeasibly much computational resource. What are the weaknesses of the approach: A) The real problem of AI is to make a system that can achieve complex goals using feasibly much computational resource. B) Workable strategies for achieving complex goals using feasibly much computational resource, may be highly dependent on the particular probability distribution over goal space mentioned in 1 above For this reason, I'm not sure the algorithmic info. approach is of much use for building real AGI systems. I note that Shane Legg is now directing his research toward designing practical AGI systems along totally different lines, not directly based any of the alg. info. stuff he worked on in his thesis. However, Marcus Hutter, Juergen Schmidhuber and others are working on methods of scaling down the approaches mentioned in 3 above (AIXItl, the Godel Machine, etc.) to as to yield feasible techniques. So far this has led to some nice machine learning algorithms (e.g. the parameter-free temporal difference reinforcement learning scheme in part of Legg's thesis, and Hutter's new work on Feature Bayesian Networks and so forth), but nothing particularly AGI-ish. But personally I wouldn't be harshly dismissive of this research direction, even though it's not the one I've chosen. -- Ben G On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 3:53 PM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.comwrote: Philip Hunt wrote: 2008/12/26 Matt Mahoney matmaho...@yahoo.com: I have updated my universal intelligence test with benchmarks on about 100 compression programs. Humans aren't particularly good at compressing data. Does this mean humans aren't intelligent, or is it a poor definition of intelligence? Although my goal was to sample a Solomonoff distribution to measure universal intelligence (as defined by Hutter and Legg), If I define intelligence as the ability to catch mice, does that mean my cat is more intelligent than most humans? More to the point, I don't understand the point of defining intelligence this way. Care to enlighten me? This may or may not help, but in the past I have pursued exactly these questions, only to get such confusing, evasive and circular answers, all of which amounted to nothing meaningful, that eventually I (like many others) have just had to give up and not engage any more. So, the real answers to your questions are that no, compression is an extremely poor definition of intelligence; and yes, defining intelligence to be something completely arbitrary (like the ability to catch mice) is what Hutter and Legg's analyses are all about. Searching for previous posts of mine which mention Hutter, Legg or AIXI will probably turn up a number of lengthy discussion in which I took a deal of trouble to debunk this stuff. Feel free, of course, to make your own attempt to extract some sense from it all, and by all means let me know if you eventually come to a different conclusion. Richard Loosemore --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Universal intelligence test benchmark
Most compression tests are like defining intelligence as the ability to catch mice. They measure the ability of compressors to compress specific files. This tends to lead to hacks that are tuned to the benchmarks. For the generic intelligence test, all you know about the source is that it has a Solomonoff distribution (for a particular machine). I don't know how you could make the test any more generic. IMO the test is *too* generic ... I don't think real-world AGI is mainly about being able to recognize totally general patterns in totally general datasets. I suspect that to do that, the best approach is ultimately going to be some AIXItl variant ... meaning it's a problem that's not really solvable using a real-world amount of resources. I suspect that all the AGI system one can really build are SO BAD at this general problem, that it's better to characterize AGI systems -- NOT in terms of how well they do at this general problem but rather -- in terms of what classes of datasets/environments they are REALLY GOOD at recognizing patterns in I think the environments existing in the real physical and social world are drawn from a pretty specific probability distribution (compared to say, the universal prior), and that for this reason, looking at problems of compression or pattern recognition across general program spaces without real-world-oriented biases, is not going to lead to real-world AGI. The important parts of AGI design are the ones that (directly or indirectly) reflect the specific distribution of problems that the reeal world presents an AGI system. And this distribution is **really hard** to encapsulate in a text compression database. Because, we don't know what this distribution is. And this is why we should be working on AGI systems that interact with the real physical and social world, or the most accurate simulations of it we can build. -- Ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Real-world vs. universal prior (was Re: [agi] Universal intelligence test benchmark)
Suppose I take the universal prior and condition it on some real-world training data. For example, if you're interested in real-world vision, take 1000 frames of real video, and then the proposed probability distribution is the portion of the universal prior that explains the real video. (I can mathematically define this if there is interest, but I'm guessing the other people here can too, so maybe we can skip that. Speak up if I'm being too unclear.) Do you think the result is different in an important way from the real-world probability distribution you're looking for? -- Tim Freeman http://www.fungible.com t...@fungible.com No, I think that in principle that's the right approach ... but that simple, artificial exercises like conditioning data on photos don't come close to capturing the richness of statistical structure in the physical universe ... or in the subsets of the physical universe that humans typically deal with... ben --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Introducing Steve's Theory of Everything in cognition.
Much of AI and pretty much all of AGI is built on the proposition that we humans must code knowledge because the stupid machines can't efficiently learn it on their own, in short, that UNsupervised learning is difficult. No, in fact almost **no** AGI is based on this proposition. Cyc is based strictly on this proposition ... some other GOFAI-ish systems like SOAR are based on weaker forms of this proposition ... but this is really a minority view in the AGI world, and a view taken by very few designs created in the last decade ... sociologically, it seems to be a view that peaked in the 70's and 80's... -- Ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
--- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
I mentioned it because looked at the book again recently and was pleasantly surprised at how well his ideas seemed to have held up In other words, although there are point on which I think he's probably wrong, his decade-old ideas *still* seem more sensible and insightful than most of the theoretical speculations one reads in the neuroscience literature... and I can't really think of any recent neuroscience data that refutes any of his key hypotheses... On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 10:36 AM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.comwrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: Richard, I'm curious what you think of William Calvin's neuroscience hypotheses as presented in e.g. The Cerebral Code That book is a bit out of date now, but still, he took complexity and nonlinear dynamics quite seriously, so it seems to me there may be some resonance between his ideas and your own I find his speculative ideas more agreeable than Tononi's, myself... thx ben g Yes, I did read his book (or part of it) back in 98/99, but From what I remember, I found resonance, as you say, but he is one of those people who is struggling to find a way to turn an intuition into something concrete. It is just that he wrote a book about it before he got to Concrete Operations. It would be interesting to take a look at it again, 10 years later, and see whether my opinion has changed. To put this in context, I felt like I was looking at a copy of myself back in 1982, when I struggled to write down my intuitions as a physicist coming to terms with psychology for the first time. I am now acutely embarrassed by the naivete of that first attempt, but in spite of the embarrassment I know that I have since turned those intuitions into something meaningful, and I know that in spite of my original hubris, I was on a path to something that actually did make sense. To cognitive scientists at the time it looked awful, unmotivated and disconnected from reality (by itself, it was!), but in the end it was not trash because it had real substance buried inside it. With people like Calvin (and others) I see writings that look somewhat speculative and ungrounded, just like my early attempts, so I am mixed between a desire to be lenient (because I was that like that once) and a feeling that they really need to be aware that their thoughts are still ungelled. Anyhow, that's my quick thoughts on him. I'll see if I can dig out his book at some point. Richard Loosemore On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 9:53 AM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.commailto: r...@lightlink.com wrote: Ed Porter wrote: Richard, Please describe some of the counterexamples, that you can easily come up with, that make a mockery of Tononi's conclusion. Ed Porter Alas, I will have to disappoint. I put a lot of effort into understanding his paper first time around, but the sheer agony of reading (/listening to) his confused, shambling train of thought, the non-sequiteurs, and the pages of irrelevant math that I do not need to experience a second time. All of my original effort only resulted in the discovery that I had wasted my time, so I have no interest in wasting more of my time. With other papers that contain more coherent substance, but perhaps what looks like an error, I would make the effort. But not this one. It will have to be left as an exercise for the reader, I'm afraid. Richard Loosemore P.S. A hint. All I remember was that he started talking about multiple regions (columns?) of the brain exchanging information with one another in a particular way, and then he asserted a conclusion which, on quick reflection, I knew would not be true of a system resembling the distributed one that I described in my consciousness paper (the molecular model). Knowing that his conclusion was flat-out untrue for that one case, and for a whole class of similar systems, his argument was toast. -Original Message- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:r...@lightlink.com mailto:r...@lightlink.com] Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 8:54 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com mailto:agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke was Building a machine that can learn from experience Ed Porter wrote: I don't think this AGI list should be so quick to dismiss a $4.9 million dollar grant to create an AGI. It will not necessarily be vaporware. I think we should view it as a good sign. Even if it is for a project that runs the risk, like many DARPA projects (like most scientific funding in general) of not necessarily placing its money where it might do the most good --- it is likely to at least produce some interesting
