Ed, do you not remember making this accusation once before, and asking
for people to step forward to support you? On that occasion you had a
sum total of ZERO people come forward with evidence or support for your
accusations, and on the other hand you did get some people who said that
I had been honest, technically accurate, willing to admit mistakes,
never gratuitously insulting and always ready to take the time to
address any questions in a prompt and thorough manner.
Does it not matter to you that you failed on that previous occasion?
How many times will you repeat this before giving up?
Now, under other circumstances I would ask you to provide some evidence
for these allegations, and then I'd take some time to examine that
evidence with you. However, my previous experience of examining your
accusations is that your comprehension of the subject is so poor that
you quickly tangle yourself up in a confusing web of red herrings, non
sequiteurs and outright falsehoods, and then you jump out of the
wreckage of the discussion holding a piece of abject nonsense in your
fist, screaming "Victory! I have proved him wrong!".
When you have done that in the past, there has been nothing left for I
and the other sensible people on this list to do except shake our heads
and give up trying to explain anything to you.
Consult an outside expert, if you dare. You will get an unpleasant
surprise.
Richard Loosemore
Ed Porter wrote:
Richard,
I don't think any person on this list has been as insulting of the ideas of
others as much you. You routinely describe other people's ideas as
"rubbish" or in similarly contemptuous terms, often with no clear
justification, and often when those you insult have not been previously
insulting you.
So you have no right to be self righteous.
And if you are at all concerned with honesty and truth --- rather than
personal pomposity --- you would listen to what I and many others on this
list have said about how often you have been clearly wrong, and how often
your arguments have been dishonest.
Richard, I think you are an intelligent guy. It is a shame your
intelligence is not freed from the childishness, and neediness, and
dishonesty of your ego.
Ed Porter
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2008 6:23 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [agi] EVIDENCE RICHARD DOES NOT UNDERSTAND COMPLEX SYSTEM
ISSUES THAT WELL
Priceless! :-)
Just how far does someone have to go on this list - in the way of
sending gratuitous torrents of personal abuse - before the list
moderators at least rebuke them, if not ban them outright?
Richard Loosemore
Ed Porter wrote:
Richard Loosemore is at it again, acting as if he knows so much more
about complex system issues than most everybody else on this list, by
dumping on Novamente and OpenCog because they do have his "RL" view
complex system issues.
But what is the evidence that Richard, in fact, know more than the rest
of us on these issues?
In fact, it is very scant. His writings on the subject that I have read
either (a) describe things most of us know about, such as the "game of
life" or Wolfram's concept of computational irreducibility, or (b) make
statements that are totally unsupported, or, in some cases, obviously
wrong.
The biggest piece of evidence of just how wrong Richard can be on the
subject related to "RICHARD'S FOUR FEATURES OF DESIGN DOOM" (my
nomenclature), a combination of features which Richard wrote in April of
this year in his blog www.susaro.com <http://www.susaro.com/> made it
impossible to design any sort of system, AGI or otherwise.
Richard wrote:
"- Memory. Does the mechanism use stored information about what it was
doing fifteen minutes ago, when it is making a decision about what to do
now? An hour ago? A million years ago? Whatever: if it remembers,
then it has memory.
"- Development. Does the mechanism change its character in some way
over time? Does it adapt?
"- Identity. Do individuals of a certain type have their own unique
identities, so that the result of an interaction depends on more than
the type of the object, but also the particular individuals involved?
"- Nonlinearity. Are the functions describing the behavior deeply
nonlinear?
These four characteristics are enough. Go take a look at a natural
system in physics, or an engineering system, and find one in which the
components of the system interact with memory, development, identity and
nonlinearity. You will not find any that are understood.
".
"Notice, above all, that no engineer has ever tried to persuade one of
these artificial systems to conform to a pre-chosen overall behavior.."
