As I have quoted below, in his susaro.com blog, Richard Loosemore states any system with MEMORY, ADAPTATION, IDENTITY (individuals within a type), and NON-LINEARITY cannot be understood, nor can it be designed to have a desired overall behavior
I WOULD APPRECIATE IF OTHERS ON THIS LIST WOULD CHIP IN WITH THEIR EVIDENCE ONE WAY OR THE OTHER ON THIS IMPORTANT TOPIC --- because it is a key issue in determining whether or not we should believe much of the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt -- an old IBM sales term for denigration of competitive products) Richard has been spreading to say traditional approaches to AGI design, including those used by Ben et al. for Novamente, are dead meat because of unsolvable problems with the type of complexity he defines (i.e., RL-complexity).. It is my strong hunch Richard's statement about these four features of design doom is provably false. It is my hunch that many AI systems with these four features have been built and have worked roughly as designed --- but in my below copied post I said off the top of my head I could not think of any, and by that I meant any I knew have been built and have worked roughly as planned and knew for sure had all the four features of doom. I believe that Novamente, if it would built, would have all the four features of design doom, as apparently does Richard from his many anti-Novamente statements. So, I am guessing, would Joscha Bach's MicroPSI, Stan Franklin's LIDA, and Laird et al.'s SOAR - all of which have been built and, as I understand it, work --- presumably with a fair amount of experimentation thrown in --- somewhat as designed. I would not be even be surprised if the fluid grammar Stephen Reed is working on has all four of these features of doom. (Stephen, please tell me if this is true or not.) It appears from Stephen's Apr 21 2008 - 5:16pm post about fluid grammar that it has (1) MEMORY, because it records individual new words and phrases it sees occurring in text before --- (2) DEVELOPMENT because its ability to properly parse adapts over time, through learning from the text --- (3) IDENTITY because I assume it classifies its individual word forms, words, and/or phrases within classes (Here I am guessing, Stephen, please correct me if I am wrong), --- and (4) ---NON-LINEARITY, because presumably performs many of the types of non-linear functions, such as thresholding and yes/no decision making, that would be used in almost any AGI such as Novamente. Richard has been using notions of RL-complexity to spread "FUD" against many other people's approach to AGI. After much asking, he has now tried to justify his denigration of others work on his susaro.com blog. So far a significant part of his objection to such work is based on the above four features of design doom. SO PLEASE SPEAK UP THOSE OF YOU ON THIS LIST WITH ANY EVIDENCE OR SOUND ARGUMENTS --- PRO OR CON --- ABOUT WHETHER RICHARD'S "FOUR FEATURES OF DESIGN DOOM" ACTUALLY DO DOOM ENGINEERING OF AGI SYSTEMS, SUCH AS NOVAMENTE. -----Original Message----- From: Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 9:06 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [agi] Adding to the extended essay on the complex systems problem Richard, In your blog you said: "- Memory. Does the mechanism use stored information about what it was doing fifteen minutes ago, when it is making a decision about what to do now? An hour ago? A million years ago? Whatever: if it remembers, then it has memory. "- Development. Does the mechanism change its character in some way over time? Does it adapt? "- Identity. Do individuals of a certain type have their own unique identities, so that the result of an interaction depends on more than the type of the object, but also the particular individuals involved? "- Nonlinearity. Are the functions describing the behavior deeply nonlinear? These four characteristics are enough. Go take a look at a natural system in physics, or an engineering system, and find one in which the components of the system interact with memory, development, identity and nonlinearity. You will not find any that are understood. ". "Notice, above all, that no engineer has ever tried to persuade one of these artificial systems to conform to a pre-chosen overall behavior.." I am quite sure there have been many AI system that have had all four of these features and that have worked pretty much as planned and whose behavior is reasonably well understood (although not totally understood, as is nothing that is truly complex in the non-Richard sense), and whose overall behavior has been as chosen by design (with a little experimentation thrown in) . To be fair I can't remember any off the top of my head, because I have read about many AI systems over the years. But recording episodes is very common in many prior AI systems. So is adaptation. Nonlinearity is almost universal, and Identity as you define it would be pretty common. So, please --- other people on this list help me out --- but I am quite sure system have been built that prove the above quoted statement to be false. Ed Porter -----Original Message----- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 4:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [agi] Adding to the extended essay on the complex systems problem Yesterday and today I have added more posts (susaro.com) relating to the definition of complex systems and why this should be a problem for AGI research. 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