--- Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I'm sure the agents can be very smart, but the group as a whole will be > > smarter than any of its members, and a set of competing groups with > > evolution > > as a judge will be smarter than any one group. > > Yes, the group as a whole will be smarter than any of it's members because > it will cherry-pick the best ideas of it's members.
This, and averaging decisions together are well known techniques in machine learning. > Survival is a good idea. An agent will come up with it. The group will > adopt it. It *seems* blatantly obvious that survival is a good idea. But "good" only has meaning with respect to a goal. Survival is good because those agents who didn't think so died, not because they came up with the idea. Agents don't choose their goals. Agents may very well come up with the idea that self sacrifice for the survival of the group is good for the group, but if that is not their goal to begin with, they aren't going to practice it. They actually have to be born with that goal and be selected by killing off competing groups. You might say that since we are building the agents, we can give them any goals we want. Suppose we give them goals of self sacrifice for the group, while humans remain selfish. Then humans will exploit them and they die. However if we give them policing powers (i.e. they can kill unFriendlies) then we die. You could give humans special status, but that goal is unstable in an evolutionary environment. > > For example, democracies tend to be more successful than dictatorships > > (which > > depend on the intelligence of its most successful member), but we wouldn't > > know that without war. > > I entirely disagree with your hypothesis. I do believe that war sped up the > process but we would have learned the lesson without them. That is called hindsight bias. http://www.singinst.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
