Richard,
> > > Even Ben Goertzel, in a recent comment, said something to the effect > that the only good reason to believe that his model is going to function > as advertised is that *when* it is working we will be able to see that > it really does work: > The above paragraph is a distortion of what I said, and misrepresents my own thoughts and beliefs. I think that, after the Novamente design and the ideas underlying it are carefully studied by a suitably trained individiual, the hypothesis that it will lead to a human-level AI comes to seem plausible. But, there is no solid proof, it's in part a matter of educated intuition. The following quote which you gave is accurate: > Ben Goertzel wrote: > > This practical design is based on a theory that is fairly complete, but > not > > easily verifiable using current technology. The verification, it seems, > will > > come via actually getting the AGI built! > > This is a million miles short of a declaration that there are "no hard > problems left in AI". Whether there are "hard problems left in AI", conditional on the assumption that the Novamente design is workable, comes down to a question of semantic interpretation. In the completion of the detailed-design and implementation of the Novamente system, there are around a half-dozen "research problems" on the "PhD thesis" level to be solved. This means there is some hard thinking left, yet if the Novamente design is correct, it pertains some well-defined and well-delimited technical questions, which seem very likely to be solvable. As an example, there is the task of generalizing the MOSES algorithm (see metacog.org) to handle general programmatic constructs at the nodes of its internal program trees. Of course this is a hard problem, yet it's a well-defined computer science problem which (after a lot of things) doesn't seem likely to be hiding any deep gotchas. But this is research and development -- not pure development -- so one never knows for sure... -- Ben ----- 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=64055433-fe7f04
