----- Forwarded message from Fred Hapgood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- From: "Fred Hapgood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 11:55:38 -0500 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: [nsg] Meeting Announcement X-Mailer: MIME::Lite 1.5 (F2.73; T1.001; A1.64; B3.05; Q3.03)
Meeting notice: The 16.Nov.04 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the
Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of
Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the
manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below.
Suggested topic of the week: The grain-size of intelligence
Most of the measures of intelligence familiar to us -- IQ, college board
scores, chess ratings -- yield a smooth curve when applied to the
general population. The tails of these curves might be quite far apart
-- a good chessplayer is immensely better than a poor one -- but there
are no obvious steps in the function. This suggests that being
relatively smart is about accumulating relatively larger numbers of
small units of something, remembering them, and keeping them
appropriately organized and connected.
On the other hand, forty years of work on AI seem to suggest that
intelligence (as we use the word in everyday life) is a single thing, or
at least a small number of things. The progress made on the key AI
functions -- machine vision, NLR, learning, problem solving -- are
interesting for their lack of generality, for being clever hacks that
succeed by virtue of leveraging unique features of specific problem
environments.
It seems as though all these projects all lack the same thing: a noise-
oriented characterization/recognition routine that gradually,
iteratively, increases the odds of finding a signal in noise. While I
have no idea what this trick is, it does feel like there is only one
idea, or at best a very small number of closely related ideas, at the
core. This suggests that intelligence is a step function.
This is a significant question since if intelligence has a small grain,
progress in AI will probably be incremental; we might need lots of man-
years to discover how to code each "unit". If it is a step function,
once the basic idea is discovered it will spread through all the problem
domains virtually overnight. Figuring out how to do machine behavior
recognition for security will mean you have also figured out how to make
machines play go and write novels and do automated hypothesis generation
and testing. Further, if intelligence comes in chunks, all that might
happen anytime. One graduate student in India might wake up tomorrow and
start the avalanche.
But there is the data mentioned earlier to worry about. How do you
reconcile the two?
<+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+>
In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the
moon.
-- Jules Verne, 1865
<+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+>
Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.
<+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+>
Legend:
"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the
first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which
refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little
else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a
sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubs follow the same model.
Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.pobox.com/~fhapgood
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----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net
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