Re: [agi] A point of philosophy, rather than engineering

[Charles Hixson]

The problem with a truly general intelligence is that the search spaces are too large. So one uses specializing hueristics to cut down the amount of search space. This does, however, inevitably remove a piece of the "generality". The benefit is that you can answer more complicated questions quickly enough to be useful. I don't see any way around this, short of quantum computers, and I'm not sure about them (I have this vague suspicion that there will be exponentially increasing probabilities of error, which require hugely increased error recovery systems, etc.).

This doesn't mean that we have currently reached the limits of agi. It means that whatever those limits are, there will always be hueristicly tuned intelligences that will be more efficient in most problem domains.

Of course, here I am taking a strict interpretation of "general", as in General Relativity vs. Special Relativity. Notice that while Special Relativity has many uses, General Relativity is (or at least was until quite recently) mainly of theoretical interest. Be prepared for a similar result with General Intelligence vs. Special Intelligence. (The difference here is that Special Intelligence comes in lots of modules adapted for lots of special circumstances.)

Personally, I believe that the most effective AI will have a core general intelligence, that may be rather primitive, and a huge number of specialized intelligence modules. The tricky part of this architecture is designing the various modules so that they can communicate. It isn't clear that this is always reasonable (consider the interfaces between chess and cooking), but if the problem can be handled in a general manner (there's that word again!), then one of the intelligences could be specialized for "message passing". In this model the "core general intelligence" will be for use when none of the hueristics fit the problem. And it's attempts will be watched by another module whose specialty is generating new hueristics.

Plausible? I don't really know. Possibly to complicated to actually build. It might need to be evolved from some simpler precursor.


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