To Mike Douglas regarding the below comment to my prior post: I think your notion that post-grads with powerful machines would only operate in the space of ideas that dont work is unfair.
A lot of post-grads may be drones, but some of them are cranking some really good stuff. The article, Learning a Dictionary of Shape-Components in Visual Cortex: Comparisons with Neurons, Humans and Machines, by Thomas Serre (accessible by Google), which I cited the other day, is a prime example. I dont know about you, but I think there are actually a lot of very bright people in the interrelated fields of AGI, AI, Cognitive Science, and Brain science. There are also a lot of very good ideas floating around. And having seen how much increased computing power has already sped up and dramatically increased what all these fields are doing, I am confident that multiplying by several thousand fold more the power of the machine people in such fields can play with would greatly increase their productivity. I am not a fan of huge program size per se, but I am a fan of being able to store and process a lot of representation. You cant compute human level world knowledge without such power. Thats the major reason why the human brain is more powerful than the brains of rats, cats, dogs, and monkeys -- because it has more representational and processing power. And although clock cycles can be wasted doing pointless things such as do-nothing loops, generally to be able to accomplish a given useful computational task in less times makes a system smarter at some level. Your last paragraph actually seems to make an argument for the value of clock cycles because it implies general intelligences will come through iterations. More opps/sec enable iterations to be made faster. Edward W. Porter Porter & Associates 24 String Bridge S12 Exeter, NH 03833 (617) 494-1722 Fax (617) 494-1822 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Mike Dougherty [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2007 5:20 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [agi] Religion-free technical content On 10/3/07, Edward W. Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In fact, if the average AI post-grad of today had such hardware to > play with, things would really start jumping. Within ten years the > equivents of such machines could easily be sold for somewhere between > $10k and $100k, and lots of post-grads will be playing with them. I see the only value to giving post-grads the kind of computing hardware you are proposing is that they can more quickly exhaust the space of ideas that won't work. Just because a program has more lines of code does not make it more elegant and just because there are more clock cycles per unit time does not make a computer any smarter. Have you ever computed the first dozen iterations of a sierpinski gasket by hand? There appears to be no order at all. Eventually over enough iterations the pattern becomes clear. I have little doubt that general intelligence will develop in a similar way: there will be many apparently unrelated efforts that eventually flesh out in function until they overlap. It might not be seamless but there is not enough evidence that human cognitive processing is a seamless process either. ----- 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/?&; ----- 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=49523228-fa9460