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
claim the human brain is an eternal verity, since it is only believed that it has existing in anything close to its current form in the last 30 to 100 thousand years, and there is no guarantee how much longer it will continue to exists. Compared to much of what the natural sciences study, its existence appears quite fleeting. I think this is just a terminology issue. The 'laws of nature' are the eternal verity, to me. The dynamical output they represent - of course that does whatever it does. The universe is an intrinsically dynamic entity at all levels. Even the persistent expression of total randomness is an 'eternal verity'. No real issue here. ===Colin said== Anyway, for these reasons, folks who use computer models to study human brains/consciousness will encounter some difficulty justifying, to the basic physical sciences, claims made as to the equivalence of the model and reality. That difficulty is fundamental and cannot be 'believed away'. ===ED's reply=== If you attend brain science lectures and read brain science literature, you will find that computer modeling is playing an ever increasing role in brain science --- so this basic difficulty that you describe largely does not exist. I think you've missed the actual point at hand for the reasons detailed * HERE*. ===Colin said== The intelligence originates in the brain. AGI and brain science must be literally joined at the hip or the AGI enterprise is arguably scientifically impoverished wishful thinking. ===ED's reply=== I don't know what you mean by joined at the hip, but I think it is being overly anthropomorphic to think an artificial mind has to slavishly model a human brain to have great power and worth. But I do think it would probably have to accomplish some of the same general functions, such as automatic pattern learning, credit assignment, attention control, etc. Ed Porter We are all enthusiastically intent on creating artificial entities with some kind of usefulness (=great power and worth). However, AGI is Artificial *General* Intelligence, seeks to create power and worth through a claim that '*general intelligence*' has been delivered. This is not merely the same general functions; it is actual general intelligence. The statement A *model* of general intelligence is oxymoronic. If you can deliver general intelligence then you are not delivering a model of it, you are delivering *actual* general intelligence. To use models as a basis for it you need to have a scientific basis for a claim that the models that have been used to implement the AGI can (in theory) deliver identical behaviour = general intelligence. Models of a human brain could be involved. Models of outward human behaviour could be involved. ... in any case - Each AGI-er needs to have a cogent, scientifically based claim in respect of the models as deliverers of the claimed outcomes - or the beliefs underlying the AGI-er's approach have a critical weakness in the eyes of science. I don't think there's any real issue here. Mostly semantics being mixed a bit. Gotta get back to xmas! Yuletide stuff to you. Colin -- *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Relevance of SE in AGI
Well, we have attempted to use sound software engineering principles to architect the OpenCog framework, with a view toward making it usable for prototyping speculative AI ideas and ultimately building scalable, robust, mature AGI systems as well But, we are fairly confident of our overall architecture with this system because there have been a number of predecessor systems based on similar principles, which we implemented and learned a lot from ... If one has a new AGI idea and wants to start experimenting with it, SE is basically a secondary matter ... the point is to explore the algorithms and ideas by whatever means is less time-wasting and frustrating... OTOH, if one has an AGI idea that's already been fleshed out a fair bit and one is ready to try to use it as the basis for a scalable, extensible system, SE is more worth paying attention to... Premature attention to engineering when one should be focusing on science is a risk, but so is ignoring engineering when one wants to build a scalable, extensible system... ben g On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.comwrote: Valentina Poletti wrote: I have a question for you AGIers.. from your experience as well as from your background, how relevant do you think software engineering is in developing AI software and, in particular AGI software? Just wondering.. does software verification as well as correctness proving serve any use in this field? Or is this something used just for Nasa and critical applications? 1) Software engineering (if we take that to mean the conventional repertoire of techniques taught as SE) is relevant to any project that gets up above a certain size, but it is less important when the project is much smaller, serves a more exploratory function, or where the design is constantly changing. To this extent I agree with Pei's comments. 2) If you are looking beyond the idea of simply grabbing some SE techniques off the shelf, and are instead asking if SE can have an impact on AGI, then the answer is a dramatic Yes!. Why? Because tools determine the way that we *can* think about things. Tools shape our thoughts. They can sometimes enable us to think in new ways that were simply not possible before the tools were invented. I decided a long time ago that if cognitive scientists had easy-to-use use tools that enabled them to construct realistic components of thinking systems, their entire style of explanation would be revolutionized. Right now, cog sci people cannot afford the time to be both cog sci experts *and* sophisticated software developers, so they have to make do with programming that is, by and large, trivially simple. This determines the kinds of models and explanations they can come up with. (Ditto in spades for the neuroscientists, by the way). So, the more global answer to your question is that nothing could be more important for AGI than software engineering. The problem is, that the kind of software engineering we are talking about is not a matter of grabbing SE components off the shelf, but asking what the needs of cognitive scientists and AGIers might be, and then inventing new techniques and tools that will give these people the ability to think about intelligent systems in new ways. That is why I am working on Safaire. Richard Loosemore --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
Hi, So if the researcher on this project have been learning some of your ideas, and some of the better speculative thinking and neural simulations that have been done in brains science --- either directly or indirectly --- it might be incorrect to say that there is no 'design for a thinking machine' in SyNAPSE. But perhaps you know the thinking of the researchers involved enough to know that they do, in fact, lack such a design, other than what they have yet to learn by progress yet to be made by their neural simulations. Well I talked to Dharmendra on this topic a couple months ago. Believe me, there is no grand AI architecture there. You won't find one in their publications, and they don't allude to one in their conversations. You'd have to be a heck of a conspiracy theorist to posit one... I agree that one could make a neural-net-like design based on the underlying conceptual principles of OpenCogPrime, and if I had a lot more free time maybe I'd do it, but I'm more interested in putting my time into the current design which IMO is better adapted to current computers. I have a feeling the neuroscientists have a lot of surprises for us coming up in the next 2 decades, so that it's premature to base AI designs on neuroscience knowledge... ANYWAY, I THINK WE SHOULD, AT LEAST, INVITE THEM TO AGI 2009. I though one of the goal of AGI 2009 it to increase the attention and respect our movement receives from the AI community in general and AI funders in particular. Please note that the AI community and the artificial brain / brain simulation community are rather separate at this point (though not entirely so). We will have a number of recognized leaders from the AI field at AGI-09, such as (to pick a few almost at random) John Laird, Marcus Hutter and Juergen Schmidhuber However, in spite of emailing and talking to some relevant folks, I didn't seem to succeed in pulling brain simulation folks into AGI-09, at least they didn't submit papers for presentation... Perhaps for AGI-10 or 11 some different strategy will need to be taken if we wish to help pull these communities together. For instance, convince *one* leader in that area to take charge of pulling his colleagues into a special session on computational neuroscience modeling etc. At the AAAI BICA symposium Alexei Samsonovich organized last month, a couple neuroscience simulation guys (Steve Grossberg for example) showed up alongside the AI guys ... probably because biology was in the title ;-) ... but still it was strongly AI-focused rather than brain-simulation focused. -- Ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:05 AM, Ed Porter ewpor...@msn.com wrote: Ben, Thanks for the reply. It is a shame the brain science people aren't more interested in AGI. It seems to me there is a lot of potential for cross-fertilization. I don't think many of these folks have a principled or deep-seated **aversion** to AGI work or anything like that -- it's just that they're busy people and need to prioritize, like all working scientists Similarly, not many AGI types show up at computational neuroscience modeling type conferences To create connections between fields there has to be some strong indication of real value offered by one field to the other ... and preferably mutual value... But of course, the catch is that this value will only be demonstrated once the researchers in the different fields actually start coming together more I was involved w/ trying to build these kinds of links in the late 90s when I co-founded two cross-disciplinary university cog sci degree programs. It's hard because different people from different fields speak different languages and have different ideas of what constitutes successful or interesting research. The problem of bringing together AI and neuroscience and psychology was *partially* solved back when by the creation of cog sci as a discipline ... but obviously the solution was only partial because cog sci to a disturbing degree got sucked into cog psych, and now someone needs to work again to pull AGI and brain-sim work together. Obviously, there's only so much one maverick outsider researcher like me can do to help nudge these two research communities together, but I'll do what I can via the AGI conferences, anyways ben g --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
