Richard,
I hope you understand - and I think you do - unlike your good friend - that
it's actually a lot easier to say nothing. Harsh as I may sound, I was
trying to be constructive.
I suggest that you cannot expect your reader to make allowances for you -
your ideas have to be clearly stated upfront, even if in condensed form. You
asked me for my ideas - e.g. the picture tree - I gave you them upfront, in
v. condensed form. It's actually a v.g. & incredibly valuable discipline to
force yourself to pitch your ideas succinctly. It's useful whomever you're
talking to, even idiots.
In case you missed the 2nd of my mis-postings, I DID actually read your
paper long ago as well as today - I had it in a folder.
And I suggest it's worth considering my ideas about presentation - this is
an area where I have a lot of professional experience. It's a major truth of
understanding, for example, that if you don't tell your reader what your
system does, you automatically leave them feeling vague, and place a strain
on them. (A bit like a detective story without a murder). You could tell
from Ben's recent report what a difference it made to his audience to have a
clear demo of his system.
If you want to send me something, I'll gladly look at it & reply offline -
although I'm real busy at the mo. answering *your* last question.!
Best
Mike Tintner wrote:
Richard,
I can't swear that I did read it. I read a paper of more or less exactly
that length some time ago and do remember the Neats vs Scruffies bit.
Here's why I would have not made an effort to remember the rest - and
this is consistent with what what you do mention briefly here from time
to time, and the impression I've already formed:
"The new methodology that I propose is not about random exploration of
different
designs for a general, human-level AI, it is about collecting data on the
global behavior
of large numbers of systems, while at the same time remaining as agnostic
as possible
about the local mechanisms that might give rise to the global
characteristics we desire."
This is a proposal about how you're going to try and come up with an
idea. In spirit, (and I stress "spirit"), it's not a lot different from
someone saying: "What's my idea? I'll tell you - I'm going to get the
best brains [or computers] that money can buy - loads & loads of them.
And get them to come up with an idea. Pretty original, huh?"
That's not an idea, Richard. *You* have to come up with that..
Is there any reason why you went to Section 4 of the paper, picked the
first sentence out, and then criticized it as if that WAS the proposal I
made?
Section 4 is 1700 words long. Did you not notice the rest?
Sadly, Section 4 had to be only 1700 words long because the paper was
already over budget by about 2000 words. It made me miserable to try to
condense any ideas at all into that space, but I had no choice.
If you had come to me and said: "I read section 4 and I tried to
understand what you said there, but it seems like it barely scratches the
surface: could you not elaborate on [this or that point]?" I would have
been more than willing to oblige. Heck, I'd have agreed with you: by the
standards I anted to achieve, that section was awful. Instead you poured
vicious, scornful sarcasm onto that first sentence. Doesn't look too good
to me.
I feel really bad about being unable to put more detail into that paper,
so you have touched my weak spot, for sure. But, as I say, I really had
no choice. There is a huge amount more that could have been said, believe
me. What I actually did was to explain the approach in terms of existing
approaches, thereby giving myself some hope of reaching people who already
understood what those existing approaches were. Connectionism, for
example, was a good reference point.
Meet me halfway here and I am always willing to expand on anything I have
written.
Richard Loosemore
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