Bob M: >I think the purpose of play is that it allows the system to search
the
space of possible actions in a broad yet shallow way, and characterize
the landscape under various fitness criteria.
Careful. What you, Bob, "a" & Vlad are all. ahem, playing with here,
innocently perhaps, is the worst kind of heresy.
For one thing, play is free not determined. As I insisted a while back, to
intense opposition from the doyens of AGI, we humans (along with animals)
are indeed free, and designed to be free precisely in order to explore (or
play). And an AGI must also be free if it is to succeed and survive - .by
exploring unfamiliar environments..
Worse still, if we or any AGI can truly play, then we can't actually be
programmed in any conventional, only the most minimal sense.
For example, Bob, if you carried your logic through, you would realise that
an agent that can play, will not only be able to play with its immediate
actions within an activity, but also with its "fitness criteria" - its
values and rules, just as humans are actually able to do. Children, for
example, play around quite explicitly and consciously with the rules of
their games, (as do adults). There is a fundamental opposition between play
and the conventional program, both in narrow AI and current AGI.
So this is dangerous stuff - it challenges the foundations of cog sci &
AI - that we and any AGI are, and must be, 1) deterministically 2)
programmed.. You could call this heretical tendency not so much the idea
that we are a "blank slate" pace Pinker, as a "blank page."
Keep on playing.
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