and reality. That difficulty is fundamental and cannot be 'believed away'. At the same time it's not a show-stopper; merely something to be aware of as we go about our duties. This will remain an issue - the only real, certain, known example of a general intelligence is the human. The intelligence originates in the brain. AGI and brain science must be literally joined at the hip or the AGI enterprise is arguably scientifically impoverished wishful thinking. Which is pretty much what Ben said...although as usual I have used too many damned words! I expect we'll just have to agree to disagree... but there you have it :-) colin hales (1) Edelman, G. (2003). Naturalizing consciousness: A theoretical framework. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 100(9), 5520–24. Ed Porter wrote: Colin, From a quick read, the gist of what your are saying seems to be that AGI is just engineering, i.e., the study of what man can make and the properties thereof, whereas science relates to the eternal verities of reality. But the brain is not part of an eternal verity. It is the result of the engineering of evolution. At the other end of things, physicists are increasingly viewing physical reality as a computation, and thus the science of computation (and communication which is a part of it), such as information theory, have begun to play an increasingly important role in the most basic of all sciences. And to the extent that the study of the human mind is a science, then the study of the types of computation that are done in the mind is part of that science, and AGI is the study of many of the same functions. So your post might explain the reason for a current cultural divide, but it does not really provide a justification for it. In addition, if you attend events at either MIT's brain study center or its AI center, you will find many of the people who are there are from the other of these two centers, and that there is a considerable degree of cross-fertilization there that I have heard people at such event describe the benefits of. Ed Porter -Original Message- *From:* Colin Hales [mailto:c.ha...@pgrad.unimelb.edu.auc.ha...@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au] *Sent:* Monday, December 22, 2008 6:19 PM *To:* agi@v2.listbox.com *Subject:* Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke was Building a machine that can learn from experience Ben Goertzel wrote: On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 11:05 AM, Ed Porter ewpor...@msn.com wrote: Ben, Thanks for the reply. It is a shame the brain science people aren't more interested in AGI. It seems to me there is a lot of potential for cross-fertilization. I don't think many of these folks have a principled or deep-seated **aversion** to AGI work or anything like that -- it's just that they're busy people and need to prioritize, like all working scientists There's a more fundamental reason: Software engineering is not 'science' in the sense understood in the basic physical sciences. Science works to acquire models of empirically provable critical dependencies (apparent causal necessities). Software engineering never delivers this. The result of the work, however interesting and powerful, is a model that is, at best, merely a correlate of some a-priori 'designed' behaviour. Testing to your own specification is a normal behaviour in computer science. This is *not*the testing done in the basic physical science - they 'test' (empirically examine) whatever is naturally there - which is, by definition, a-priori unknown. No matter how interesting it may be, software tells us nothing about the actual causal dependencies. The computer's physical hardware (semiconductor charge manipulation), configured as per the software, is the actual and ultimate causal necessitator of all the natural behaviour of hot rocks inside your computer. Software is MANY:1 redundantly/degenerately related to the physical (natural world) outcomes. The brilliantly useful 'hardware-independence' achieved by software engineering and essentially analogue electrical machines behaving 'as-if' they were digital - so powerful and elegant - actually places the status of the software activities outside the realm of any claims as causal. This is the fundamental problem that the basic physical sciences have with computer 'science'. It's not, in a formal sense a 'science'. That doesn't mean CS is bad or irrelevant - it just means that it's value as a revealer of the properties of the natural world must be accepted with appropriate caution. I've spent 10's of thousands of hours testing software that drove all manner of physical world equipment - some of it the size of a 10 storey building. I was testing to my own/others specification. Throughout all of it I knew I was not doing science in the sense that scientists know it to be. The mantra is correlation is not causation and it's beaten into scientist pups from an early age
Re: [agi] SyNAPSE might not be a joke ---- was ---- Building a machine that can learn from experience
should invite people like Edelman, Tononi, and Dharmendra Modha to AGI 2009. The more we act interested and respectful of them, the more likely we are to get respect back from them and from their funders. Ed Porter -Original Message- From: YKY (Yan King Yin) [mailto:generic.intellige...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 12:31 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] Building a machine that can learn from experience DARPA buys G.Tononi for 4.9 $Million! For what amounts to little more than vague hopes that any of us here could have dreamed up. Here I am, up to my armpits in an actual working proposition with a real science basis... scrounging for pennies. hmmm...maybe if I sidle up and adopt an aging Nobel prizewinner...maybe that'll do it. nah. too cynical for the festive season. There's always 2009! You never know You talked about building your 'chips'. Just curious what are you working on? Is it hardware-related? YKY --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 8:01 AM, Derek Zahn derekz...@msn.com wrote: Ben: Right. My intuition is that we don't need to simulate the dynamics of fluids, powders and the like in our virtual world to make it adequate for teaching AGIs humanlike, human-level AGI. But this could be wrong. I suppose it depends on what kids actually learn when making cakes, skipping rocks, and making a mess with play-dough. Some might say that if they get conservation of mass and newton's law then they skipped all the useless stuff! OK, but those some probably don't include any preschool teachers or educational theorists. That hypothesis is completely at odds with my own intuition from having raised 3 kids and spent probably hundreds of hours helping out in daycare centers, preschools, kindergartens, etc. Apart from naive physics, which is rather well-demonstrated not to be derived in the human mind/brain from basic physical principles, there is a lot of learning about planning, scheduling, building, cooperating ... basically, all the stuff mentioned in our AGI Preschool paper. Yes, you can just take a robo-Cyc type approach and try to abstract, on your own, what is learned from preschool activities and code it into the AI: code in Newton's laws, axiomatic naive physics, planning algorithms, etc. My strong prediction is you'll get a brittle AI system that can at best be tuned into adequate functionality in some rather narrow contexts. But in the case where we are trying to roughly follow stages of human development with goals of producing human-like linguistic and reasoning capabilities, I very much fear that any significant simplification of the universe will provide an insufficient basis for the large sensory concept set underlying language and analogical reasoning (both gross and fine). Literally, I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But, as you say, this could be wrong. Sure... that can't be disproven right now, of course. We plan to expand the paper into a journal paper where we argue against this obvious objection more carefully -- basically arguing why the virtual-world setting provides enough detail to support the learning of the critical cognitive subcomponents of human intelligence. But, as with anything in AGI, even the best-reasoned paper can't convince a skeptic. It's really the only critique I have of the AGI preschool idea, which I do like because we can all relate to it very easily. At any rate, if it turns out to be a valid criticism the symptom will be that an insufficiently rich set of concepts will develop to support the range of capabilities needed and at that point the simulations can be adjusted to be more complete and realistic and provide more human sensory modalities. I guess it will be disappointing if building an adequate virtual world turns out to be as difficult and expensive as building high quality robots -- but at least it's easier to clean up after cake-baking. Well, it's completely obvious to me, based on my knowledge of virtual worlds and robotics, that building a high quality virtual world is orders of magnitude easier than making a workable humanoid robot. *So* much $$ has been spent on humanoid robotics before, by large, rich and competent companies, and they still suck.It's just a very hard problem, with a lot of very hard subproblems, and it will take a while to get worked through. On the other hand, making a virtual world such as I envision, is more than a spare-time project, but not more than the project of making a single high-quality video game. It's something that any one of these big Japanese companies could do with a tiny fraction of their robotics budgets. The issue is a lack of perceived cool value and a lack of motivation. Ben --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
It's an interesting idea, but I suspect it too will rapidly break down. Which activities can be known about in a rich, better-than-blind-Cyc way *without* a knowledge of objects and object manipulation? How can an agent know about reading a book,for example, if it can't pick up and manipulate a book? How can it know about adding and subtracting, if it can't literally put objects on top of each other, and remove them? We humans build up our knowledge of the world objects/physics up from infancy. Science also insists that all formal scientific knowledge of the world - all scientific disciplines - must be ultimately physics/objects-based. Is there really an alternative? And just to be clear: in the AGI Preschool world I envision, picking up and manipulating and stacking objects, and so forth, *would* be possible. This much is not hard to achieve using current robot-simulator tech. ben --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
