Mike, There are at least 2 ways this can happen, I think. The first way is that a mechanism is theoretically proven to be "complete", for some less-than-sufficient formalism. The best example of this is one I already mentioned: the neural nets of the nineties (specifically, feedforward neural nets with multiple hidden layers). There is a completeness result associated with these. I quote from http://www.learnartificialneuralnetworks.com/backpropagation.html :
"Although backpropagation can be applied to networks with any number of layers, just as for networks with binary units it has been shown (Hornik, Stinchcombe, & White, 1989; Funahashi, 1989; Cybenko, 1989; Hartman, Keeler, & Kowalski, 1990) that only one layer of hidden units suces to approximate any function with finitely many discontinuities to arbitrary precision, provided the activation functions of the hidden units are non-linear (the universal approximation theorem). In most applications a feed-forward network with a single layer of hidden units is used with a sigmoid activation function for the units. " This sort of thing could have contributed to the 50 years of less-than-success you mentioned. The second way this phenomenon could manifest is more a personal fear than anything else. I am worried that there really might be partial principles of mind that could seem to be able to do everything for a time. The possibility is made concrete for me by analogies to several smaller domains. In linguistics, the grammar that we are taught in high school does almost everything. In logic, 1st-order systems do almost everything. In sequence learning, hidden markov models do almost everything. So, it is conceivable that some AGI method will be missing something fundamental, yet seem for a time to be all-encompassing. On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 5:58 AM, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Abram:I am worried-- worried that an AGI system based on anything less than > the one most powerful logic will be able to fool AGI researchers for a > long time into thinking that it is capable of general intelligence. > > Can you explain this to me? (I really am interested in understanding your > thinking). AGI's have a roughly 50 year record of total failure. They have > never shown the slightest sign of general intelligence - of being able to > cross domains. How do you think they will or could fool anyone? > > > > ------------------------------------------- > agi > Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now > RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ > Modify Your Subscription: > https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com > ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=111637683-c8fa51 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
