Will:
Mike Archbold <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
It looks to me to be borrowed from Aristotle's ethics. Back in my
college
days, I was trying to explain my project and the professor kept
interrupting me to ask: What does it do? Tell me what it does. I don't
understand what your system does. What he wanted was
input-function-output.
He didn't care about my fancy data structure or architecture goals, he
just wanted to know what it DID.
I have come across this a lot. And while it is a very useful heuristic
for sniffing out bad ideas that don't do anything I also think it is
harmful to certain other endeavours. Imagine this hypothetical
conversation between Turing and someone else (please ignore all
historical inaccuracies).
Sceptic: Hey Turing, how is it going. Hmm, what are you working on at
the moment?
Turing: A general purpose computing machine.
Sceptic: I'm not really sure what you mean by computing. Can you give
me an example of something it does?
Turing: Well you can use it calculate differential equations....
Sceptic: So it is a calculator, we already have machines that can do that.
Turing: Well it can also be a chess player.
Sceptic: Wait, what? How can something be a chess player and a calculator?
Turing: Well it isn't both at the same time, but you can reconfigure
it to do one then the other.
Sceptic: If you can reconfigure something, that means it doesn't
intrinsically do one or the other. So what does the machine do itself?
Turing: Well, err, nothing.
I think the quest for general intelligence (if we are to keep any
meaning in the word general), will have be hindered by trying to pin
down what candidate systems do, in the same way general computing
would be.
I think the requisite question in AGI to fill the gap formed by not
allowing this question, is, "How does it change?"
Will,
You're actually almost answering the [correct and proper] question: what
does it do? But you basically end up as with that sub problem, evading it.
What a General Intelligence does is basically simple. It generalizes
creatively - it connects different domains - it learns skills and ideas in
one domain, and then uses them to learn skills and ideas in other domains.
It learns how to play checkers, and then chess, and then war games, and then
geometry.
A computer is in principle a general intelligence - a machine that can do
all these things - like the brain. But in practice it has to be programmed
separately for each specialised skill and can only learn within a
specialised domain. It has so far been unable to be truly general purpose -
and think and learn across domains..
The core problem - what a general intelligence must DO therefore - is to
generalize creatively - to connect different domains - chalk and cheese,
storms and teacups, chess pieces and horses and tanks . [I presume that is
what you are getting at with: "How does it change?"]
That's your sub problem - the sub can't move. All the standard domain checks
for non-movement - battery failure, loose wire etc. - show nothing. The
sub, if it's an AGI, must find the altogether new kind of reason in a new
domain, that is preventing it moving. (Perhaps it was some mistyped but
reasonable, or otherwise ambiguous, command. Perhaps it's some peculiar kind
of external suction..).
What makes creative generalization so difficult (and 'creative') is that no
domain follows rationally (i.e. logico-mathematically or strictly
linguistically) from another. You cannot deduce chalk from cheese, or chess
from checkers. And you cannot in fact deduce almost any branch of rational
systems themselves from any other - Riemannian geometry, for example, does
not follow logically or geometrically or statistically or via Bayes from
Euclidean, any more than topology or fractals.
The FIRST thing AGI'ers should be discussing is how they propose to solve
the what-does-it-do problem of creative generalization - or, at any rate,
what are their thoughts and ideas so far.
You think they're being wise by universally avoiding this problem - *the*
problem. I think they're just chicken.
-------------------------------------------
agi
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