I agree, but the good news is that game dev advances fast. So, my plan with the AGI Preschool would be to build it in an open platform such as OpenSim, and then swap in better and better physics engines as they become available. Some current robot simulators use ODE and this seems to be good enough to handle a lot of useful robot-object and object-object interactions, though I agree it's limited. Still, making a dramatically better physics engine -- while a bunch harder than making a nice AGI preschool using current virtual worlds and physics engines -- is still a way, way easier problem than making a highly functional (in terms of sensors and actuators) humanoid robot. Also, the advantages of working in a virtual rather than physical world should not be overlooked. The ability to run tests over and over again, to freely vary parameters and so forth, is pretty nice ... also the ability to run 1000s of tests in parallel without paying humongous bucks for a fleet of robots... ben On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Derek Zahn derekz...@msn.com wrote: Oh, and because I am interested in the potential of high-fidelity physical simulation as a basis for AI research, I did spend some time recently looking into options. Unfortunately the results, from my perspective, were disappointing. The common open-source physics libraries like ODE, Newton, and so on, have marginal feature sets and frankly cannot scale very well performance-wise. Once I even did a little application whose purpose was to see whether a human being could learn to control an ankle joint to compensate for an impulse event and stabilize a simple body model (that is, to make it not fall over) by applying torques to the ankle. I was curious to see (through introspection) how humans learn to act as process controllers. http://happyrobots.com/anklegame.zip for anybody bored enough to care. It wasn't a very good test of the question so I didn't really get a satisfactory answer. I did discover, though, that a game built around more appealing cases of the player learning to control physics-inspired processes could be quite absorbing. Beyond that, the most promising avenue seems to be physics libraries tied to graphics hardware being worked on by the hardware companies to help sell their stream processors. The best example is Nvidia, who bought PhysX and ported it to their latest cards, giving a huge performance boost. Intel has bought Havok and I can only imagine that they are planning on using that as the interface to some Larrabee-based physics engine. I'm sure that ATI is working on something similar for their newer (very impressive) stream processing cards. At this stage, though, despite some interesting features and leaping performance, it is still not possible to do things like get realistic sensor maps for a simulated soft hand/arm, and complex object modifications like bending and breaking are barely dreamed of in those frameworks. Complex multi-body interactions (like realistic behavior when dropping or otherwise playing with a ring of keys or realistic baby toys) have a long ways to go. Basically, I fear those of us who are interested in this are just waiting to ride the game development coattails and it will be a few years at least until performance that even begins to interest me will be available. Just my opinions on the situation. -- *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 10:44 AM, Philip Hunt cabala...@googlemail.comwrote: 2008/12/20 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: Well, it's completely obvious to me, based on my knowledge of virtual worlds and robotics, that building a high quality virtual world is orders of magnitude easier than making a workable humanoid robot. I guess that depends on what you mean by high quality and workable. Why does a robot have to be humanoid, BTW? I'd like a robot that can make me a cup of tea, I don't particularly care if it looks humanoid (in fact I suspect many humans would have less emotional resistance to a robot that didn't look humanoid, since it's more obviously a machine). It doesn't have to be humanoid ... but apart from rolling instead of walking, I don't see any really significant simplifications obtainable from making it non-humanoid. Grasping and manipulating general objects with robot manipulators is very much an unsolved research problem. So is object recognition in realistic conditions. So, to make an AGI robot preschool, one has to solve these hard research problems first. That is a viable way to go if one's not in a hurry -- but anyway in the robotics context any talk of preschools is drastically premature... On the other hand, making a virtual world such as I envision, is more than a spare-time project, but not more than the project of making a single high-quality video game. GTA IV cost $5 million, so we're not talking about peanuts here. Right, but that is way cheaper than making a high-quality humanoid robot Actually, $$ aside, we don't even **know how** to make a decent humanoid robot. Or, a decently functional mobile robot **of any kind** Whereas making a software based AGI Preschool of the type I described is clearly feasible using current technology, w/o any research breakthroughs And I'm sure it could be done for $300K not $5M using OSS and non-US outsourced labor... ben g --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
Well, there is massively more $$ going into robotics dev than into AGI dev, and no one seems remotely near to solving the hard problems Which is not to say it's a bad area of research, just that it's a whole other huge confusing RD can of worms So I still say, the choices are -- virtual embodiment, as I advocate -- delay working on AGI for a decade or so, and work on robotics now instead (where by robotics I include software work on low-level sensing and actuator control) Either choice makes sense but I prefer the former as I think it can get us to the end goal faster. About the adequacy of current robot hardware -- I'll tell you more in 9 months or so ... a project I'm collaborating on is going to be using AI (including OpenCog) to control a Nao humanoid robot. We'll have 3 of them, they cost about US$14K each or so. The project is in China but I'll be there in June-July to play with the Naos and otherwise collaborate on the project. My impression is that with a Nao right now, camera-eye sensing is fine so long as lighting conditions are good ... audition is OK in the absence of masses of background noise ... walking is very awkward and grasping is possible but limited The extent to which the limitations of current robots are hardware vs software based is rather subtle, actually. In the case of vision and audition, it seems clear that the bottleneck is software. But, with actuation, I'm not so sure. The almost total absence of touch and kinesthetics in current robots is a huge impediment, and puts them at a huge disadvantage relative to humans. Things like walking and grasping as humans do them rely extremely heavily on both of these senses, so in trying to deal with this stuff without these senses (in any serious form), current robots face a hard and odd problem... ben On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 11:42 AM, Philip Hunt cabala...@googlemail.comwrote: 2008/12/20 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: It doesn't have to be humanoid ... but apart from rolling instead of walking, I don't see any really significant simplifications obtainable from making it non-humanoid. I can think of several. For example, you could give it lidar to measure distances with -- this could then be used as input to its vision system making it easier for the robot to tell which objects are near or far. Instead of binocular vision, it could have 2 video cameras. It could have multiple ears, which would help it tell where a sound is coming from. The the best of my knowledge, no robot that's ever been used for anything practical has ever been humanoid. Grasping and manipulating general objects with robot manipulators is very much an unsolved research problem. So is object recognition in realistic conditions. What sort of visual input do you plan to have in your virtual environment? So, to make an AGI robot preschool, one has to solve these hard research problems first. That is a viable way to go if one's not in a hurry -- but anyway in the robotics context any talk of preschools is drastically premature... On the other hand, making a virtual world such as I envision, is more than a spare-time project, but not more than the project of making a single high-quality video game. GTA IV cost $5 million, so we're not talking about peanuts here. Right, but that is way cheaper than making a high-quality humanoid robot Is it? I suspect one with tracks, two robotic arms, various sensors for light and sound, etc, could be made for less than $10,000 -- this would be something that could move around and manipulate a blocks world. My understanding is that all, or nearly all, the difficulty comes in programming it. Which is where AI comes in. Actually, $$ aside, we don't even **know how** to make a decent humanoid robot. Or, a decently functional mobile robot **of any kind** Is that because of hardware or software issues? -- Philip Hunt, cabala...@googlemail.com Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
Consider an object, such as a sock or a book or a cat. These objects can all be recognised by young children, even though the visual input coming from trhem chasnges from what angle they're viewed at. More fundamentally, all these objects can change shape, yet humans can still effortlessly recognise them to be the same thing. And this ability doesn't stop with humans -- most (if not all) mammalian species can do it. Until an AI can do this, there's no point in trying to get it to play at making cakes, etc. Well, it seems to me that current virtual worlds are just fine for exploring this kind of vision processing However, I have long been perplexed at the obsession with so many AI folks with vision processing. I mean: yeah, it's important to human intelligence, and some aspects of human cognition are related to human visual perception But, it's not obvious to me why so many folks think vision is so critical to AI, whereas other aspects of human body function are not. For instance, the yogic tradition and related Eastern ideas would suggest that *breathing* and *kinesthesia* are the critical aspects of mind. Together with touch, kinesthesia is what lets a mind establish a sense of self, and of the relation between self and world. In that sense kinesthesia and touch are vastly more fundamental to mind than vision. It seems to me that a mind without vision could still be a basically humanlike mind. Yet, a mind without touch and kinesthesia could not, it would seem, because it would lack a humanlike sense of its own self as a complex dynamic system embedded in a world. Why then is there constant talk about vision processing and so little talk about kinesthetic and tactile processing? Personally I don't think one needs to get into any of this sensorimotor stuff too deeply to make a thinking machine. But, if you ARE going to argue that sensorimotor aspects are critcial to humanlike AI because they're critical to human intelligence, why harp on vision to the exclusion of other things that seem clearly far more fundamental?? Is the reason just that AI researchers spend all day staring at screens and ignoring their physical bodies and surroundings?? ;-) ben g --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Creativity and Rationality (was: Re: Should I get a PhD?)
