On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 8:10 AM <johnr...@polyplexic.com> wrote: > Why is there no single general compression algorithm? Same reason as general > intelligence, thus, multi-agent, thus inter agent communication, thus > protocol, and thus consciousness.
Legg proved that there are no simple, general theories of prediction, and therefore no simple but powerful learners (or compression algorithms). Suppose you have a simple algorithm that can predict any computable infinite sequence of symbols after only a finite number of mistakes. Then I can create a simple sequence that your program can't learn. My program runs your program and outputs a different symbol at each step. You can read his paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0606070 This has been the biggest pitfall of AGI projects. You make fast progress initially on the easy problems, thinking the solution is in sight, and then get stuck on the hard ones. > Doesn't Gödel Incompleteness imply "magic" is needed? No, it (and Legg's generalizations) implies that a lot of software and hardware is required and you can forget about shortcuts like universal learners sucking data off the internet. You can also forget about self improving software (violates information theory), quantum computing (neural computation is not unitary), or consciousness (an illusion that evolved so you would fear death). How much software and hardware? You were born with half of what you know as an adult, about 10^9 bits each. That's roughly the information content of your DNA, coincidentally about the same as your long term memory capacity according to Landauer. (see https://www.cs.colorado.edu/~mozer/Teaching/syllabi/7782/readings/Landauer1986.pdf ). All this debate about nurture vs nature is because for most traits, it's both. The hard coded (nature) part of your AGI is about 300M lines of code, doable for a big company for $30 billion but probably not by you working alone. And then you still need a 10 petaflop computer to run it on, or several billion times that to automate all human labor globally like you promised your simple universal learner would do by next year. Or maybe you could automate the software development. It's happened once, right? All it took was 10^48 DNA base copy operations on 10^37 bases over 3.5 billion years on planet sized hardware that uses one billionth as much energy per operation as transistors. I believe AGI will happen because it's worth $1 quadrillion to automate labor and the technology trend is clear. We have better way to write code than evolution and we can develop more energy efficient computers by moving atoms instead of electrons. It's not magic. It's engineering. -- -- Matt Mahoney, mattmahone...@gmail.com ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T9c94dabb0436859d-M5cc8f151a753aed0c7debc96 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
