> Eliezer/Ben, > > When you've had time to draw breath can you explain, in non-obscure, > non-mathematical language, what the implications of the AIXI-tl > discussion are? > > Thanks. > > Cheers, Philip
Here's a brief attempt... AIXItl is a non-practical AGI software design, which basically consists fo two parts * a metaprogram * an operating program The operating program controls its actions. The metaprogram works by searching the set of all programs of size less than L than finish running in less than T time steps, and finding the best one, and installing this best one as the operating program. Clearly this is a very slow approach to AI since it has to search a huge space of programs each time it does anything. There is a theorem that says... Given any AI system at all, if you give AIXItl a big enough t and l, then it can outperform the other AI system. Note that this is an unfair contest, because the AIXItl is effectively being given a lot more compute power than the other system. But basically, what the theorem shows is that if you don't need to worry about computing resources, then AI design is trivial -- you can just use AIXItl, which is a very simple program. This is not pragmatically useful at all, because in reality we DO have to worry about computing resources. What Eliezer has pointed out is that AIXItl's are bad at figuring out what each other are going to do. If you put a bunch of AIXItl's in a situation where they have to figure out what each other are going to do, they probably will fail. The reason is that what each AIXItl does is to evaluate a lot of programs much faster than it is, and choose one to be its operating program. An AIXItl is not configured to study programs that are as slow as it is, so it's not configured to study other programs that are its clones, or are of similar complexity to it. On the other hand, humans are dumber than AIXItl's (for big t and l), but they are smarter at figuring out what *each other* are going to do, because they are built to be able to evaluate programs (other humans) around as slow as they are. This is a technical reflection of the basic truth that * just because one AI system is a lot smarter than another when given any problem of fixed complexity to solve * doesn't mean the smarter AI system is better at figuring out and interacting with others of *its kind*, than the dumber one is at figuring out and interacting with others of *its kind*. Of course, I glossed over a good bit in trying to summarize the ideas nonmathematically.. In this way, Novamentes are more like humans than AIXItl's. -- Ben G ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
