As much as I would love that list, or any other list, to act as a benchmark
of intermediate progress, I think there is something deeply wrong with it,
albeit it may be simply an "extension" of the cheating concerns of Ben et
al. The list does sound like a very reasonable way to check the cognitive
progress of children, and with the danger of psychologizing Piaget style,
I'd like to offer another candidate item that occurred to me while watching
the animated Tron: run-and-hide, or hide-n-seek. Tron is an action-packed
franchise which includes a lot of fighting, and a lot of running. If you
have any experience with any pre-arithmetic, even pre-linguistic children,
and of course pretty much any animal all the way down to protozoa, you can
see that they all, occasionally, have to "choose" between the f-f (fight or
flee), with two more f's (food and fuck) being of interest.

Of course these strategies are cheatable, a couple of simple heuristics and
you are "in", except that one cheating strategy may be extremely desirable:
run-and-hide controlled by proper environmental measures and simulations
that balance energy expenditure in running versus the risk of being
caught/derezzed/eaten, all again in the context of food gathering and
intelligence gathering on the predators (whether literally or
ritualistically the grown ups etc). Which in a way returns to my pet peeve,
that intelligence is pretty much a nonsensical word if not applied to
organisms and even populations. Sure, I can solve some algebra problems for
you without the 4 f's playing any major role, but in a sense I have also
cheated, my organism is much more suited to hunting gathering in the jungle
and after a lot of "brain hacking" I have acquired some algebra skills
superior to masses of hunter gatherers but arguably inferior to what proper
mathematicians would like them to be. Rephrased, I use a couple of
heuristics that were given to me by the giants of mathematics to get by,
and I don't see how this is different from coding a couple of heuristics to
pass the "early AGI childhood" test.

>From a different point of view, my intuition is that a child is a brilliant
intellect, not a so-and-so iffy developing intellect. Certainly a short
while after passing this kind of basic capabilities test it would be ready
to pass most survival and IQ tests, including the Turing test, as an "odd
person" perhaps but a person nevertheless. Generally, most people will not
go past the "minimum required" model building and experimenting with the
world, ie they will suck at algebra and dancing and poetry and..., and I am
fully confident small children cope just as well at a minimum level long
before we teach them any fancy mathematics and grammar. So, at the end of
the day I would favor open-ended free-form problem domains and
model-building - I have previously suggested the generalized game contests
as suitably free-form and deep, naturally language is also free-form
enough. Also programs that would learn to program the hard way are of
interest, let's say a program screen scraping http://www.tryfsharp.org/ and
trying to build interesting programs online, or even participating at
Topcoder, now that would be something! For internal use one could make use
of the occasional Brett-ian checklist, and vary some parameters, for
example one could throttle the bandwidth of the input channel(s), also
tweak the output channel, and see if learning speeds up or if it falls
apart, hopefully discovering internal architectures that can zoom in on the
environment's invariants quite reliably and independently of common
environmental transforms. Output channel would be, for example, the ability
to have a rich interaction with the environment by "turning the head",
"piling" objects etc. I expect very little from architectures that are
"observe-only", such as statistical learning. Of course an SVM or similar
could be made to pass the Brett test, but I could only call such a pass
cheating :)

AT



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