IMHO, Mike Tintner is not often rude, and is not exactly a troll because I feel he is genuinely trying to understand the deeper issues related to AGI, rather than mainly trying to stir up trouble or cause irritation However, I find conversing with him generally frustrating because he combines A) extremely strong intuitive opinions about AGI topics with B) almost utter ignorance of the details of AGI (or standard AI), or the background knowledge needed to appreciate these details when compactly communicated This means that discussions with Mike never seem to get anywhere... and, frankly, I usually regret getting into them I would find it more rewarding by far to engage in discussion with someone who had Mike's same philosophy and ideas (which I disagree strongly with), but had enough technical background to actually debate the details of AGI in a meaningful way For example, Selmer Bringjord (an AI expert, not on this list) seems to share a fair number of Mike's ideas, but discussions with him are less frustrating because rather than wasting time on misunderstandings, basics and terminology, one cuts VERY QUICKLY to the deep points of conceptual disagreement ben g On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:19 PM, Pei Wang mail.peiw...@gmail.com wrote: BillK, Thanks for the reminder. I didn't reply to him, but still got involved. :-( I certainty don't want to encourage bad behaviors in this mailing list. Here bad behaviors are not in the conclusions or arguments, but in the way they are presented, as well as in the politeness/rudeness toward other people. Pei On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 11:38 AM, BillK pha...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 3:55 PM, Mike Tintner wrote: (On the contrary, Pei, you can't get more narrow-minded than rational thinking. That's its strength and its weakness). Pei In case you haven't noticed, you won't gain anything from trying to engage with the troll. Mike does not discuss anything. He states his opinions in many different ways, pretending to respond to those that waste their time talking to him. But no matter what points are raised in discussion with him, they will only be used as an excuse to produce yet another variation of his unchanged opinions. He doesn't have any technical programming or AI background, so he can't understand that type of argument. He is against the whole basis of AGI research. He believes that rationality is a dead end, a dying culture, so deep-down, rational arguments mean little to him. Don't feed the troll! (Unless you really, really, think he might say something useful to you instead of just wasting your time). BillK --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Creativity and Rationality (was: Re: Should I get a PhD?)
yeah ... that's not a matter of the English language but rather a matter of the American Way ;-p Through working with many non-Americans I have noted that what Americans often intend as a playful obnoxiousness is interpreted by non-Americans more seriously... I think we had some mutual colleagues in the past who favored such a style of discourse ;-) ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:49 PM, Pei Wang mail.peiw...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: IMHO, Mike Tintner is not often rude, and is not exactly a troll because I feel he is genuinely trying to understand the deeper issues related to AGI, rather than mainly trying to stir up trouble or cause irritation Well, I guess my English is not good enough to tell the subtle difference in tones, but his comments often sound that You AGIers are so obviously wrong that I don't even bother to understand what you are saying ... Now let me tell you I don't enjoy this tone. Pei However, I find conversing with him generally frustrating because he combines A) extremely strong intuitive opinions about AGI topics with B) almost utter ignorance of the details of AGI (or standard AI), or the background knowledge needed to appreciate these details when compactly communicated This means that discussions with Mike never seem to get anywhere... and, frankly, I usually regret getting into them I would find it more rewarding by far to engage in discussion with someone who had Mike's same philosophy and ideas (which I disagree strongly with), but had enough technical background to actually debate the details of AGI in a meaningful way For example, Selmer Bringjord (an AI expert, not on this list) seems to share a fair number of Mike's ideas, but discussions with him are less frustrating because rather than wasting time on misunderstandings, basics and terminology, one cuts VERY QUICKLY to the deep points of conceptual disagreement ben g On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:19 PM, Pei Wang mail.peiw...@gmail.com wrote: BillK, Thanks for the reminder. I didn't reply to him, but still got involved. :-( I certainty don't want to encourage bad behaviors in this mailing list. Here bad behaviors are not in the conclusions or arguments, but in the way they are presented, as well as in the politeness/rudeness toward other people. Pei On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 11:38 AM, BillK pha...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 3:55 PM, Mike Tintner wrote: (On the contrary, Pei, you can't get more narrow-minded than rational thinking. That's its strength and its weakness). Pei In case you haven't noticed, you won't gain anything from trying to engage with the troll. Mike does not discuss anything. He states his opinions in many different ways, pretending to respond to those that waste their time talking to him. But no matter what points are raised in discussion with him, they will only be used as an excuse to produce yet another variation of his unchanged opinions. He doesn't have any technical programming or AI background, so he can't understand that type of argument. He is against the whole basis of AGI research. He believes that rationality is a dead end, a dying culture, so deep-down, rational arguments mean little to him. Don't feed the troll! (Unless you really, really, think he might say something useful to you instead of just wasting your time). BillK --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https
Re: [agi] Creativity and Rationality (was: Re: Should I get a PhD?)
In my opinion you are being too generous and your generosity is being taken advantage of. That is quite possible; it's certainly happened before... As well as trying to be nice to Mike, you have to bear list quality in mind and decide whether his ramblings are of some benefit to all the other list members. Well I decided not to make this a moderated list, and to be extremely reluctant about banning people The only ban I've instituted so far was against someone who was persistently making personal anti-Semitic attacks against other list members, a couple years back... I have sniped off-topic threads a handful of times, but by and large I guess I've decided to leave this list a free for all ... Later this year I'll likely be involved with the launch of a forum site oriented toward more structured AGI discussions... ben --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
A paper by Stephan Bugaj and I that will appear in the AGI-09 proceedings and get presented at the conference. http://www.opencog.org/wiki/Image:Preschool.pdf I'll also be giving a couple technical papers together w/ other colleagues, but this one focuses on how to evaluate AGIs and so may be of interest for discussion... Simple stuff, really; but still, the sort of thing that not enough attention has been paid to What I'd like to see is a really nicely implemented virtual world preschool for AIs ... though of course building such a thing will be a lot of work for someone... ben -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Building a machine that can learn from experience
Colin, It is of course possible that human intelligence relies upon electromagnetic-field sensing that goes beyond the traditional five senses. However, this argument Functionally, the key behaviour I use to test my approach is scientific behaviour. If you sacrifice the full EM field, an AGI would provably be unable to enact scientific behaviour because the AGI brain dynamics would be forced to operate *without the dynamics of the EM field*, which is literally connected to the distal natural world (forming a new I/O stream). The link to the distal natural world is critically involved in 'scientific observation'. You can't simulate it because it's what you are actually there to gain access to. A scientist does not already know what it 'out there' - an AGI scientist needs what human scientist has in order that the AGI do science as well as a human. Scientific behaviour easily extends to normal problem solving behaviour of the kind humans have. Hence 'general intelligence'. makes no sense to me. I haven't seen you present any meaningful argument that scientific behavior depends on extrasensory phenomena. Do you have such an argument? Ben --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
Well, there is a major question whether one can meaningfully address AGI via virtual-robotics rather than physical-robotics No one can make a convincing proof either way right now But, it's clear that if one wants to go the physical-robotics direction, now is not the time to be working on preschools and cognition. In that case, we need to be focusing on vision and grasping and walking and such. OTOH, if one wants to go the virtual-robotics direction (as is my intuition), then it is possible to bypass many of the lower-level perception/actuation issues and focus on preschool-level learning, reasoning and conceptual creation. And there's no need to write a paper on the eventual possibility of putting robots in real preschools: that's obvious. But it's also far beyond the scope of contemporary robots, as would be univerally. Whereas virtual preschool is not as *obviously* far beyond the scope of contemporary AGI designs (at least according to some experts, like me), which is what makes it more interesting in the present moment... ben g -- Ben G On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 5:12 PM, Philip Hunt cabala...@googlemail.comwrote: 2008/12/19 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: What I'd like to see is a really nicely implemented virtual world preschool for AIs ... though of course building such a thing will be a lot of work for someone... Why a virtual world preschool and not a real one? A virtual world, if not programmed accurately, may be subtly differernet from the real world, so that for example an AGI is capable of picking up and using a screwdriver in the virtual world but not real real world, because the real world is more complex. If you want your AGI to be able to use a screwdriver, you probably need to train it in the real world (at least some of the time). If you don't care whether your AGI can use a screwdriver, why have one in the virtual world? -- Philip Hunt, cabala...@googlemail.com Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Cross-Cultural Discussion using English [WAS Re: [agi] Creativity ...]
