I believe the purpose of sleep in placental and marsupial mammals (the only animals with REM sleep) is to copy medium term (daily) memories from the hippocampus to long term memory in the cortex. In humans, only visual and verbal memories are transferred (as dreams). During deep sleep between dreams, memories in the cortex are played back in reverse and fed back to the hippocampus*, which I believe is the process of erasing medium term memories as part of a feedback loop.
An AGI should have a hierarchy of short and long term memory, but I don't believe it is necessary to mimic sleeping and dreaming. I think there are more efficient ways to implement a cache when you remove the limitations of neurons. *discussed on this list. Sorry, I don't remember the reference. --- Chuck Esterbrook <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This is a light article about the purpose and value of sleep in humans: > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=437683&in_page_id=1965 > > The article is nothing earth shattering, but it reminded me that I've > thought for a long time that an AGI would likely have a sleep cycle to > perform various functions such as optimizing memory retrieval, > learning new associations, solving problems, etc. > > What about the AGIs that people are building or working towards, such > as those from Novamente, AdaptiveAI, Hall, etc.? Do/Will your systems > have "sleep periods" for internal maintenance and improvement? If so, > what types of activities do they perform during sleep? > > Or feel free to chime in with thoughts on AGI and sleep even if you > haven't begun building yet... > > -Chuck > -- 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
