----- Original Message ---- From: Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Friday, November 3, 2006 9:28:24 PM Subject: Re: Re: [agi] Natural versus formal AI interface languages
>I do not agree that having precise quantitative measures of system >intelligence is critical, or even important to AGI. The reason I ask is not just to compare different systems (which you can't really do if they serve different purposes), but also to measure progress. When I experiment with language models, I often try many variations, tune parameters, etc., so I need a quick test to see if what I did worked. I can do that very quickly using text compression. I can test tens or hundreds of slightly different models per day and make very precise measurements. Of course it is also useful that I can tell if my model works better or worse than somebody else's model that uses a completely different method. There does not seem to be much cooperation on this list toward the goal of achieving AGI. Everyone has their own ideas. That's OK. The purpose of having a metric is not to make it a race, but to help us communicate what works and what doesn't so we can work together while still pursuing our own ideas. Papers on language modeling do this by comparing different algorithms and reporting the results by word perplexity. So you don't have to re-experiment with various n-gram backoff models, LSA, statistical parsers, etc. You already know a lot about what works and what doesn't. Another reason for measurements is that it makes your goals concrete. How do you define "general intelligence"? Turing gave us a well defined goal, but there are some shortcomings. The Turing test is subjective, time consuming, isn't appropriate for robotics, and really isn't a good goal if it means deliberately degrading performance in order to appear human. So I am looking for "better" tests. I don't believe the approach of "let's just build it and see what it does" is going to produce anything useful. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