And when a Chinese doesn't answer a question, it usually means No ;-) Relatedly, I am discussing with some US gov't people a potential project involving customizing an AI reasoning system to emulate the different inferential judgments of people from different cultures... ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 5:29 PM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.comwrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: yeah ... that's not a matter of the English language but rather a matter of the American Way ;-p Through working with many non-Americans I have noted that what Americans often intend as a playful obnoxiousness is interpreted by non-Americans more seriously... Except that, in fact, Mike is not American but British. As a result of long experience talking to Americans, I have discovered that what British people intend as routine discussion, Americans interpret as serious, intentional obnoxiousness. And then, what Americans (as you say) intend as playful obnoxiousness, non-Americans interpret more seriously. Richard Loosemore I think we had some mutual colleagues in the past who favored such a style of discourse ;-) ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:49 PM, Pei Wang mail.peiw...@gmail.commailto: mail.peiw...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org mailto:b...@goertzel.org wrote: IMHO, Mike Tintner is not often rude, and is not exactly a troll because I feel he is genuinely trying to understand the deeper issues related to AGI, rather than mainly trying to stir up trouble or cause irritation Well, I guess my English is not good enough to tell the subtle difference in tones, but his comments often sound that You AGIers are so obviously wrong that I don't even bother to understand what you are saying ... Now let me tell you I don't enjoy this tone. Pei --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Building a machine that can learn from experience
IS the AGI. If the company goes bad you take it out and shoot it. The process of giving birth to a real company is literally giving birth to s specialist AGI - the actual company itself attends board meetings... fun eh! The hard question - do you invite it to the coporate dance night? He he. cheers, colin hales -- *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com/ -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Building a machine that can learn from experience
* d) 75 years of computer-based-AGI failure - has sent me a message that no amount of hubris on my part can overcome. As a scientist I must be informed by empirical outcomes, not dogma or wishful thinking. * That argument really is a foolish one not worth paying attention to. I mean, it could turn out that computer-based AGI is impossible, but it's *so* obvious that our failure to achieve this so far proves nothing about this. Once we have computers that are powerful enough to simulate the brain at the molecular level ... and detailed understanding of brain structure and dynamics at that level ... *then*, if we simulate the brain at that level on a computer and it fails to be intelligent, there will be *empirical* reason to seriously consider the hypothesis that computer-based AGI is impossible. Not until then. -- Ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Cross-Cultural Discussion using English [WAS Re: [agi] Creativity ...]
Well, I think you might have overreacted to his writing style for cultural reasons However, I also think that -- to be Americanly blunt -- you're very unlikely to learn anything from conversing with Mike, nor to make much positive impact on his own understanding by conversing with him. So in this case, I reckon the cultural factors are kind of irrelevant ;-) ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 7:47 PM, Pei Wang mail.peiw...@gmail.com wrote: Richard and Ben, If you think I, as a Chinese, have overreacted to Mike Tintner's writing style, and this is just a culture difference, please let me know. In that case I'll try my best to learn his way of communication, at least when talking to British and American people --- who knows, it may even improve my marketing ability. ;-) Pei On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 7:01 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: And when a Chinese doesn't answer a question, it usually means No ;-) Relatedly, I am discussing with some US gov't people a potential project involving customizing an AI reasoning system to emulate the different inferential judgments of people from different cultures... ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 5:29 PM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.com wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: yeah ... that's not a matter of the English language but rather a matter of the American Way ;-p Through working with many non-Americans I have noted that what Americans often intend as a playful obnoxiousness is interpreted by non-Americans more seriously... Except that, in fact, Mike is not American but British. As a result of long experience talking to Americans, I have discovered that what British people intend as routine discussion, Americans interpret as serious, intentional obnoxiousness. And then, what Americans (as you say) intend as playful obnoxiousness, non-Americans interpret more seriously. Richard Loosemore I think we had some mutual colleagues in the past who favored such a style of discourse ;-) ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:49 PM, Pei Wang mail.peiw...@gmail.com mailto:mail.peiw...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org mailto:b...@goertzel.org wrote: IMHO, Mike Tintner is not often rude, and is not exactly a troll because I feel he is genuinely trying to understand the deeper issues related to AGI, rather than mainly trying to stir up trouble or cause irritation Well, I guess my English is not good enough to tell the subtle difference in tones, but his comments often sound that You AGIers are so obviously wrong that I don't even bother to understand what you are saying ... Now let me tell you I don't enjoy this tone. Pei --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Cross-Cultural Discussion using English [WAS Re: [agi] Creativity ...]
On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 7:51 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: Well, I think you might have overreacted to his writing style for cultural reasons However, I also think that -- to be Americanly blunt -- you're very unlikely to learn anything from conversing with Mike, On AGI-related topics, I meant. He may well have other areas of expertise where we could learn a lot from him, but they are not the focus of this list. nor to make much positive impact on his own understanding by conversing with him. So in this case, I reckon the cultural factors are kind of irrelevant ;-) ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 7:47 PM, Pei Wang mail.peiw...@gmail.com wrote: Richard and Ben, If you think I, as a Chinese, have overreacted to Mike Tintner's writing style, and this is just a culture difference, please let me know. In that case I'll try my best to learn his way of communication, at least when talking to British and American people --- who knows, it may even improve my marketing ability. ;-) Pei On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 7:01 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: And when a Chinese doesn't answer a question, it usually means No ;-) Relatedly, I am discussing with some US gov't people a potential project involving customizing an AI reasoning system to emulate the different inferential judgments of people from different cultures... ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 5:29 PM, Richard Loosemore r...@lightlink.com wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: yeah ... that's not a matter of the English language but rather a matter of the American Way ;-p Through working with many non-Americans I have noted that what Americans often intend as a playful obnoxiousness is interpreted by non-Americans more seriously... Except that, in fact, Mike is not American but British. As a result of long experience talking to Americans, I have discovered that what British people intend as routine discussion, Americans interpret as serious, intentional obnoxiousness. And then, what Americans (as you say) intend as playful obnoxiousness, non-Americans interpret more seriously. Richard Loosemore I think we had some mutual colleagues in the past who favored such a style of discourse ;-) ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:49 PM, Pei Wang mail.peiw...@gmail.com mailto:mail.peiw...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org mailto:b...@goertzel.org wrote: IMHO, Mike Tintner is not often rude, and is not exactly a troll because I feel he is genuinely trying to understand the deeper issues related to AGI, rather than mainly trying to stir up trouble or cause irritation Well, I guess my English is not good enough to tell the subtle difference in tones, but his comments often sound that You AGIers are so obviously wrong that I don't even bother to understand what you are saying ... Now let me tell you I don't enjoy this tone. Pei --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
It's a hard problem, and the answer is to cheat as much as possible, but not any more so. We'll just have to feel this out via experiment... My intuition is that current virtual worlds and game worlds are too crude, but current robot simulators are not. I.e., I doubt one needs serious fluid dynamics in one's simulation ... I doubt one needs bodies with detailed internal musculature ... but I think one does need basic Newtonian physics and the ability to use tools, break things in half (but not necessarily realistic cracking behavior), balance things and carry them and stack them and push them together Lego-like and so forth... I could probably frame a detailed argument as to WHY I think the line should be drawn right there, in terms of the cognitive tasks supported by this level of physics simulation. That would be an interesting followup paper, I guess. The crux of the argument would be that all the basic tasks required in an AGI Preschool could be sensibly formulated using only this level of physics simulation, in a way that doesn't involve cheating... (but the proper contextualization formalization of doesn't involve cheating would require some thought) ben On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 7:54 PM, Derek Zahn derekz...@msn.com wrote: Hi Ben. OTOH, if one wants to go the virtual-robotics direction (as is my intuition), then it is possible to bypass many of the lower-level perception/actuation issues and focus on preschool-level learning, reasoning and conceptual creation. And yet, in your paper (which I enjoyed), you emphasize the importance of not providing a simplistic environment (with the screwdriver example). Without facing the low-level sensory world (either through robotics or through very advanced simulations feeding senses essentially equivalent to those of humans), I wonder if a targeted human-like AGI will be able to acquire the necessary concepts that children absorb and use as much o f the metaphorical basis for their thought -- slippery, soft, hot, hard, rough, sharp, and on and on. I assume you have some sort of middle ground in mind... what's your thinking about how much you can cheat in this way (beyond that of what is conveniently doable I mean)? Thanks! -- *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Building a machine that can learn from experience