In response to my email copied below I received multiple emails that
showed systems having these four features have, in fact, been designed
and built for years, and have, in fact, worked generally as designed,
Finally Richard substantially retracted his statement by restating it to
say, in effect, the above FOUR FEATURES OF DESIGN DOOM would make it
impossible to design a powerful AGI --- without any clear standard for
determining at what scale design doom would set in.
But even Richard's modified statement concerning the FOUR FEATURES OF
DESIGN DOOM, appears to be based on little more than Richard's hunch.
In fact, partial evidence of its falsehood is presented by the
Googleplex. The Googleplex very arguably has each of the above features,
as defined in the article, in vast quantity, and it functions generally
as designed, and it is a type of intelligence. So the issue of what
types of systems having these four features can be largely designed ---
and which cannot --- is much more complex than Richard's statements have
indicated --- at least, in the relatively small percent of his posts I
have read since.
Obviously in a Novamente or OpenCog AGI system the FOUR FEATURES OF
DESIGN DOOM and, more importantly, the much large role self organization
would play --- not only for representation, but also for behavior,
including behaviors that control operation of the system itself --- is
likely to increase the gnarliness of the system. But it is far from
clear, as Richard contends, that such gnarliness cannot be controlled
sufficiently to get an AGI that works generally as planned (at least to
the extent that most human babies work generally as planned). Such self
organized gnarliness is reasonably controlled in the human brain. We
understand many of the mechanisms the brain uses to accomplish such
control, and, if you read Ben's work, you will note that a lot of
attention has been paid how to deal with some of these control issues.
SO THE GRAND PUBA WAS WRONG, on one of the few instances (that I have
read) when he has ever tried to clarify his grand puba thoughts on RL
complexity.
I do not think Richard lacks intelligence. Some of his posts have been
very insightful and well reasoned. And the problem of getting complex
systems that rely heavily on self organization to function as desired
could prove very significant, as Ben has agreed.
But since Richard so insanely over stated the problems of complexly
issues in his FOUR FEATURES OF DESIGN DOOM blog article quoted above,
and since he was relatively slow to retract such overstatement when
first questioned, and since he retracted version of the statement had no
proof or solid reasoning behind it, we have strong reason to believe he
is still grossly overestimating the problem.
I don't know why Richard is so irrational on this subject. I think it
has to do with the fact RL complexity issues are where his ego flag is
planted. And since his sense of self importance is so invested in it,
emotions prevent him from thinking about it objectively.
If Richard were motivated more by trying to understand the truth, and
less by wanting to feel smarter than everyone else, I think he could
contribute much more to this list.
Ed Porter
P.S.
To be fair I have read much less of Richard's posts since the FOUR
FEATURES OF DESIGN DOOM flap, because I came to the conclusion that
Richard, although occasionally insightful, is often full of hot air. It
is possible that he has made much more intelligent and well justified
statements on the subject of RL complexity since then. But from my
quick skimming of roughly a 1/3 of his posts since then ---- I have no
reason to think so.
EWP
-----Original Message-----
*From:* Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*Sent:* Thursday, April 24, 2008 10:48 AM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* DO RICHARD'S FOUR FEATURES OF DESIGN DOOM ACTUALLY PREVENT
DESIGNABILITY
As I have quoted below, in his susaro.com blog, Richard Loosemore states
any system with MEMORY, ADAPTATION, IDENTITY (individuals within a
type), and NON-LINEARITY cannot be understood, nor can it be designed to
have a desired overall behavior
I WOULD APPRECIATE IF OTHERS ON THIS LIST WOULD CHIP IN WITH THEIR
EVIDENCE ONE WAY OR THE OTHER ON THIS IMPORTANT TOPIC --- because it is
a key issue in determining whether or not we should believe much of the
FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt -- an old IBM sales term for
denigration of competitive products) Richard has been spreading to say
traditional approaches to AGI design, including those used by Ben et al.
for Novamente, are dead meat because of unsolvable problems with the
type of complexity he defines (i.e., RL-complexity)..
