On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 6:06 PM, Russell Wallace <[email protected]> wrote: > > For my part, the link I question is the implicit one between mathematical > principle and engineering practice. > > If we had an infinitely powerful computer on which we could run a > Kolmogorov compression oracle, would that give us AGI? Yes.
Well, no, there is still the problem of acquiring the 10^17 bits of human knowledge you need to build models of 10^10 human minds. > If we take a real compression program running on real hardware and try to > use it as a predictor let alone a general intelligence, does it perform > well? No. Matt tried precisely that experiment awhile ago, using a very > good, state-of-the-art text compression program. The fact that it could do > text prediction at all was an interesting validation of the mathematical > theory, but its performance as a predictor was unsurprisingly abysmal. Not really. The best compressors on my large text benchmark achieve just over 1 bit per character, which is in the range of uncertainty for human level performance (0.6 to 1.3 bpc). But I am pretty sure that humans can still do better than the best algorithms. That's something I still need to test, however. > Even the reverse doesn't hold. We haven't got AGI to test it with, but we > can test it with NGI which we do have. Are humans good at compression? No. > Matt observes one reason for this is the lack of deterministic reset > capability, but if we imagine solving that problem by running an uploaded > human on digital hardware, thus enabling the mind in question to perform > lossless compression, it's clear the result would be very inefficient > compared to a specialized compression program. Inefficient, maybe, but not necessarily poor at compression. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-c97d2393 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-2484a968 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
