[agi] Fwd: [DIV10] opportunity for graduate studies in evolution of human creativity
It's not exactly AGI ... but if anyone is looking for an interesting, funded PhD project, this could be worth applying for ... I know Liane and she's pretty open-minded and interesting... -- Ben G - Original Message - From: Liane Gabora To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 11:20 AM Subject: [DIV10] opportunity for graduate studies in evolution of human creativity PLEASE PASS THIS ON TO ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE POTENTIALLY INTERESTED: I have funding for one or two bright, motivated graduate students interested in either experimental studies or computer modeling related to the evolution of human cognition with an emphasis on human creativity. An outline of the funded project is provided below, but it is completely acceptable that the project deviate from this original proposal according to the interests of the student and the demands of the project as it unfolds. It is still potentially possible for the student to begin in the fall of 2008 but it would be necessary to contact me more or less immediately by email at [EMAIL PROTECTED] if we were to make this happen. A 2009 start date is also possible. Liane ~~~ Liane Gabora, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Psychology University of British Columbia Okanagan campus, University Way Kelowna BC, V1V 1V7, CANADA Ph: (250) 807-9849 Fax: (250)807-8439 www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/liane Summary of Proposed Research It has often been proposed that life is not the only thing to have evolved on our planet, that the stories, ideas, beliefs systems, and artifacts that make up culture also evolve. However it has not been established in what sense culture constitutes an evolutionary process. The goal of this research is to definitively establish the mechanisms by which human culture evolves. I aim to bring forward a theoretical framework for cultural evolution that is as sound as our theoretical framework for biological evolution, and apply it to the task of reconstructing our past and exploring possible futures. It is widely assumed that what evolves through culture is discrete units of information (e.g. culturgens or memes). The alternative investigated here is that what evolves through culture is the mind as a whole, or more specifically, individuals' internal models of the world, including habitual ways of thinking and communicating (Gabora, 2004, 2008). This internal model is referred to as a worldview. Of necessity, a worldview acquires and expresses cultural information in the form of discrete units (e.g. gestures or artifacts), but the processing of it reflects the multifaceted web of knowledge, experience, needs and perspectives that constitute the worldview. It is proposed that the worldview is to cultural evolution what the body is to biological evolution: a self-organizing, self-mending, self-regenerating structure. It is further proposed that a worldview evolves not—like modern-day organisms—through natural selection (survival of the fittest), which operates at the level of populations (Gabora, 2004, 2005, 2008), but—like pre-DNA life forms—through piecemeal transformation at the level of individuals (Gabora, 2006; Vetsigian, Woese, & Goldenfeld, 2006). In other words, cultural evolution evolves through a Lamarckian process more akin to the evolution of the earliest life than present-day life. This theory will be developed and tested in the proposed research program. The first project builds on a computer model of culture that showed that the invention and imitation of ideas in a group of neural network based agents exhibits change that is cumulative and adaptive but of limited complexity, and not open-ended (Gabora, 1995). Agents' cognitive architecture will be modified to facilitate the blending of concepts, the chaining of ideas and actions, and implementation of actions that cumulatively modify their environment. They will also be given the ability to shift according to the demands of the situation between top-down and bottom-up modes of information processing, thereby simulating the human capacity to spontaneously and unconsciously shift between analytic (convergent) and associative (divergent) forms of thought. I will assess the degree to which the resulting cognitive architecture has the self-organizing, self-mending, self-regenerating structure proposed to make Lamarckian evolution possible. I will investigate whether the modified agents exhibit cultural evolution that is not just cumulative and adaptive but open-ended, i.e. generate inventions that are unanticipated, and that create niches for new inventions. The second project will result in a psychologically informed software program for reconstructing human material cultural history. The program allows the user to enter the attributes of artifacts associated with one or more distinct or interacting cultural groups. It provides information about this pattern of artifact distribution that is not evident from the attrib
Re: [agi] The resource allocation problem
On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 6:30 PM, William Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The resource allocation problem and why it needs to be solved first > > How much memory and processing power should you apply to the following > things?: > > Visual Processing > Reasoning > Sound Processing > Seeing past experiences and how they apply to the current one > Searching for new ways of doing things > Applying each heuristic > This question supposes a specific kind of architecture, where these things are in some sense separate from each other. If they are but aspects of the same process, with modalities integrated parts of reasoning, resources can't be rationed on such a high level. Rather underlying low-level elements should be globally restricted and differentiate to support different high-level processes (so that certain portion of them gets mainly devoted to visual processing, high-level reasoning, language, etc.). -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Symbols
Mike Tintner wrote: Richard: I already did publish a paper doing exactly that ... haven't you read it? Yep. And I'm still mystified. I should have added that I have a vague idea of what you mean by complex system and its newness, but no idea of why it will solve any unsolved problem of AGI, and absolutely no idea of what it actually does. My guess is: you use it to bet on the gee-gees :) Does anyone else know BTW? (This is marketing research). So I went to the trouble of writing an 8424-word paper and you have absolutely no idea what it means, and cannot even get so far as to ask some specific questions about it? It sounds a little like you are saying: "I didn't understand this so you must try again." How do I know that the text I already wrote was not perfect the way it was, and that the problem is at your end? ;-) Just asking. I was actually going to re-write it in a longer form soon, because the size of the chapter that Ben would accept for the conference proceedings was barely enough for me to explain the idea properly. Richard Loosemore --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The resource allocation problem
Charles H: Due to this, the resource management should not be algorithmic,
but
free to adapt to the amount of resources at hand. I'm intent on a
economic solution to the problem, where each activity is an economic
actor.
