I noticed yesterday that most of the videos of talks and panels from AGI-08 have been uploaded (http://www.agi-08.org/schedule.php). Big thanks to the organizers for that! I have some difficulty getting into some of the papers but the 10-ish minute overview talks are by and large quite good, and the panel discussions are particularly interesting. I feel much better now about not going to the conference! Hopefully the rest of the talks will be posted, I can't wait to watch them. Some personal reactions to particular things: * Finally, I think the field has moved beyond the need for so many papers on "six secrets of AI", "five reasons AI has failed", and so on. Even the obligatory "What is AI?" talk was largely redundant (although Dr. Wang's point -- that we will all have different definitions and we should take that into account when studying the work of others -- needs saying). This is good news. Perhaps next year's conference won't need so many overview talks. * Somehow I had this vague notion that SOAR had basically dried up and blown away in the 1990s, but John Laird's description of current work in SOAR was terrific and quite exciting. I'll be following their progress closely. * There are now quite a number of architectures with AGI-type ambitions that have significant implementation behind them (Novamente, SOAR, LIDA, NARS, OSCAR, BICA, Texai, and others). The most interesting parts of the panels for me was when the people involved in building those architectures discussed what they have in common and differences in approach for similar problems. As Ben Goertzel (and Sam Adams and others) point out, these architectures share quite a lot at the level of their "boxes and arrows" overview slides, which provides some context for interesting detailed discussion. If such discussion occurred on this list that would be really cool; but perhaps a workshop at AGI-09 where the architects of these actually-existing systems discussed their similarities and differences and current limitations would be worthwhile. I'd sure pay to see it! * It was quite interesting to see that simulation/visualization as an important operating principle / reasoning mechanism is becoming so popular. Ideally, I suppose, such modal mechanisms would do double duty in perception and simulation... accomplishing that and interfacing it cleanly with other modalities or general-purpose knowledge representation is really fascinating and I have a feeling we'll be seeing more along those lines. I wonder if Novamente will go sort of solipsistic and absorb AGISim into itself as a modal reasoning module. * Along those lines, there seems to be a growing (certainly not universal) consensus among complete-system builders that virtual embodiment is a "best approach" for providing broad knowledge support (grounding) without messing around with robots. Somebody could write an excellent paper about the potential pitfalls of such an approach (detail, fidelity, deep causality issues behind appearance, function, and inter-object + inter-feature relationships, and so on). If nobody else is working in detail on publishing such an analysis perhaps I will study those issues for some months and try to write something for AGI-09 about it. * Stephen Reed is one of the most clear and deliberate speakers I've seen in this field. It's really interesting how seeing a person talk about their research makes it seem more real and interesting than just reading about it. * I wish Josh's Variac paper wasn't just a poster... but I suppose something has to get left out. Hopefully next year there will be more concrete implementation/experimentation progress to report in a talk. * Limiting people to 10-12 minutes makes it basically impossible to present the contents of a paper, so the talks turn into project overviews. Actually I found that to be a GOOD thing, and hope it continues that way (as long as we don't get the same overview talks year after year...) * Some presenters were very effective and some were not. I encourage everybody to rehearse their talks to make sure that the amount of material presented is appropriate to the time frame, and to make sure it is presented smoothly. Thanks to the organizers and all the participants. Fantastic stuff.
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