On Thursday 17 May 2007 05:36:17 pm Mike Tintner wrote: > You don't start a creative process with the solution, or the kind of solution you reckon you need, i.e. in this case, the kind of architectures that you reckon will bring about AGI.
Wrong. Technological innovations are quite frequently made by approaching a problem with a given technique that one has reason to think will work, and refining and adapting it until it does. The Wright brothers came to the problem of a flying machine with the key ideas of bolting a motor/airscrew onto a glider. Each part existed already--they refined the combination until it worked. The Apollo project attacked the idea of going to the moon using liquid-fueled rockets. Lots of scale-up, re-arrangement of parts, etc, but the basic idea was just pushed along until it worked. We're all starting the attack on the AI problem with the assumption that we'll do it by writing programs for electronic digital stored-program computers. If your comment were correct we should all be second-guessing this assumption and worrying about whether we shouldn't be trying networks of op-amps instead. But the comment is historically incorrect -- because the people who have the right knowledge to solve a new, big, technical problem are exactly the ones who are going to take a technique and think, "Hey, I could make this work on that". Then they push on it for ten years and voila. Josh ----- 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/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
