Thanks for the comments.
I understand your perspective and I think it's a reasonable one.
Well your thinking has surely left it's mark on my views ;-)
I think that what you'll get from this approach, if you're lucky, is a kind of "primitive brain", suitable to control something with general intelligence around that of a reptile or a very stupid mammal.
Then, you can use the structures/dynamics of this primitive brain as raw materials, for constructing a more powerful general intelligence.
Yes, this is the basic idea. Some structures and dynamics will tend to categorize and cluster information, some will tend to recognize temporal patterns, some might tend to store information, some will be mixtures of these things. Exactly what I'll find is hard to know in advance. As you say this isn't a powerful "brain", but it might serve as a set of useful building blocks to construct more powerful general intelligence from.
Your approach seem to be to skip this first step by careful design. The danger is that it's hard and you might mess it up. Some of the needed dynamics could be very subtle and easily missed. Also it's not clear just how "small" the fundamental units of representation have to be in order to be flexible and dynamic enough.
The danger with my approach is that my theory might be too weak. This could leave me with a search space that is too big to effectively search. Also, if it turns out that my fundamental units of representation are smaller than what is really needed, I might produce very inefficient solutions. I also need to look more closely at why all the researchers who were evolving neural network dynamics seem to have given up and are now doing other things... that's not a good sign! One of the main guys who was doing this is at a research institute near here so I might have to go visit him for a chat about it.
Heh, our approaches slowly get closer. Novamente is greatly simplified and cleaned up from the 1.5 million lines of code that was webmind, while vetta has very slowly been increasing in complexity since my webmind days. Still, this is only a weekend hobby for me --- I need to focus my energies on getting my PhD done. Building an AGI might have to wait.
ciao Shane
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