--- On Fri, 10/24/08, Russell Wallace <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > http://wiki.alu.org/Russell_Wallace%27s_Road_to_Lisp
I think choosing a programming language for AGI is a bit premature. The purpose of AGI is to satisfy the goals of people. That role is currently served by the global economy, which has an algorithmic complexity of 10^17 to 10^18 bits. Almost all of that knowledge is stored in human brains. The maximum rate at which it can be extracted is 2 bits per second per person. That knowledge is not going to be coded in any programming language. In fact, it is far too expensive even to code it as explicit instruction in natural language. The cheapest way to extract it (at a cost of $1 quadrillion) is a society of pervasive surveillance where everything you say and do is public knowledge and searchable. This requires solutions to the language and vision problems. This will be practical once we have a million-fold decrease in the cost of computation, based on the cost of simulating a brain sized neural network. It could occur sooner if we discover more efficient solutions. So far we have not. If you are selecting a language for self improving AI using a genetic algorithm, then you need to select a language near the boundary between stability and chaos, one with a Lyapunov exponent near 0. All programming languages (including LISP) have positive exponents (are chaotic). A small change to the source code (i.e. randomly flipping one bit) produces on average a large change in behavior that is rarely beneficial. A language is borderline stable if a random change is amplified by X with probability 1/X. Natural language and DNA both have this property. The ratio of helpful to harmful changes resulting from either random bit mutations or swapping large blocks of code is high enough to make the approach practical. If you are selecting a language to implement language or vision, good choices are C, C++, and assembler. The primary concern is efficiency and the ability to make good use of underlying parallelism in the hardware. The choice will probably be less important as hardware gets faster. -- 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/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
