William,

This sounds like you should be announcing the analysis phase! Detailed
comments follow...

On 5/26/08, William Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> VRRM  - Virtual Reinforcement Resource Managing Machine
>
> Overview
>
> This is a virtual machine designed to allow non-catastrophic
> unconstrained experimentation of programs in a system as close to the
> hardware as possible.


There have been some interesting real machines in the past, e.g. the
Burroughs 5000 and 6000 series computers that seldom crashed. When they did,
it was presumed to be either an OS or a hardware problem. At Remote
Time-Sharing we extended these in a virtual machine, to make a commercial
time-sharing system that NEVER EVER crashed after initial debugging. This
while servicing secondary schools in the Seattle Area with many hackers,
including a very young Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Systems now crash NOT because of the lack of some whiz-bang technology, but
because architectural development has been in a state of arrested
development for the last ~35 years.

This should allow the system to change as much
> as is possible and needed for the application under consideration.
> Currently the project expects to go to the operating system level
> (including experimentation on schedulers and device drivers).  A
> separate sub-system supplies information on how well the experiment is
> going.  The information is made affective by making it a form of
> credit periodically used to bid for computational system resources and
> to pass around between programs.


This sounds like a problem for real-time applications.

Expected deployment scenarios
>
> - Research and possible small scale applications on the following
>     - Autonomous Self-managing robotics
>     - A "Smart" operating system that customises itself to the users
> preferences without extensive knowledge on the users part
>
> Language - C


Whoops, there are SERIOUS limitations to what can be made reliable in C.

Progress
>
> Currently I am hacking/designing my own, but I am open to going to a
> standard machine emulator if that seems easy at any point. I expect to
> heavily re-factor. I am focussing on the architectural registers,
> memory space and memory protection first and will get on to the actual
> instruction set last.


This effort would most usefully be merged with the 10K architectures that I
have discussed on this forum. Merging disparate concerns might actually
result in a design that someone actually constructs.

I'm also in parallel trying to design a high level language for this
> architecture so the internals initial programs can be cross-compiled
> for it more easily.


Does this require a new language, or just some cleverly-named subroutines?

Current Feature plans
>
> - Differentiation between transient and long term storage to avoid
> unwanted disk thrashing


Based on the obsolete concept of virtual memory rather than limitless RAM.

- Unified memory space


Sounds scary. Perhaps "mailboxed" memory?

- Capability based security between programs


IMHO future AI/AGI will be accomplished by interfacing separately-developed
subsystems, as Dr. Eliza interfaces with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Your
best/only hope to every utilize your plans to make this happen is when a new
series of computers are developed, e.g. the 10K architectures. Hence, either
you must allay yourself with other efforts, or no one ill notice you.

- Specialised Capability registers as well as floating point and integers


Have you seen my/our proposed improvements to IEEE-754 floating point, that
itself incorporates a capability register?! Perhaps we should look at a
common design?

- Keyboard, mouse and display virtual devices as well as extensible
> models for people to build their own


I'd be more interested in speech, tactile, and/or genuine 3-D I/O.

Steve Richfield



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agi
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