Joseph Gentle:> Eventually, you will have to write something which allows for emergent
behaviour and complex communication. To me, that stage of your project is the interesting crux of AGI. It should have some very interesting emergant behaviour with inputs other than the information SLAM outputs... Why not just work on that difficult part now?
Er, you don't ask that in AGI. The general culture here is not to recognize the crux, or the "test" of AGI. You are the first person here to express the basic requirement of any creative project. You should only embark on a true creative project - in the sense of committing to it - if you have a creative "idea", i.e. if you have a provisional definition of the problem and a partial solution to it, one that will make people say, "Yes that might work." (Many more ideas will of course usually be required). It's one of the most extraordinary phenomena that everyone, but everyone, involved in the creative community of AGI resists doing that and has extensive rationalisations of why they're not doing that.Every AGI systembuilder has several "ideas" about how to do *other* things, that may be auxiliary to AGI, like search more efficiently, and logics to deal with uncertainty, but no one has offered a "crux" idea.
The first thing is that you need a definition of the problem, and therefore a test of AGI. And there is nothing even agreed about that - although I think most people know what is required. This was evident in Richard's recent response to ATMurray's recent declaring of his "Agi" system. Richard clearly knew pretty well why that system failed the AGI "test" but he didn't have an explicit definition of the test at his fingertips.
The test, I suggest, is essentially; not the Turing Test or anything like that but "The General Test." If your system is an AGI, or has AGI potential, then it must first of all have a skill and be able to solve problems in a given doman. The "test" is then: can it a) independently learn a skill in an adjacent domain, and/or b) pass a problemsolving test in an adjacent domain (to be set by someone other than the systembuilder!). If it can play soccer, can it learn how to play rugby and solve problems in rugby? If it can build Lego constructions, can it learn to build a machine? If it can search for hidden items, can it learn to play hide-and-seek? The General Test then is simply a test of whether a system can generalize its skill(s). If it knows how to put together a set of elements in certain kinds of ways, can it then learn to put those same elements together [and perhaps some new ones] in new kinds of ways?
The robotic challenge test set by the ICRA is a good one, precisely because it is a "General Test," requiring robotbuilders to solve *any* breakdown of equipment that may reasonably occur in a planetary exploration camp - and generalize their existing repair skills.
That's what people should be doing here centrally - discussing and exchanging their ideas about how to solve the General Test. The fact that no one is discussing this (despite vast volumes of overall discussion) suggests very powerfully that no one *has* an idea.
(And it's a fairly safe bet, Joseph, that no one will now do the obvious thing and say.." well, one idea I have had is...", but many will say, "the reason why we can't do that is...")
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