The idea of economics is v. interesting & important. I think - & I'm
confident science will come to think - of humans as psychoeconomies -
continually having to decide how much effort and time we will continue to
invest in each activity, both mental and physical. We automatically ask
whether it's "worth" investing our resources - worth the likely risks and
costs in terms of effort and time . ("Is it worth it?" "Can I be
arsed/bothered" "Is there any chance of it working?" "It'll take forever/no
time at all.." etc. etc)
This is a continuous metacognitive level of activity-assessment, and it
applies to very small sub-activities as well. We continually ask ourselves,
for example, even in putting together posts like these, whether it is worth
developing this idea or that, or trying to dig up a reference, or find an
analogy. We don't just proceed in automatic trains of thought, as AFAIK
current computer programs do.
Such psychoeconomic, metacognitive "resource management" is essential for a
true AGI. For one thing, a true AGI has to be able to drop - and therefore
decide whether it's worth dropping - any activity at literally any moment -
in order to attend to something more important that may arise.
So I'd be interested to hear more from you here, especially on how your
management will be other than algorithmic.
---
agi
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Re: [agi] The resource allocation problem
Will, In NARS I use dynamic resource allocation. See http://nars.wang.googlepages.com/wang.computation.pdf and http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/pub/wang.resource.ps A similar approach is Hofstadter's "parallel terraced scan", see http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/parallel.html Beside the references you mentioned, you may also want to check out the other works reported at 1996 AAAI Symposium on "Flexible Computation" (http://flexcomp.microsoft.com/flexpr.htm), and Stuart Russell and Eric Wefald, Principles of Meta-Reasoning, http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/russell91principles.html plus the psychological literature on attention and memory. I'd be very interested in your paper. Pei On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 10:30 AM, William Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The resource allocation problem and why it needs to be solved first > > How much memory and processing power should you apply to the following > things?: > > Visual Processing > Reasoning > Sound Processing > Seeing past experiences and how they apply to the current one > Searching for new ways of doing things > Applying each heuristic > > Is there one right way of deciding these things when you have limited > resources? At time A might you want more reasoning done (while in a > debate) and at time B more visual processing (while driving). > > There is also the long term memory problem, should you remember your > first kiss or the first star trek episode you saw. Which is more > important? > > An intelligent system needs to solve this problem for itself, as only > it will know what is important for the problems it faces. That is it > is a local problem. It also requires resources itself. If resources > are tight then very approximate methods of determining how many > resources to spend on each activity. > > Due to this, the resource management should not be algorithmic, but > free to adapt to the amount of resources at hand. I'm intent on a > economic solution to the problem, where each activity is an economic > actor. > > This approach needs to be at the lowest level because each activity > has to be programmed with the knowledge of how to act in an economic > setting as well as to perform its job. How much should it pay for the > other activities of the the programs around it? > > I'll attempt to write a paper on this, with proper references (Baum, > Mark Miller et Al.) But I would be interested in feedback at this > stage, > > Will Pearson > > --- > agi > Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now > RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ > Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com > --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] The resource allocation problem
The resource allocation problem and why it needs to be solved first How much memory and processing power should you apply to the following things?: Visual Processing Reasoning Sound Processing Seeing past experiences and how they apply to the current one Searching for new ways of doing things Applying each heuristic Is there one right way of deciding these things when you have limited resources? At time A might you want more reasoning done (while in a debate) and at time B more visual processing (while driving). There is also the long term memory problem, should you remember your first kiss or the first star trek episode you saw. Which is more important? An intelligent system needs to solve this problem for itself, as only it will know what is important for the problems it faces. That is it is a local problem. It also requires resources itself. If resources are tight then very approximate methods of determining how many resources to spend on each activity. Due to this, the resource management should not be algorithmic, but free to adapt to the amount of resources at hand. I'm intent on a economic solution to the problem, where each activity is an economic actor. This approach needs to be at the lowest level because each activity has to be programmed with the knowledge of how to act in an economic setting as well as to perform its job. How much should it pay for the other activities of the the programs around it? I'll attempt to write a paper on this, with proper references (Baum, Mark Miller et Al.) But I would be interested in feedback at this stage, Will Pearson --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Symbols
On 31/03/2008, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Did you get the fact that once you generalize your idea enough, we're > all in complete agreement -- but that *a lot* of your specific facts are > just plain wrong (to whit -- the phrase "*vision isn't just saccade-ing. > The retina does also register whole images, even if in varying degrees of > fidelity*" is nonsensical if you truly understanding what saccading is and > how the retina operates)? > I think it's not presently known exactly how the brain reconstructs the visual scene from a sequence of samples obtained by saccades. If there are any papers on this I'd be grateful if someone could point them out. What we do know is that the data obtained from the retina at any point in time is a fairly low resolution noisy image heavily biased towards the foveal area, and that from a sequence of movements our brain somehow synthesises this data and gives us a kind of executive summary of what's in front of us (a simulation, if you prefer). --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
