Stephen Reed wrote:
Hi Richard,
After reading your blog post <http://susaro.com/archives/20> I wonder if
you think either that (1) a hierarchical control system
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_control_system>, such as
proposed by James Albus <http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/192218.html> and
adopted by me as the Texai cognitive architecture, is doomed to failure
as an AGI due to complexity, or whether that (2) a hierarchical control
system, as evidenced in the field by driverless cars
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car>, is a partitioning and
scaling solution to AGI complexity?
Even if we cannot agree yet on how a single human mind manages to
overcome the complexity issue as you define it, I suggest that vast
human organizations have evolved hierarchical control structures (e.g.
chain of command, specialization, compartmentalization, policy
deployment, quality assurance between work units, etc.) to address this
issue.
Okay, the short answer is that the best way for me to give you a full
answer to your question would be for me to refer to some stuff that is
on the way ... the next few blog posts in this sequence.
But, in the mean time...
I would not say that your hierarchical control structure is doomed to
failure because I do not yet know how close it is to what we understand
of the human cognitive system. The reason for saying that is that, in
the end, the conclusion of my argument is that we must stay quite close
to the human system, and adopt a methodology that supports a certain
kind of "agnostic" exploration of different types of system. In that
context it be that your HCS is quite close to the system that works in
human cognition, and in that case there would be nothing wrong with your
choice.
The only thing I would say is to watch out for dependencies between your
HCS and other aspects of your system. If the HCS requires a strictly
serial evaluation of goals that are explicitly represented using the
same knowledge representation scheme as is used for regular declarative
knowledge, for example, I would counsel caution, because I believe that
this design runs into trouble.
As for the organizational perspective, I am not quite sure which point
you were addressing with that.
And your question about the driverless cars architecture... you seem to
be suggesting that this might be a "a partitioning and scaling solution
to AGI complexity". That choice of words has got me worried about a
possible misundersanding, because you might have been implying that the
complex systems problem I have described was all about partitioning the
AGI problem to reduce its "complicatedness" .... and that interpretation
would be not where I was going with it at all!
That's as much as I can squeeze in at the moment, let me know what if
this answers your questions at all.
Richard Loosemore
-------------------------------------------
agi
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