I'm getting several replies to this that indicate that people don't understand what a utility function is.
If you are an AI (or a person) there will be occasions where you have to make choices. In fact, pretty much everything you do involves making choices. You can choose to reply to this or to go have a beer. You can choose to spend your time on AGI or take flying lessons. Even in the middle of typing a word, you have to choose which key to hit next. One way of formalizing the process of making choices is to take all the actions you could possibly do at a given point, predict as best you can the state the world will be in after taking such actions, and assign a value to each of them. Then simply do the one with the best resulting value. It gets a bit more complex when you consider sequences of actions and delayed values, but that's a technicality. Basically you have a function U(x) that rank-orders ALL possible states of the world (but you only have to evaluate the ones you can get to at any one time). It doesn't just evaluate for core values, "leaving the rest of the software to range" over other possibilities. Economists may "crudely approximate" it, but it's there whether they study it or not, as gravity is to physicists. ANY way of making decisions can either be reduced to a utility function, or it's irrational -- i.e. you would prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. The math for this stuff is older than I am. If you talk about building a machine that makes choices -- ANY kind of choices -- without understanding it, you're talking about building moon rockets without understanding the laws of gravity, or building heat engines without understanding the laws of thermodynamics. Josh ------------------------------------------- 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
