2008/6/12 J Storrs Hall, PhD <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > 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).
We do mean slightly different things then. By U(x) I am just talking about a function that generates the set of scalar rewards for actions performed for a reinforcement learning algorithm. Not that evaluates every potential action from where the current system is (since I consider computation an action in order to take energy efficiency into consideration, this would be a massive space). > 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. > The kinds of choices I am interested in designing for at the moment are should program X or program Y get control of this bit of memory or IRQ for the next time period. X and Y can also make choices and you would need to nail them down as well in order to get the entire U(x) as you talk about it. As the function I am interested in is only concerned about programmatic changes call it PCU(x). Can you give me a reason why the utility function can't be separated out this way? Will Pearson ------------------------------------------- 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
