Hi Johnathon,
I disagree, play without rules can certainly be fun. Running just to run,
jumping just to jump. Play doesn't have to be a game, per se. It's simply a
purposeless expression of the joy of being alive. It turns out of course that
play is helpful for achieving certain goals that we interpret as being
installed by evolution. But we don't play to achieve goals, we do it because
it's fun. As Mike said, this very discussion is a kind of play, and while we
can certainly identify goals that we try to accomplish in the course of hashing
these things out, there's an element in it, for me anyway, of just doing it
because I love doing it. I suspect that's true for others here. I hope so,
anyway.
Of course, those that are dogmatically functionalist will view such language as
'fun' as totally irrelevant. That's ok. The cool thing about AI is that
eventually, it will shed light on whether subjective experience (to
functionalists, an inconvenience to be done away with) is critical to
intelligence.
To address your second question, the implicit goal is always reproduction. If
there is one basic reductionist element to all of life, it is that. Making play
fun is a way of getting us to play at all, so that we are more likely to
reproduce. There's a limit however to the usefulness and accuracy of reducing
everything to reproduction.
Terren
--- On Mon, 8/25/08, Jonathan El-Bizri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Part of play is the specification of arbitrary goals and limitations within the
overlying process. Games without rules aren't 'fun' to people or kittens.
Play, as distinct from pactice, is its own reward - the reward felt by a
kitten. The spirit of Mike's question, I think, was about identifying the
essential goalless-ness of play, the sense in which playing fosters adaptivity
of goals. If you really want to interpret goal-satisfaction in play, it must be
a meta-goal of mastering one's environment - and that is such a broadly defined
goal that I don't see how one could specify it to a seed AI. I believe that's
why evolution used the "trick" of making it fun.
But making it 'fun' doesn't answer the question of what the implicit goals are.
Piaget's theories of assimilation can bring us closer to this, I am of the mind
that they encompass at least part of the intellectual drive toward play and
investigation.
Jonathan El-Bizri
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