On 20/11/2007, Benjamin Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > How much funding is "massive" varies from domain to domain. E.g. it's > hard to > do anything in nanotech without really expensive machinery. For AGI, $10M > is a lot of money, because the main cost is staff salaries, plus commodity > > hardware.
Clearly, you aren't thinking of buying any supercomputers :-) OK, I'm joking... The problem with AGI algo's today is that they haven't even yet gotten to the point of feeling a need for supercomputers yet. I find this odd, because verious narrow AI problems, such as data mining of today, as well as chess-playing of yesterday, clearly demonstrate and consume large supercomputer resources. I find it telling that no one is saying "I've got the code, I just need to scale it up 1000-fold to make it impressive ..." For nanotech, $10M isn't all that much, since specialized hardware is > needed > to do many kinds of serious work. There's also a psychological component. There's something deeply impressive about a lab with lots of wires and whirring devices ... that gut-feel "wow" factor just sort-of evaporates when you walk by theoreticians offices, even those of Nobel prize winners. There is a definite, subliminal "wow factor" bias in science funding that favors expensive whizzy machines over theory. And, what counts as a prototype often depends on one's theoretical > framework. Do you > consider there to have been a prototype for the first atom bomb? I don't > think there was, > but there were preliminary experiments that, given the context of the > framework of theoretical > physics, made the workability of the atom bomb seem plausible. In a certain sense, there were many prototypes: arguably hundreds, as they knew they had to get the core compressed with a certain shape charge, and had a lot of trouble getting it right. In the RaLa tests, they blew up radioactive lanthanum so that they could x-ray the insides of an exploding bomb to make sure it was sufficiently compressed and symmetrical to work. But, in a certiain sense, these prototypes are no different than, say, running a parser against wikipedia: you know its one of the steps that needs to be taken on the road to AGI; taking these steps doesn't "prove" that the final atom bomb would actually work. --linas ----- 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=68370297-32718e
