YKY, The reason to deal with a simulation world rather than doing robotics is purely pragmatic.
Messing with robots is a pain! Good robotic hardware is expensive, and requires significant effort to maintain, especially for those of us with limited hardware-engineering expertise. I've done a bit of hands-on robotics work in the past, so I've learned this the hard way. Furthermore, for a team of programmers distributed across various physical locations, working with physical robots would seem to require a separate robot at each physical location, or else a robot at a single site with a full-time robot-maintaner onsite and excellent videoconferencing type facilities so all the distributed team members can see the robot.... Furthermore, if one decides one needs to change around ones sensors and actuators for some reason, it can be very time-consuming and expensive to do so... On the other hand, a sim-world is a lot cheaper to build, a lot easier to maintain, and can be used in a collaborative way by a distributed development team. And it's easy to change around if one's ideas change.... I do find it interesting to think about how to translate complex sensor-data into cognitive information. I have a lot of ideas about how to do this using Novamente. But I have a feeling that one can get an AGI working without giving it highly rich sensory inputs or highly flexible actuators. However, this is really a separate issue from the sim-world versus robot issue, because one could implement a physical robot with simple sensors & actuators, or one could implement a sim-world with very rich sensors and actuators. I plan to start with a pretty simple sim-world, and add richer simulated sensors & actuators within it only if necessary. I'm probably only going to mess with physical robotics once I have a) Novamente working reasonably well for controlling an agent in a simple simulated world b) funding to pay at least one dedicated robotics person Without funding to pay for a dedicated Novamente-sim-world person, I'm afraid progress on the sim-world project will be very slow, since it will end up being worked on by a bunch of us in "spare time" not being spend on other more commercial but less AGI-ish Novamente-based projects. To try to work on a Novamente-robotics project in this kind of part-time way would be silly, the rate of progress would effectively be zero. -- Ben -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Yan King Yin Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 10:46 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [agi] proposal: Sensory Front-End > Ben wrote: > > I'm more interested in the AGI-SIM approach, however... But why similate at all? We can have a sensory front-end that abstracts sensory experiences into input languages of choice, such as propositional/predicate logic. (In fact, I find this to be a very promising approach, because I can simply use my neural-based AI to act as this front end ;)) So I guess this would be beneficial to other AGI groups as well. I suspect that a distributive representation is necessarily for AGI, but I can't be 100% sure. The best way is to build a platform and let everyone experiment with their pet theories. Anyone wants to join in developing the front-end? I think it could have commercial appeal too, so we can get some extra funding from it. YKY -- _______________________________________________ Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp ?SRC=lycos10 ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
