On Tuesday 02 October 2007 05:50:57 pm, Edward W. Porter wrote: > The below is a good post:
Thank you! > I have one major question for Josh. You said > > “PRESENT-DAY TECHNIQUES CAN DO MOST OF THE THINGS THAT AN AI NEEDS > TO DO, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF COMING UP WITH NEW REPRESENTATIONS AND > TECHNIQUES. THAT'S THE SELF-REFERENTIAL KERNEL, THE TAIL-BITING, > GÖDEL-INVOKING COMPLEX CORE OF THE WHOLE PROBLEM.” > > Could you please elaborate on exactly what the “complex core of the whole > problem” is that you still think is currently missing. No, but I will try to elaborate inexactly. :^) Let me quote Tom Mitchell, Head of Machine Learning Dept. at CMU: "It seems the real problem with current AI is that NOBODY to my knowledge is seriously trying to design a 'never ending learning' machine." (Private communication) By which he meant what we tend to call "RSI" here. I think the "coming up with new representations and techniques" part is pretty straightforward, the question is how to do it. Search works, a la a GA, if you have billions of years and trillions of organisms to work with. I personally am too impatient, so I'd like to understand how the human brain does it in billions of seconds and 3 pounds of mush. Another way to understand the problem is to say that all AI learning systems to date have been "wind-up toys" -- they could learn stuff in some small space of possibilities, and then they ran out of steam. That's what happened famously with AM and Eurisko. I conjecture that this will happen with ANY fixed learning process. That means that for RSI, the learning process must not only improve the world model and whatnot, but must improve (=> modify) *itself*. Kind of the way civilization has (more or less) moved from religion to philosophy to science as the methodology of choice for its sages. That, of course, is self-modifying code -- the dark place in a computer scientist's soul where only the Kwisatz Haderach can look. :^) > Why for example would a Novamente-type system’s representations and > techniques not be capable of being self-referential in the manner you seem > to be implying is both needed and currently missing? It might -- I think it's close enough to be worth the experiment. BOA/Moses does have a self-referential element in the Bayesian analysis of the GA population. Will it be enough to invent elliptic function theory and zero-knowledge proofs and discover the Krebs cycle and gamma-ray bursts and write Finnegan's Wake and Snow Crash? We'll see... 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=8660244&id_secret=49291559-b3bbfd
