On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 3:24 PM, Vladimir Nesov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Again, specifics. What is this "specification" thing? What kind of
> task are to be specified in it? Where does it lead, where does it end?

At the low end, you could look at some of the fitness functions that
have been written for genetic programming. Moving up a bit, we could
take gameplaying as an example, where specifications would involve
writing the rules of games like chess and Go. Looking further ahead, a
highly desirable application area would be verifying, debugging and
configuring existing software, the interface to which would entail
writing specifications of existing languages and platforms. Fancy
writing a C compiler or a Java byte code interpreter in raw lambda
calculus?

> In the context of my general argument I don't assume that you'd have
> to write that much. If you have to write so much, that is a deviation
> from my default, and you'd need to explain it to connect to this
> argument. Basically, it's a tradeoff between adding complexity in a
> core AI algorithm and adding complexity in a message that AI mush
> handle, in which I'd prefer to keep the core simple.

*nods* I know what you mean, that intuitively feels like it ought to
be the right approach. But it turns out the AI core can't be that
simple and still do anything interesting. It's still desirable to keep
it as simple as reasonably possible, but the threshold is above the
point where using lambda calculus instead of Common Lisp would help.


-------------------------------------------
agi
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