A few comments on this debate: It's good to keep in mind the different premises that people hold --
There are those who believe that no-one knows how to build AGI at this stage. For them, discussing reverse-engineering the brain or building new experimental/exploratory development environments may make sense. The there are those who believe that current hardware has inappropriate architecture and/or technology, or is *way* underpowered (many orders of magnitude). Not much hope there, unless you believe that you can design & build such new systems AND you know what AGI will require! Lastly, there are those of us who believe that there are indeed some people who know how to build AGI *now*. Hopefully, those would concentrate on finding the best approaches, and making it happen ASAP. Peter Voss http://adaptiveai.com/ PS. Regarding Databases, in our own work we use SqlServer for some things (it's an integral part of our overall system), but found it quite useless for central knowledge representation. The three main reasons are: many real-time inserts (they are slow), the need for very large numbers of simple queries that depend on previous results (single query overhead kills performance), and the need for specialized data requirements (very sparse tables, highly dynamic table creation, etc.). There were many specific problems we encountered in trying to make more use of a SQL. ----- 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