It is my strong hunch Richard's statement about these four features of
design doom is provably false. It is my hunch that many AI systems with
these four features have been built and have worked roughly as designed
--- but in my below copied post I said off the top of my head I could
not think of any, and by that I meant any I knew have been built and
have worked roughly as planned and knew for sure had all the four
features of doom.
I believe that Novamente, if it would built, would have all the four
features of design doom, as apparently does Richard from his many
anti-Novamente statements. So, I am guessing, would Joscha Bach's
MicroPSI, Stan Franklin's LIDA, and Laird et al.'s SOAR - all of which
have been built and, as I understand it, work --- presumably with a fair
amount of experimentation thrown in --- somewhat as designed.
I would not be even be surprised if the fluid grammar Stephen Reed is
working on has all four of these features of doom. (Stephen, please
tell me if this is true or not.)
It appears from Stephen's Apr 21 2008 - 5:16pm post about fluid grammar
that it has (1) MEMORY, because it records individual new words and
phrases it sees occurring in text before --- (2) DEVELOPMENT because its
ability to properly parse adapts over time, through learning from the
text --- (3) IDENTITY because I assume it classifies its individual word
forms, words, and/or phrases within classes (Here I am guessing,
Stephen, please correct me if I am wrong), --- and (4) ---NON-LINEARITY,
because presumably performs many of the types of non-linear functions,
such as thresholding and yes/no decision making, that would be used in
almost any AGI such as Novamente.
Richard has been using notions of RL-complexity to spread "FUD" against
many other people's approach to AGI. After much asking, he has now
tried to justify his denigration of others work on his susaro.com blog.
So far a significant part of his objection to such work is based on the
above four features of design doom.
SO PLEASE SPEAK UP THOSE OF YOU ON THIS LIST WITH ANY EVIDENCE OR SOUND
ARGUMENTS --- PRO OR CON --- ABOUT WHETHER RICHARD'S "FOUR FEATURES OF
DESIGN DOOM" ACTUALLY DO DOOM ENGINEERING OF AGI SYSTEMS, SUCH AS
NOVAMENTE.
-----Original Message-----
*From:* Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*Sent:* Wednesday, April 23, 2008 9:06 PM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* RE: [agi] Adding to the extended essay on the complex systems
problem
Richard,
In your blog you said:
"- Memory. Does the mechanism use stored information about what it was
doing fifteen minutes ago, when it is making a decision about what to do
now? An hour ago? A million years ago? Whatever: if it remembers,
then it has memory.
"- Development. Does the mechanism change its character in some way
over time? Does it adapt?
"- Identity. Do individuals of a certain type have their own unique
identities, so that the result of an interaction depends on more than
the type of the object, but also the particular individuals involved?
"- Nonlinearity. Are the functions describing the behavior deeply
nonlinear?
These four characteristics are enough. Go take a look at a natural
system in physics, or an engineering system, and find one in which the
components of the system interact with memory, development, identity and
nonlinearity. You will not find any that are understood.
".
"Notice, above all, that no engineer has ever tried to persuade one of
these artificial systems to conform to a pre-chosen overall behavior.."
I am quite sure there have been many AI system that have had all four of
these features and that have worked pretty much as planned and whose
behavior is reasonably well understood (although not totally understood,
as is nothing that is truly complex in the non-Richard sense), and whose
overall behavior has been as chosen by design (with a little
experimentation thrown in) . To be fair I can't remember any off the
top of my head, because I have read about many AI systems over the
years. But recording episodes is very common in many prior AI systems.
So is adaptation. Nonlinearity is almost universal, and Identity as you
define it would be pretty common.
So, please --- other people on this list help me out --- but I am quite
sure system have been built that prove the above quoted statement to be
false.
Ed Porter
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 4:11 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [agi] Adding to the extended essay on the complex systems problem
Yesterday and today I have added more posts (susaro.com) relating to the
definition of complex systems and why this should be a problem for AGI
research.
Richard Loosemore
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