On 3/20/07, Eric Baum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This is the problem with Wallace's complaints. You actually want the "machine [to do] something unpredicted", namely the right thing in unpredicted circumstances. Its true that its hard and expensive to engineer/find an underlying compact explanation, but it is precisely the fact that this very constrained/compact underlying program is so improbable that makes it work! The arguments for its working in fact *rest exactly* on the fact that it is so improbable, it wouldn't exist unless it generalized to new experiences. So while its hard to engineer this, which might be called emergence, you will IMO be forced to if you want to succeed. That is the reason why AGI is hard.
It's one reason why AGI is hard, and there is truth in what you say. However, ab initio search for compact explanation is so hard that we humans mostly don't do it because we can't. When we do have to bite the bullet and explicitly attempt it, it often takes entire communities of geniuses working for decades to produce a result that can be boiled down to a few lines. Newton, Darwin, Einstein et al were by no means the only ones working on their various problems. Koza has an example of the invention of a simple circuit, I think it was the negative feedback amplifier or somesuch, you could draw it on the back of a cigarette pack, it took a very bright engineer months or years of thinking before he cracked it, and there were lots of others trying at the same time. What we mostly do is use existing solutions and blends thereof, that were developed by our predecessors over millions of lifetimes. Even when I'm programming, apparently writing new code, I'm really mostly using concepts I learned from other people, tweaking and blending them to fit the current context. And an AGI will have to do the same. Yes, it will have to be able to bite the bullet and run a full-blown search for a compact solution when necessary. But that's just plain too hard to be doing all the time, so an AGI will have to, like humans, mostly rely on existing concepts developed by other people. ----- 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
