I'm going to try to put some words into Richard's mouth here since I'm
curious to see how close I am . . . . (while radically changing the words).
I think that Richard is not arguing about the possibility of Novamente-type
solutions as much as he is arguing about the predictability of *very* flexible
Novamente-type solutions as they grow larger and more complex (and the
difficulty in getting it to not instantaneously "crash-and-burn"). Indeed, I
have heard a very faint shadow of Richard's concerns in your statements about
the "tuning" problems that you had with BioMind.
Novamente looks, at times, like the very first step in an inductive proof .
. . . except that it is in a chaotic environment rather than the nice orderly
number system. Pieces of the system clearly sail in calm, friendly waters but
hooking them all up in a wild environment is another story entirely (again,
look at your own BioMind stories).
I've got many doubts because I don't think that you have a handle on the
order -- the big (O) -- of many of the operations you are proposing (why I harp
on scalability, modularity, etc.). Richard is going further and saying that
the predictability of even some of your smaller/simpler operations is
impossible (although, as he has pointed out, many of them could be constrained
by attractors, etc. if you were so inclined to view/treat your design that
way).
Personally, I believe that intelligence is *not* complex -- despite the
fact that it does (probably necessarily) rest on top of complex pieces --
because those pieces' interactions are constrained enough that intelligence is
stable. I think that this could be built into a Novamente-type design *but*
you have to be attempting to do so (and I think that I could convince Richard
of that -- or else, I'd learn a lot by trying :-).
Richard's main point is that he believes that the search space of viable
parameters and operations for Novamente is small enough that you're not going
to hit it by accident -- and Novamente's very flexibility is what compounds the
problem. Remember, life exists on the boundary between order and chaos. Too
much flexibility (unconstrained chaos) is as deadly as too much structure.
I think that I see both sides of the issue and how Novamente could be
altered/enhanced to make Richard happy (since it's almost universally flexible)
-- but doing so would also impose many constraints that I think that you would
be unwilling to live with since I'm not sure that you would see the point. I
don't think that you're ever going to be able to change his view that the
current direction of Novamente is -- pick one: a) a needle in an infinite
haystack or b) too fragile to succeed -- particularly since I'm pretty sure
that you couldn't convince me without making some serious additions to Novamente
----- Original Message -----
From: Benjamin Goertzel
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2007 3:49 PM
Subject: Re: [agi] What best evidence for fast AI?
To be honest, Richard, I do wonder whether a sufficiently in-depth
conversation
about AGI between us would result in you changing your views about the CSP
problem in a way that would accept the possibility of Novamente-type
solutions.
But, this conversation as I'm envisioning it would take dozens of hours, and
would
require you to first spend 100+ hours studying detailed NM materials, so this
seems
unlikely to happen in the near future.
-- Ben
On Nov 12, 2007 3:32 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Benjamin Goertzel wrote:
>
> Ed --
>
> Just a quick comment: Mark actually read a bunch of the proprietary,
> NDA-required Novamente documents and looked at some source code (3 years
> ago, so a lot of progress has happened since then). Richard didn't, so
> he doesn't have the same basis of knowledge to form detailed comments on
> NM, that Mark does.
This is true, but not important to my line of argument, since of course
I believe that a problem exists (CSP), which we have discussed on a
number of occasions, and your position is not that you have some
proprietary, unknown-to-me solution to the problem, but rather that you
do not really think there is a problem.
Richard Loosemore
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