1)
This really has very little to do with AGI, except within the context of a
very special and peculiar theoretical framework
2)
I'm pretty confident that applying a well-customized version of MOSES *(code
*.*google*.com/p/*moses*/) to this problem would work way better than random
search or GP. The customization would involve some intuitive understanding
of the problem space, within MOSES's "representation building" phase.
But doing this customization would be a significant chunk of work, which I
don't recommend anyone to undertake right now, as there are more important
things to do. (though it would be a fun student project)
Anyway, it's interesting that my first idea about how to approach this
problem would be to combine human intuition about the problem space with
sophisticatedly guided random search, according to the MOSES approach...
-- Ben G
On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 3:53 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:
> William Pearson wrote:
>
>> 2008/8/3 Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>>
>>> I probably don't need to labor the rest of the story, because you have
>>> heard
>>> it before. If there is a brick wall between the overall behavior of the
>>> system and the design choices that go into it - if it is impossible to
>>> go
>>> from 'I want the system to behave like [that]' to 'therefore I need to
>>> make
>>> [this] choice of design at the low level' - then all the stuff about
>>> using
>>> intuition to sense the right design would go out the window. This is why
>>> the conversation yesterday about what John Conway actually did when he
>>> came
>>> up with Game of Life was so important: the documentary evidence suggests
>>> that what he and his team did was just blind search. Other people have
>>> tried to assert that he used mathematical intuition. The complex systems
>>> community would say that in almost all projects like the one Conway
>>> undertook, there would be absolutely no choice whatsoever but to do a
>>> blind
>>> search.
>>>
>>
>>
>> Might it be worth setting people a challenge? Set people the task of
>> building a complex system with a certain property or maybe a few
>> (nothing too bad, perhaps selecting a rule number from something akin
>> to Wolframs numbering). They give reasons why they picked the rules
>> they did and see if they do better than a RNG at picking the correct
>> number. You appear to be going against a strong intuition here, so
>> giving people a practical experiment they can play on themselves might
>> be worthwhile.
>>
>
> Excellent idea.
>
> What do you think of this? The challenge is to find a cellular automaton
> that has exactly two basic "objects" ("creatures" in Game of Life slang)
> that move across the plane at a regular speed. Two gliders, in other words.
>
> They must be different in design, with different speeds, and not derived
> from one another. And (just one more requirement, if that does not seem too
> unreasonable) if the CA is started off with a random initial state on many
> occasions, the frequency of occurrence of the two types of glider must
> converge on the ratio 7:1 (plus or minus 10%).
>
> Finding a system in which there are more than two unique types of glider
> would not count. There must be exactly two.
>
> And it goes without saying that the interactions between cells should be of
> the sort that qualifies the system as 'complex'. I know that is difficult
> to define, but it would obviously be cheating to put a large programmable
> engine inside each cell and have these processors explicitly negotiate with
> one another to form the gliders.
>
> (One other comment: in your above suggestion you talk about some of
> Wolfram's numbered rules, but I am not quite sure how this relates.)
>
> So there you go. As you say, the challenge is to do this and then give
> reasons why the rules were picked, and also to do a comparison with chosing
> rules at random.
>
> If people find it really too difficult to get the frequency ratio, I'd be
> happy enough to see just the two gliders.
>
>
>
> Richard Loosemore
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------
> agi
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--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first
overcome " - Dr Samuel Johnson
-------------------------------------------
agi
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