Ed Porter wrote:
Richard,
It is false to imply that knowledge of how to draw implications from a
series of statements by some sort of search mechanism is equally unknown as
that of how to make an anti-gravity drive -- if by "anti-gravity drive" you
mean some totally unknown form of physics, rather than just anything, such
as human legs, that can push against gravity.
It is unfair because there is a fair amount of knowledge about how to draw
implications from sequences of statements. For example view Shastri's
www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~shastri/psfiles/cogsci00.ps. Also Ben Goertzel has
demonstrated a program that draws implications from statements contained in
different medical texts.
Ed Porter
P.S., I have enclosed an inexact, but, at least to me, useful drawing I made
of the type of "search" involved in understanding the multiple implications
contained in the series of statements contained in Shastri's "John fell in
the Hallway. Tom had cleaned it. He was hurt" example. Of course, what is
most missing from this drawing are all the other, dead end, implications
which do not provide a likely implication. Only one of such dead end is
shown (the implication between fall and trip). As a result you don't sense
how many dead ends have to be searched to find the implications which best
explain the statements. EWP
Well, bear in mind that I was not meaning the analogy to be *that*
exact, or I would have given up on AGI long ago - I'm sure you know that
I don't believe that getting an understanding system working is as
impossible as getting an AG drive built.
The purpose of my comment was to point to a huge gap in understanding,
and the mistaken strategy of dealing with all the peripheral issues
before having a clear idea how to solve the central problem.
I cannot even begin to do justice, here, to the issues involved in
solving "the high dimensional problem of seeking to understand the
meaning of text, which often involve multiple levels of implication,
which would normally be accomplished by some sort of search of a large
semantic space"
You talk as if an extension of some current strategy will solve this ...
but it is not at all clear that any current strategy for solving this
problem actually does scale up to a full solution to the problem. I
don't care how many toy examples you come up with, you have to show a
strategy for dealing with some of the core issues, AND reasons to
believe that those strategies really will work (other than "I find them
quite promising").
Not only that, but there at least some people (to wit, myself) who
believe there are positive reasons to believe that the current
strategies *will* not scale up.
Richard Loosemore
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 10:07 AM
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Subject: Re: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
Ed Porter wrote:
Once you build up good models for parsing and word sense, then you read
large amounts of text and start building up model of the realities
described
and generalizations from them.
Assuming this is a continuation of the discussion of an AGI-at-home P2P
system, you are going to be very limited by the lack of bandwidth,
particularly for attacking the high dimensional problem of seeking to
understand the meaning of text, which often involve multiple levels of
implication, which would normally be accomplished by some sort of search
of
a large semantic space, which is going to be difficult with limited
bandwidth.
But a large amount of text with appropriate parsing and word sense
labeling
would still provide a valuable aid for web and text search and for many
forms of automatic learning. And the level of understanding that such a
P2P
system could derive from reading huge amounts of text could be a valuable
initial source of one component of world knowledge for use by AGI.
I know you always find it teious when I express scepticism, so I will
preface my remarks with: take this advice or ignore it, your choice.
This description of how to get AGI done reminds me of my childhood
project to build a Mars-bound spacecraft modeled after James Blish's
Book "Welcome to Mars". I Knew that I could build it in time for the
next conjunction of Mars, but I hadn't quite gotten the anti-gravity
drive sorted out, so instead I collected all the other materials
described in the book, so everything would be ready when the AG drive
started working...
The reason it reminds me of this episode is that you are calmly talking
here about "the high dimensional problem of seeking to understand the
meaning of text, which often involve multiple levels of implication,
which would normally be accomplished by some sort of search of a large
semantic space" ......... this is your equivalent of the anti-gravity
drive. This is the part that needs extremely detailed knowledge of AI
and psychology, just to be understand the nature of the problem (never
mind to solve it). If you had any idea bout how to solve this part of
the problem, everything else would drop into your lap. You wouldn't
need a P2P AGI-at-home system, because with this solution in hand you
would have people beating down your door to give you a supercomputer.
Menawhile, unfortunately, solving all those other issues like making
parsers and trying to do word-sense disambiguation would not help one
whit to get the real theoretical task done.
I am not being negative, I am just relaying the standard understanding
of priorities in the AGI field as a whole. Send complaints addressed to
"AGI Community", not to me, please.
Richard Loosemore
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