On Saturday 06 September 2008, William Pearson wrote: > I'm very interested in computers that self-maintain, that is reduce > (or eliminate) the need for a human to be in the loop or know much > about the internal workings of the computer. However it doesn't need > a vastly different computing paradigm it just needs a different way > of thinking about the systems. E.g. how can you design a system that > does not need a human around to fix mistakes, upgrade it or maintain > it in general.
Yes, these systems are interesting. I can easily imagine a system that generates systems that have low human maintenance costs. But suppose that the system that you make generates a system (with that low hu maint cost), and this 2nd-gen system does it again and again. This is the problem of clanking replicators too -- you need to have some way to correct divergence and for errors of replication; and not only that, but as you go into new environments there are new things that have to be taken into account for maintenance. Bacteria solve this problem with having many billions of cells per culture and then having enough genetic variability to somehow scrounge up a partial solution within time -- so that once you get to the Nth-generation you're not screwed entirely if some change occurs in the environment. There was a recent experiment in the news that has been going for 20 years, the Michigan man who had bacterial selection experiments in bottles for the past 20 years only to find that they evolved an ability to metabolize something they didn't metabolize before. That's an example of being able to work in new environments, and there's a lot of cost to it (dead bacteria, many generations, etc.) that silicon projects can't quite do simply because of resource/cost constraints if you use traditional approaches. What would an alternative approach look like? One where you don't need dead silicon projects, and one where you have enough instances of programs that you're able to find a solution with your genetic algorithm in enough time? The increasing availability of RAM and hdd space might be enough to let us bruteforce it, but the embodiment of bacteria in the problem domains is something that "more memory strategies" don't quite address. Thoughts? - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ Engineers: http://heybryan.org/exp.html irc.freenode.net #hplusroadmap ------------------------------------------- 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