You can't deliver any evidence at all that the processes I am investigating are invalid. True, and you can't deliver any evidence that once AGIs reach an IQ of 1000, aliens will contact them and welcome them to the Trans-Universal Club of Really Clever Beings. In fact, I won't be at all surprised if something like that happens! But of course, there is a rather diverse infinitude of hypotheses that aren't refuted by current evidence... FWIW, my own intuition is that -- there quite possibly *are* currently-unexplained, interesting, important electromagnetic interactions between brains and the world around them -- these are quite possibly related to various psi phenomena, about which there is an awful lot of convincing empirical evidence right now (see Damien Broderick's book Outside the Gates of Science for a nice review) -- none of this gives any reason why cognition and consciousness can't arise in a computer program There is a lot that we don't know about the world! But, concluding from this general ignorance that AGI is impossible in digital computers seems wholly unjustified to me. -- Ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Building a machine that can learn from experience
You, like the rest of us, are incapable of discussing anything else. Email cannot carry non-algorithmic ideas or concepts. Just because you do not consider your system algorithmic does not mean that it is not. Nature is algorithmic, your chip is algorithmic, everything is algorithmic. That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Hey, you just have no way to know that... If you and I both contain brains that somehow invoke non-Turing oracles, then an email could communicate info from one oracle to the other that would provide a coupling of noncomputational processes in our brains The problem is that **there is no way for science to ever establish the existence of a nonalgorithmic process**, because science deals only with finite sets of finite-precision measurements. So, it is quite **possible** that brain and mind nonalgorithmic, and that intelligence is not scientifically addressable and AGIs cannot be designed via science. But if this is indeed the case, it can never be scientifically established. FWIW, my own intuition is that -- mind does involve nonalgorithmic aspects -- this is in no way an obstacle to the creation of AGI using digital computer programs. The nonalgorithmic aspects are gonna be there anyway, we don't need to build them into our programs;-) But I can't prove that scientifically and I never will be able to... -- Ben G --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 8:42 PM, Philip Hunt cabala...@googlemail.comwrote: 2008/12/20 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: I.e., I doubt one needs serious fluid dynamics in one's simulation ... I doubt one needs bodies with detailed internal musculature ... but I think one does need basic Newtonian physics and the ability to use tools, break things in half (but not necessarily realistic cracking behavior), balance things and carry them and stack them and push them together Lego-like and so forth... Needs for what purpose? I can see three uses for a virtual world: 1. to mimic the real world accurately enough that the AI can use the virtual world instead, and by using it become proficient in dealing with the real world, because it is cheaper than a real world. Obviously to program a virtual world this real is a big up-front investment, but once the investment is made, such a world may well be cheaper and easier to use than our real one. I think this will come along as a side-effect of achieving the other goals, to some extent. But it's not my main goal, no. 2. to provide a useful bridge between humans and the AGI, i.e. the virtual world will be similar enough to the real world that humans will have a common frame of reference with the AGI. Yes... to allow the AGI to develop progressively greater intelligence in a manner that humans can easily comprehend, so that we can easily participate and encourage its growth (via teaching and via code changes, knowledge entry, etc.) 3. to provide a toy domain for the AI to think about and become proficient in. Not just to become proficient in the domain, but become proficient in general humanlike cognitive processes. The point of a preschool is that it's designed to present all important adult human cognitive processes in simplified forms. (Of course there's no reason why a toy domain needs to be anything like a virtual world, it could for example be a software modality that can see/understand source code as easily and fluently as humans interprete visual input.) AIUI you're mostly thinking in terms of 2 or 3. Fair comment? -- Philip Hunt, cabala...@googlemail.com Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
Right. My intuition is that we don't need to simulate the dynamics of fluids, powders and the like in our virtual world to make it adequate for teaching AGIs humanlike, human-level AGI. But this could be wrong. It also could be interesting to program an artificial chemistry that emulated certain aspects of real chemistry -- not to be realistic, but to have enough complexity to be vaguely analogous. After all, I mean: preschoolers have fun and learn a lot mixing flour and butter and eggs and so forth, but how realistic does the physics of such things really have to be to give a generally comparable learning experience??? ben Evolution has equipped humans (and other animals) have a good intuitive understanding of many of the physical realities of our world. The real world is not just slippery in the physical sense, it's slippery in the non-literal sense too. For example, I can pick up an OXO cube (a solid object), crush it so it become powder, pour it into my stew, and stir it in so it dissolves. My mind can easily and effortlessly track that in some sense its the same oxo cube and in another sense it isn't. Another example: my cat can distinguish between surfaces that are safe to sit on, and others that are too wobbly, even if they look the same. An animals intuitive physics is a complex system. I expect that in humans a lot of this machinery isd re-used to create intelligence. (It may be true, and IMO probably is true, that it's not necessary to re-create this machinery to make an AGI). -- Philip Hunt, cabala...@googlemail.com Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
Well, that's a really easy example, right? For making tea, the answer would probably be yes. Baking a cake is a harder example. An AGI trained in a virtual world could certainly follow a recipe to make a passable cake. But it would never learn to be a **really good** baker in the virtual world, unless the virtual world were fabulously realistic in its simulation (and we don't know how to make it that good, right now). Being a really good baker requires a lot of intuition for subtle physical properties of ingredients, not just following a recipe and knowing the primitive basics of naive physics... ben g On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 8:56 PM, Philip Hunt cabala...@googlemail.comwrote: 2008/12/20 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: 3. to provide a toy domain for the AI to think about and become proficient in. Not just to become proficient in the domain, but become proficient in general humanlike cognitive processes. The point of a preschool is that it's designed to present all important adult human cognitive processes in simplified forms. So it would be able to transfer its learning to the real world and (when given a robot body) be able to go into a kitchen its never seen before and make a cup of tea? (In other words, will the simulation be deep enough to allow that). -- Philip Hunt, cabala...@googlemail.com Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Building a machine that can learn from experience
On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 9:10 PM, J. Andrew Rogers and...@ceruleansystems.com wrote: On Dec 19, 2008, at 5:35 PM, Ben Goertzel wrote: The problem is that **there is no way for science to ever establish the existence of a nonalgorithmic process**, because science deals only with finite sets of finite-precision measurements. I suppose it would be more accurate to state that every process we can detect is algorithmic within the scope of our ability to measure it. Like with belief in god(s) and similar, the point can then be raised as to why we need to invent non-algorithmic processes when ordinary algorithmic processes are sufficient to explain everything we see. Because some folks find that they are not subjectively sufficient to explain everything they subjectively experience... Non-algorithmic processes very conveniently have properties identical to the supernatural, and so I treat them similarly. This is just another incarnation of the old unpredictable versus random discussions. Sure, non-algorithmic processes could be running the mind machinery, but then so could elves, unicorns, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and many other things that it is not necessary to invoke at this time. Absent the ability to ever detect such things and lacking the necessity of such explanations, I file non-algorithmic processes with vast number of other explanatory memes of woo-ness of which humans are fond. Like the old man once said, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Cheers, J. Andrew Rogers --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
