Brad Paulsen wrote:
Richard Loosemore wrote:
Brad Paulsen wrote:
James,
Someone ventured the *opinion* that keeping such a list of "things I
don't know" was "nonsensical," but I have yet to see any evidence or
well-reasoned argument backing that opinion. So, it's just an
opinion. One with which I, obviously, do not agree.
Please be clear about what was intended by my remarks.
I *now* have an explicit, episodic memory of confronting the question
"Who won the world series in 1954", and as a result of that episode
that occured today, I have the explicit knowledge that I do not know
the answer. Having that kind of explicit knowledge of
lack-of-knowledge is not problematic at all.
The only thing that seems implausible is that IN GENERAL we try to
answer questions by first looking up explicit elements that encode the
fact that we do not know the answer. As a general strategy this must,
surely, be deeply implausible, for the reasons that I originally gave,
which centered on the fact that the sheer quantity of unknowns would
be overwhelming for any system. For almost every one of the
potentially askable questions that would elicit, in me, a response of
"I do not know", there would not be any such episode. Similarly, it
would be clearly implausible for the cognitive system to spend its
time making lists of things that it did not know. If that is not an
example of an obviously implausible mechanism, then I do not know what
would be.
Ah. Now we're getting somewhere! I do *not* (and did not) propose that
we keep a list of "all the things unknown" in memory. Nor did I propose
some "background" task that would maintain or add to such a list. That
would be "...wildly, outrageously impossible, for any system!" Maybe,
instead of assuming the worse (that I could be so ignorant as to propose
such a list), you might have asked for some "clarification?"
The list of "things I don't know" is, by definition, a list of "things I
know I don't know." How could I *possibly* know about things I don't
know I don't know? The list I propose contains ONLY those things we
know we don't know. Such a list is, in my opinion, completely manageable
and, indeed, helpful information to have around. When we first
encounter a completely novel object or event we will have to search
(percolate, whatever) for it in memory and come up empty (however you
want to define that). It is then, and *only* then, that we put this
knowledge (or meta-knowledge) on the "things (I know) I don't know" list.
This list can be consulted before performing a search of all memory to
determine if there's a need to do such an exhaustive search. If the
thing we're trying to remember is on the "things (I know) I don't know"
list, we can very quickly report the "feeling of not knowing."
Otherwise, we have to do the exhaustive (however you define that) search
of things we do know and come up empty. Such a list can also be used by
subconscious processes to power our desire to learn. Presumably, we
experience cognitive dissonance when we feel there's something we know
nothing about and want to resolve that feeling. How? By learning.
Once learned, the thing falls off the "things (I know) I don't know"
list. Similarly, if an item is on the list for a long time, it will
naturally "fall off" the list (the "use it or lose it" principle). Both
of these "natural" actions will work, I believe, to keep this list quite
small.
These are all interesting questions, in a way, but they involve a way of
doing AI that I find ... problematic ... for other reasons. I would
have many questions about whether the maintenance and deployment of such
a list would actually be as viable as you imply, but that is very much a
practical question specific to that type of AI.
The more general issue of whether the system keeps meta knowledge of
that sort is something that we completely agree on: whichever way it
uses it, it certainly does keep it for at least a while.
Sometimes (well, don't ask my ex) I can be a bit thick. I know you're
all surprised to hear that, but...
It just dawned on me that much of the uproar here may have been caused
by a miscommunication (gee, where have we heard of that happening
before?). I may have used the term "things we don't know" to denote the
"things we know we don't know" list. If so, please accept my
apologies. Having played with these questions for a long time, this
*important* distinction apparently became lost to me and I began to
assume it self-evident that a "things we don't know" list would have had
to come into being as the result of our encounters with those things
when they were "things we didn't know we didn't know" (and, therefore,
could not be in any list of knowledge we had -- we are clueless about
these things until we encounter them).
If that's the case, let me (finally) be clear: the "list" I am talking
about in the human or AGI agent's memory is a list of THINGS I KNOW I
DON'T KNOW. In the first (misleading) example I gave, the word
"fomlepung" would be on that list after the query containing it had
resulted in the "I don't know" answer (how that determination is made is
really a minor point for this discussion). In the second example query
I gave, the "Which team won the 1924 World Series?" would also, after
eliciting the "I don't know" response, find its way onto this list.
Distinction understood and completely accepted. I did indeed start out
thinking that you meant "things we don't know" as opposed to "things
that we know we do not know".
I think that one of the factors that helps cause misunderstandings like
this is that there certainly are (or have been) people on this list (and
on the good old SL4 list) who really are dumb enough to push completely
ludicrous ideas that cannot possibly be implemented, and will defend
those ideas right down to the wire. With that kind of flak flying
around, it can sometimes be difficult to know whether a given idea is
just open to multiple interpretations or is the opening salvo in a
genuine piece of technicolor stir-fried baloney. :-)
(Not that I thought that your comments were ever at that level, I hasten
to add).
Richard Loosemore
-------------------------------------------
agi
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