On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 06:34:25PM +0000, Russell Wallace wrote: > wouldn't exist unless it generalized to new experiences. So while > its hard to engineer this, which might be called emergence,
It's not emergence, but rather failing gracefully and doing the right thing. > you will IMO be forced to if you want to succeed. That is the > reason why AGI is hard. There are many reasons why AGI is hard. This is only one of them. Folks, please use the right quoting style. Not posting HTML-only is a good start. Levels of whitespace indentation don't cust the mustard. You have to use ">". > 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 Exhaustive searches are intractable, but if the fitness space has high diversity in a small ball at each given point of genotype space and a neutral fitness network though which individua can percolate through without suffering dire consequences you can reach pretty good solutions without doing the impossible. And, of course, the systems reshaping their fitness landscape in above way is the hardest trick they have to do, because they have to effectively (statistically) brute force that initial threshold. It's pretty easy sailing afterwards. > 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. Evolutionary designs typically produce networks with both positive and negative feedback loops. Miraculously, these are not only stable, but rather robust. Notice that a mix of positive and negative feedback loops is an earmark of nonlinear dynamics systems. That evolutionary algorithms produce just these is not a coincidence. It indicates nonlinear systems are damn good solutions. Notice that human designers routinely miss these, and don't even have the analytical tools to understand these when plunked down in front of their very noses. What you described is not an isolated occurence. It is a typical case. > 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. I don't view programming as programming, but as state and state transformations. Everything else is just semantics and syntactic sugar. And once you realize that you're dealing with a lot of state, and quite nonlinear transformations, then immediately the source of the state (somebody typing it in? I don't think so) and the kind of transformations (written down explicitly? I don't think so) come in. > 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 Why "bite the bullet"? Optimisations is where it's all at. > 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. People, as not bipedal primate people. And of course this assumes that everything is zero diversity, so you can just drop in modules, and expect them to make sense. Just for the record of any future readers: not all of us are quite that silly. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE ----- 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