Ahhh... ***that's*** why everyone always hates my cakes!!! I never realized you were supposed to **taste** the stuff ... I thought it was just supposed to look funky after you throw it in somebody's face ;-) On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 9:31 PM, Philip Hunt cabala...@googlemail.comwrote: 2008/12/20 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: Baking a cake is a harder example. An AGI trained in a virtual world could certainly follow a recipe to make a passable cake. But it would never learn to be a **really good** baker in the virtual world, unless the virtual world were fabulously realistic in its simulation (and we don't know how to make it that good, right now). Being a really good baker requires a lot of intuition for subtle physical properties of ingredients, not just following a recipe and knowing the primitive basics of naive physics... A sense of taste would probably help too. -- Philip Hunt, cabala...@googlemail.com Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Preschool: sketch of an evaluation framework for early stage AGI systems aimed at human-level, roughly humanlike AGI
Although, I note, I know a really good baker who makes great cakes in spite of the fact that she does not eat sugar and hence does not ever taste most of the stuff she makes... But she *used to* eat sugar, so to an extent she can go on memory Sorta like how Beethoven kept composing after he went deaf, I suppose ;-) On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 9:42 PM, Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org wrote: Ahhh... ***that's*** why everyone always hates my cakes!!! I never realized you were supposed to **taste** the stuff ... I thought it was just supposed to look funky after you throw it in somebody's face ;-) On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 9:31 PM, Philip Hunt cabala...@googlemail.comwrote: 2008/12/20 Ben Goertzel b...@goertzel.org: Baking a cake is a harder example. An AGI trained in a virtual world could certainly follow a recipe to make a passable cake. But it would never learn to be a **really good** baker in the virtual world, unless the virtual world were fabulously realistic in its simulation (and we don't know how to make it that good, right now). Being a really good baker requires a lot of intuition for subtle physical properties of ingredients, not just following a recipe and knowing the primitive basics of naive physics... A sense of taste would probably help too. -- Philip Hunt, cabala...@googlemail.com Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Building a machine that can learn from experience
Hi, Because some folks find that they are not subjectively sufficient to explain everything they subjectively experience... That would be more convincing if such people were to show evidence that they understand what algorithmic processes are and can do. I'm almost tempted to class such verbalizations as meaningless noise, but that's probably too strong a reaction. Push comes to shove, I'd have to say I'm one of those people. My subjective intuition says that algorithmic processes don't exhaust the universe, even though they exhaust the space of what can be scientifically validated/falsified or verbally described. I can't prove that to you, but if I fill your brain with enough of the right sorts of drugs I may be able to convince you 8-D I do suspect there's a nonalgorithmic aspect to consciousness, for instance -- but I also suspect this is not something you need to BUILD ... it's something that's gonna be there anyway once you build your digital algorithmic mind. Panpsychism in other words... I see nothing wrong with such intuitions or beliefs, so long as one doesn't mix them up with science. I think that die-hard scientific rationalists could sometimes use a little more humility in the face of the unsolvability of Hume's problem of induction ;=) Yes, you can work around it by assuming Occam's Razor as a sort of primal religious principle ... but then you're making a big assumption pulled out of the glorious subjective nothing ... which is fine, but you should acknowledge that's what you're doing... ben g --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Should I get a PhD?
Mike, The lack of AGI funding can't be attributed solely to its risky nature, because other highly costly and highly risk research has been consistently funded. For instance, a load of $$ has been put into building huge particle accelerators, in the speculative hope that they might tell us something about fundamental physics. And, *so* much $$ has been put into parallel processing and various supercomputing hardware projects ... even though these really have contributed little, and nearly all progress has been made using commodity computing hardware, in almost every domain. Not to mention various military-related boondoggles like the hafnium bomb... which never had any reasonable scientific backing at all. Pure theoretic research in string theory is funded vastly more than pure theoretic research in AGI, in spite of the fact that string theory has never made an empirical prediction and quite possibly never will, and has no near or medium term practical applications. I think there are historical and psychological reasons for the bias against AGI funding, not just a rational assessment of its risk of failure. For one thing, people have a strong bias toward wanting to fund the creation of large pieces of machinery. They just look impressive. They make big scary noises, and even if the scientific results aren't great, you can take your boss on a tour of the facilities and they'll see Multiple Wizzy-Looking Devices. For another thing, people just don't *want* to believe AGI is possible -- for similar emotional reasons to the reasons *you* seem not to want to believe AGI is possible. Many people have a nonscientific intuition that mind is too special to be implemented in a computer, so they are more skeptical of AGI than of other risky scientific pursuits. And then there's the history of AI, which has involved some overpromising and underdelivering in the 1960s and 1970s -- though, I think this factor is overplayed. After all, plenty of Big Physics projects have overpromised and underdelivered. The Human Genome project, wonderful as it was for biology, also overpromised and underdelivered: where are all the miracle cures that were supposed to follow the mapping of the genome? The mapping of the genome was a critical step, but it was originally sold as being more than it could ever have been ... because biologists did not come clean to politicians about the fact that mapping the genome is only the first step in a long process to understanding how the body generates disease (first the genome, then the proteome, the metabolome, systems biology, etc.) Finally, your analysis that AGI funding would be easier to achieve if researchers focused on transfer learning among a small number of domains, seems just not accurate. I don't see why transfer learning among 2 or 3 domains would be appealing to conservative, pragmatics-oriented funders. I mean -- on the one hand, it's not that exciting-sounding, except to those very deep in the AI field -- also, if your goal is to get software that does 3 different things, it's always going to seem easier to just fund 3 projects to do those 3 things specifically using narrowly-specialized methods, instead of making a riskier investment in something more nebulous like transfer learning I think the AGI funding bottleneck will be broken either by -- some really cool demonstrated achievement [I'm working on it!! ... though it's slow with so little funding...] -- a nonrational shift in attitude ... I mean, if string theory and supercolliders can attract $$ in the absence of immediate utility or demonstrated results, so can AGI ... and the difference is really just one of culture, politics and mass psychology or a combination of the two... ben On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 6:02 AM, Mike Tintner tint...@blueyonder.co.ukwrote: Ben: Research grants for AGI are very hard to come by in the US, and from what I hear, elsewhere in the world also That sounds like - no academically convincing case has been made for pursuing not just long-term AGI its more grandiose ambitions (which is understandable/ obviously v. risky) but ALSO its simpler ambitions, i.e. making even the smallest progress towards *general* as opposed to *specialist/narrow* intelligence, producing a ,machine, say, that could cross just two or three domains. If the latter is true, isn't that rather an indictment of the AGI field? -- *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303
Re: [agi] Should I get a PhD?
, if your goal is to get software that does 3 different things, it's always going to seem easier to just fund 3 projects to do those 3 things specifically using narrowly-specialized methods, instead of making a riskier investment in something more nebulous like transfer learning I think the AGI funding bottleneck will be broken either by -- some really cool demonstrated achievement [I'm working on it!! ... though it's slow with so little funding...] -- a nonrational shift in attitude ... I mean, if string theory and supercolliders can attract $$ in the absence of immediate utility or demonstrated results, so can AGI ... and the difference is really just one of culture, politics and mass psychology or a combination of the two... ben On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 6:02 AM, Mike Tintner tint...@blueyonder.co.ukwrote: Ben: Research grants for AGI are very hard to come by in the US, and from what I hear, elsewhere in the world also That sounds like - no academically convincing case has been made for pursuing not just long-term AGI its more grandiose ambitions (which is understandable/ obviously v. risky) but ALSO its simpler ambitions, i.e. making even the smallest progress towards *general* as opposed to *specialist/narrow* intelligence, producing a ,machine, say, that could cross just two or three domains. If the latter is true, isn't that rather an indictment of the AGI field? -- *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx -- *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- *agi* | Archives https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttps://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI b...@goertzel.org I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
