> And, importance levels need to be context-dependent, so that assigning
> them requires sophisticated inference in itself...
The problem may not be so serious. Common sense reasoning may require only
*shallow* inference chains, eg < 5 applications of rules. So I'm very
optimistic =) Your worries are only applicable to 100-page theorem-proving
tasks, not really the concern of AGI.
A) This is just not true, many commonsense inferences require
significantly more than 5 applications of rules
B) Even if there are only 5 applications of rules, the combinatorial
explosion still exists. If there are 10 rules and 1 billlion
knowledge items, then there may be up to 10 billion possibilities to
consider in each inference step. So there are (10 billion)^5 possible
5-step inference trajectories, in this scenario ;-)
Of course, some fairly basic pruning mechanisms can prune it down a
lot, but, one is still left with a combinatorial explosion that needs
to be dealt with via subtle means...
Please bear in mind that we actually have a functional uncertain
logical reasoning engine within the Novamente system, and have
experimented with feeding in knowledge from files and doing inference
on them. (Though this has been mainly for system testing, as our
primary focus is on doing inference based on knowledge gained via
embodied experience in the AGISim world.)
The truth is that, if you have a lot of knowledge in your system's
memory, you need a pretty sophisticated, context-savvy inference
control mechanism to do commonsense inference.
Also, temporal inference can be quite tricky, and introduces numerous
options for combinatorial explosion that you may not be thinking about
when looking at atemporal examples of commonsense inference. Various
conclusions may hold over various time scales; various pieces of
knowledge may become obsolete at various rates, etc.
I imagine you will have a better sense of these issues once you have
actually built an uncertain reasoning engine, fed knowledge into it,
and tried to make it do interesting things.... I certainly think this
may be a valuable exercise for you to do. However, until you have
done it, I think it's kind of silly for you to be speaking so
confidently about how you are so confident you can solve all the
problems found by others in doing this kind of work!! I ask again, do
you have some theoretical innovation that seems probably to allow you
circumvent all these very familiar problems??
-- Ben
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