Re: Symbol Grounding [WAS Re: [agi] AGI-08 videos]
Richard wrote: Then, when we came back from the break, Ben Goertzel announced that the roundtable on symbol grounding was cancelled, to make room for some other discussion on a topic like the future of AGI, or some such. I was outraged by this. The subsequent discussion was a pathetic waste of time, during which we just listened to a bunch of people making vacuous speculations and jokes about artificial intelligence. In the end, I decided that the reason this happened was that when the workshop was being planned, the title was chosen in ignorance. That, in fact, Ben never even intended to talk about the real issue of grounding symbols, but just needed a plausible-sounding theme-buzzword, and so he just intended the workshop to be about a meaningless concept like connecting AGI systems to the real world. No, that is not the case. What happened, as I recall, was that the conference schedule was running late, and one of the speakers from the session on symbol grounding had cancelled anyway, so it seemed apropos to skip from that session to the next one -- since **something** had to be cancelled to make the schedule fit That conference was a small workshop and was pretty loosely organized, I decided to let the discussion and content flow according to the general interests of the participants. As it happened the participants as a whole were not gripped by the symbol grounding theme and gravitated to other topics, which was OK with me. Unfortunately to Richard this seemed to have been his main interest. Feedback on AGI-06 overall was overwhelmingly positive; in fact Richard's is the only significantly negative report I've seen. AGI-08 was more formally structured, as will be AGI-09; but these are larger conferences, which require more structure to run at all smoothly. -- Ben G --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI-08 videos
Richard Loosemore said: But instead of deep-foundation topics like these, what do we get? Mostly what we get is hacks. People just want to dive right and make quick assumptions about the answers to all of these issues, then they get hacking and build something - *anything* - to make it look as though they are getting somewhere. I don't believe that this is accurate. Those who I speak to in this community (including the authors of papers at AGI-08 you claim have produced hacks) give me the clear impression that they spend every day considering deep-foundation issues. The systems that you see are not random hacks based on quick assumptions, but the by-products of people grappling with these deep-foundation issues. This is certainly my experience. Every day I'm trying to grapple with deeper problems, but must admit that I'm unlikely to solve anything from my armchair. To create something that can be comprehended, critiqued and studied, I have to carefully reduce my ideas to a set of what may be almost laughable assumptions. However, once I've made such assumptions and implemented a system, I have a much better grasp on the problem at hand. From there, I can go back and explore ways of removing some of those assumptions, I can try to better model my ideas, and I can rethink the deeper issues with the knowledge I learnt from that experiment. When I publish work on those concrete systems, I admit that I am not directly discussing deeper issues. However, I believe that this method makes communication much more effective and clear (I've tried both ways and have experienced remarkably more success in conveying my ideas with sloppy examples than with excellent arguments) and I believe that most readers can look beyond the annoying but necessary assumptions and see the deeper ideas that I am attempting to express. As I work on the problem further, I'll create systems that are closer to my own ideas and may find ways of distilling my ideas into more formal treatments of the fundamental issues. I suspect that this experience is shared by most people here. Ultimately, I think that any work in an area like AGI should be read with attention to the things left between the lines. In fact, I think that expecting researchers to focus only on the fundamentals first is counterproductive: not only will you end up with a whole lot of hypothesizing with no connection to reality or experience, but you'll have a whole lot of talk and opinion but no understanding of each other. -Ben --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] reflectivity as consciousness
On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 11:15 PM, Anthony George [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But, I want to ask the list whether or not there has been any trend or attempt to incorporate reflexivity into an AGI model. By reflexivity I mean, basically, two computers that interact with each other but, perhaps, don't know that they are two separate computers. This is just based on an intuitive image that I've had: that consciousness might be something like the tension between two viewpoints, and not either of the viewpoints themselves. Two speakers oriented the same way with their soundwaves going out would be the two computers, where the soundwaves interact would be where the AGI would be. Hi, What problem are you trying to solve? You seem to be talking about detection of novel situations. Let's say a simple component can be stable when it receives the same kind of input again and again and it doesn't change in response to that input anymore. Then it will only be necessary (or possible) for this component to change when it receives novel input, that is unlike the usual kind. The change in the component can be viewed as adding a new fact to memory. In this case memory only needs to be created when something changes. When multiple components interact, that is their responses influence their inputs, it may be simple to create unusual inputs for some of the components at first. But if system gradually adapts, most of the inputs circulating in such system will become usual for components that receive them, and there will be less and less memory formation. Conscious activity is usually accompanied by new memories (at least in the short term). If no new memories are formed, you wouldn't know about how the activity proceeds, you'll only be able to observe the outcome (if any). You can observe this feature in actions that you are used to, e.g. you don't remember thinking about choosing specific movements when walking or driving. It happens automatically, and the process of performing some quite complex activities is closed from introspection. But whenever something unusual happens, you notice it instantly. A human mind is sufficiently complex, and it's possible to clash many facts combinatorially, creating novel combinations to form memories about. Thought-aware thinking happens when situation is novel, when either incompatible knowledge elements within the mind interact, or when the fact perceived in the world is different from what's in the mind. -- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI-08 videos
