> > "My own interpretation of the work is that an individual person > > is no more powerful than a Turing machine (though, this point > > isn't discussed in the paper), but that society as a whole is > > capable of hypercomputation because we can keep drawing upon > > more resources to solve a problem: we build machines, we > > reproduce, we interact with and record our thoughts in the > > environment. Effectively, society as a whole becomes somewhat > > like a Zeus machine - faster and more complex with each moment." > > Something like this is mentioned in the paper as objection #4. > But personally, I'd respond as follows: if a society of AGIs > can hypercompute, then why not a single AGI with a society-of- > mind style architecture? It is difficult to distinguish > between a closely-linked society and a loosely-knit > individual, where AI is concerned. So I argue that if a > society can (and should) hypercompute, there is no reason to > suspect that an individual can't (or shouldn't).
The point I was making was not that the social structure is important. Sure, a society of processes on an individual machine should have no more computing power than a single process on that machine. Instead, the important aspect is the fact that society creates machines, reproduces and interacts with the environment. By doing these things we increase our problem solving ability exponentially. As I understand the claims, a single AGI could achieve similar kinds of hypercomputation if it can design and build new hardware to extend its own capabilities: if it can actually make itself get faster. It would, in effect, be a Turing machine of unbounded complexity. A single AGI running on fixed hardware and no way of extending itself computationally is not going to be able to do this, even if it is implemented as a society-of-mind. In any case, this whole conversation bothers me. It seems like we're focussing on the wrong problems; like using the Theory of Relativity to decide on an appropriate speed limit for cars in school zones. If it could take 1,000 years of thought and creativity to go from BB(n) to BB(n+1) for some n, we're talking about problems of an incredible scale, far beyond what most of us have in mind for our first prototypes. A challenge with the busy beaver problem is that when n becomes big enough, you start being able to encode long-standing and very difficult mathematical conjectures. -Ben ------------------------------------------- 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=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
