Valentina Poletti wrote:
I have a question for you AGIers.. from your experience as well as from your background, how relevant do you think software engineering is in developing AI software and, in particular AGI software? Just wondering.. does software verification as well as correctness proving serve any use in this field? Or is this something used just for Nasa and critical applications?
1) Software engineering (if we take that to mean the conventional repertoire of techniques taught as "SE") is relevant to any project that gets up above a certain size, but it is less important when the project is much smaller, serves a more exploratory function, or where the design is constantly changing. To this extent I agree with Pei's comments.
2) If you are looking beyond the idea of simply grabbing some SE techniques off the shelf, and are instead asking if SE can have an impact on AGI, then the answer is a dramatic "Yes!". Why? Because tools determine the way that we *can* think about things. Tools shape our thoughts. They can sometimes enable us to think in new ways that were simply not possible before the tools were invented.
I decided a long time ago that if cognitive scientists had easy-to-use use tools that enabled them to construct realistic components of thinking systems, their entire style of explanation would be revolutionized. Right now, cog sci people cannot afford the time to be both cog sci experts *and* sophisticated software developers, so they have to make do with programming that is, by and large, trivially simple. This determines the kinds of models and explanations they can come up with. (Ditto in spades for the neuroscientists, by the way).
So, the more global answer to your question is that nothing could be more important for AGI than software engineering.
The problem is, that the kind of software engineering we are talking about is not a matter of grabbing SE components off the shelf, but asking what the needs of cognitive scientists and AGIers might be, and then inventing new techniques and tools that will give these people the ability to think about intelligent systems in new ways.
That is why I am working on Safaire. Richard Loosemore ------------------------------------------- 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=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
