It's not just - oh now I recognize a pattern and can predict the next few items. It's oh I see and understand numerous patterns all intermeshed and have a rich knowledge base of raw and processed pattern data...and my operators are patterns, etc.. Most stuff in the universe is patterns, but all intertwined and mixed together. Note: pattern is an overloaded term- there are several definitions.
John From: Steve Richfield [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, May 16, 2008 9:38 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [agi] Pattern extrapolation as a method requiring limited intelligence Hi y'all, I can still remember an incident when I was just 13 years old. I was called into the Principal's office and asked about my poor score on an IQ test. You see, I was the school genius with off-scale IQ, yet I had barely tested average=100. The test had been a hundred or so patterns of numbers with me having to pick the next number from a multiple-choice list. However, I could often see reasonable explanations to support more than one choice, and sometimes different explanations to support ALL choices. I had asked about this at the time of the test, and was told to "pick the answer with the simplest explanation". I protested that they ALL had simple explanations, to which I was instructed to "just do the best that you can". I suggested that if the principal would just produce some of the test questions, that I would gladly show him how there were many simple answers. I suggested that the IQ test was really more of a measure of the person creating the test rather than of the people taking the test. The principal just shook his head and sent me back to class. Now, decades later, come the present discussions about patterns, apparently advanced along with the same lines of "thought" that was behind that IQ test so many years ago. Pattern recognition without underlying supporting theory is WORTHLESS (or perhaps worse) except perhaps to suggest possible underlying theory. Any good AGI would see a limitless list of possible next items from any real-world list. Take a sequence of alternating musical notes. Does anyone here REALLY think that someone is going to sit in Carnegie Hall and continuously play two alternating notes just because he started out that way? Note that Fur Elise does indeed start out that way. No, at some point, the odds of continuing with the same two notes drops quite low. A good music composition program might theorize the best sounding subsequent notes, and THOSE would be much more likely than continuing with the same mindless repeating pattern. No, I am NOT saying that pattern identification is worthless, just that when used to predict rather than understand an underlying process, that it may well be of negative value. In any case, I really can't see any value to AGI or other efforts from success here. Note the parallels with unsupervised neural networks, which seek to do much the same. However, unsupervised NNs typically look for VARIATIONS from past patterns rather extrapolating from them. I think that this "small" difference is crucial. Have I missed something important here? Steve Richfield _____ agi | <http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> Archives <http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/> | <http://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> Modify Your Subscription <http://www.listbox.com> ------------------------------------------- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
