In theorem proving computers are weak too compared to performance of good mathematicians. The domain of mathematics is well understood. But we do not understand how we manage to solve problems within this domain.
In my opinion language itself is no real domain for intelligence at all. Language is just a communication protocol. You have patterns of a certain domain in your brain you have to translate your internal pattern representation to a sequence of words in order to communicate your patterns to another person. It is similar to the language of XML. The computer has a database und algorithms which work with its data. But XML is just a communication protocol. The computer translates its internal data representation into an XML-string in order to send it to another place (possibly another computer). Do you think, you can learn how databases and the algorithms work by learning to understand the xml-strings? I don't think so. And similar I don't think that it is an efficient way to build and AGI by understanding human intelligence from the perspective of language understanding. Of course, language understanding gives us some hints about data representation within the brain: Here is a simple example of language understanding by two sentences: "Yesterday I went into a garden with apple trees. The fruits tasted very well." We know that the word fruits represent the apples of the apple trees in the garden. The following could be a model for this phenomenon: If the listener receives the first sentence, some patterns are activated in his brain. One of these patterns is the pattern of apples. Then, the person receives the second sentence which activates the pattern of fruits. Then somehow the person creates the links between the patterns of the first sentence and the patterns of the second sentence. This example suggests we can learn the nature of human intelligence by the domain of language understanding. But this is probably a misconception as I hopefully have pointed out by my example of XML and the databases and algorithms of computers. The real stuff of human intelligence is behind the language understanding and not the language understanding itself. Language understanding is just an add-on. In order to create AGI as soon as possible we should choose a domain which is as simple as possible but still sufficient for AGI. Following this approach we should drop language understanding for the first AGI. As Ben has pointed out language understanding is useful to teach AGI. But if we use the domain of mathematics we can teach AGI by formal expressions more easily and we understand these expressions as well. - Matthias >>> Matt Mahony wrote: Would you consider Gelernter's theorem prover [1] an example of AGI? It proved geometry theorems by drawing diagrams that helped it heuristically trim the search space. The problem with well understood problems is that they are well understood. Thus, there has been little progress since the pioneering work in AI done before 1965. Computers can do many tasks better than humans. The areas where computers are weak are language, vision, and motor coordination. I think a lot of the intuition that mathematicians use in solving difficult proofs is really a language modeling problem. Mathematicians can read proofs done by others and apply similar techniques. Likewise, writing software has to be understood in terms of natural language learning and modeling. A programming language is a compromise between what humans can understand and what machines can understand. Humans learn C++ grammar and semantics by induction, from lots of examples. Machines know C++ from an explicit specification. Natural language is poorly understood, which is exactly why we need to study it. 1. Gelernter, H., Realization of a Geometry-Theorem Proving Machine, Proceedings of an International Conference on Information Processing, Paris: UNESCO House, pp. 273-282, 1959. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- 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=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