OK. Let me give a system engineer's perspective . . . . I believe that a lot of the current systems have done a lot of excellent, rigorous work both at the bottom-most and top-most levels of cognition. The problem is, I believe, that these two levels are separated by two to five more levels and that no one is really even willing to acknowledge that these levels exist and are necessary and will require *a lot* of work and learning to implement. We are not going to get to human-level intelligence with low-level mechanisms and a scheduler. The low-level mechanisms are not going to miraculously figure out how to assemble knowledge into a usable, scalable foundation for more discovery and knowledge. Most of the systems that are highly touted are actually merely generic discovery systems with PLANS to extend to a complete cognitive system but nothing more -- and most of them operate at a lower (i.e. data) level (rather than a knowledge level) than makes sense if you're truly trying to build a knowledge and cognitive system rather than a data-mining and discovery system. Most of the rest (Cyc, etc.) operate at the highest conceptual level but are massive compendiums of bolt-ons with no internal consistency, rhyme, reason, or hope of being extendable by the system itself. Almost all of the systems are starting out way too large rather than trying for a very small seed with rational mechanisms for growth and ways to cleanly add additional mechanisms. Most of the systems have too much Not-Invented-Here syndrome and as a result are being leap-frogged by others who are intelligently using Commercial-Off-The-Shelf or Open-Source software. Note: Most of these complaints do *NOT* apply to Texai (except possibly the two to five level complaint -- except that Texai is actually starting at what I would call one of the middle levels and looks like it has reasonable plans for branching out. Richard doesn't express his arguments in easy to understand terms . . . . but his core belief that we need more engineering to solve deep problems and less hacking to quickly achieve low-hanging fruit (and then stalling out afterwards) definitely needs to be given more currency. - Original Message - From: Benjamin Johnston [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 4:36 AM Subject: Re: [agi] AGI-08 videos Richard Loosemore said: But instead of deep-foundation topics like these, what do we get? Mostly what we get is hacks. People just want to dive right and make quick assumptions about the answers to all of these issues, then they get hacking and build something - *anything* - to make it look as though they are getting somewhere. I don't believe that this is accurate. Those who I speak to in this community (including the authors of papers at AGI-08 you claim have produced hacks) give me the clear impression that they spend every day considering deep-foundation issues. The systems that you see are not random hacks based on quick assumptions, but the by-products of people grappling with these deep-foundation issues. This is certainly my experience. Every day I'm trying to grapple with deeper problems, but must admit that I'm unlikely to solve anything from my armchair. To create something that can be comprehended, critiqued and studied, I have to carefully reduce my ideas to a set of what may be almost laughable assumptions. However, once I've made such assumptions and implemented a system, I have a much better grasp on the problem at hand. From there, I can go back and explore ways of removing some of those assumptions, I can try to better model my ideas, and I can rethink the deeper issues with the knowledge I learnt from that experiment. When I publish work on those concrete systems, I admit that I am not directly discussing deeper issues. However, I believe that this method makes communication much more effective and clear (I've tried both ways and have experienced remarkably more success in conveying my ideas with sloppy examples than with excellent arguments) and I believe that most readers can look beyond the annoying but necessary assumptions and see the deeper ideas that I am attempting to express. As I work on the problem further, I'll create systems that are closer to my own ideas and may find ways of distilling my ideas into more formal treatments of the fundamental issues. I suspect that this experience is shared by most people here. Ultimately, I think that any work in an area like AGI should be read with attention to the things left between the lines. In fact, I think that expecting researchers to focus only on the fundamentals first is counterproductive: not only will you end up with a whole lot of hypothesizing with no connection to reality or experience, but you'll have a whole lot of talk and opinion but no understanding of each other. -Ben --- agi
[agi] Evaluating Conference Quality [WAS Re: Symbol Grounding ...]
Ben Goertzel wrote: Feedback on AGI-06 overall was overwhelmingly positive; in fact Richard's is the only significantly negative report I've seen. Of course, if the conference was filled with low-quality presentations and low-quality comments from participants, then all of those people who gave presentations and who made comments would be BOUND to give an objective evaluation of the quality of the conference, wouldn't they? ;-) They wouldn't have any vested interest in saying What a success!, would they? And if one person gave a poor evaluation of the conference based on specific points of fact, rather than just feel-good opinion (if, for example, that person noted a complete inability of the participants to talk about the main theme of the conference in a technically accurate way), that empirically-based observation would count for nothing, compared with the great feeling that everyone had about the meeting? 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] organising parallel processes
On 5/4/08, Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As perhaps you know, I want to organize Texai as a vast multitude of agents situated in a hierarchical control system, grouped as possibly redundant, load-sharing, agents within an agency sharing a specific mission. I have given some thought to the message content, and assuming that my bootstrap English dialog effort actually works, then English language as an Agent Control Language vocabulary becomes possible at the more deliberative, higher levels of the hierarchy, when the duration of NL parsing and generation is small compared to the overall task duration. Let me offer my naive opinion: The distributive agents would be owned by different people on the net, who would want their agents to do *different* things for them. This occurs simultaneously. We need to distinguish 2 situations: A) where all the agents cooperate to solve ONE problem B) where agents are solving their own problems Your scheme would be useful for A. But it seems that most AGI users would want B. Which problem do you intend to solve? In case B, your scheme would add a lot of complications and whether it'd be beneficial or not is rather unclear. YKY --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] jamming with OpenCog / Novamente
I'm wondering if it's possible to plug in my learning algorithm to OpenCog / Novamente? The main incompatibilities stem from: 1. predicate logic vs term logic 2. graphical KB vs sentential KB If there is a way to somehow bridge these gaps, it may be possible YKY --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Evaluating Conference Quality [WAS Re: Symbol Grounding ...]
On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 10:10 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: Feedback on AGI-06 overall was overwhelmingly positive; in fact Richard's is the only significantly negative report I've seen. Of course, if the conference was filled with low-quality presentations and low-quality comments from participants, then all of those people who gave presentations and who made comments would be BOUND to give an objective evaluation of the quality of the conference, wouldn't they? ;-) They wouldn't have any vested interest in saying What a success!, would they? And if one person gave a poor evaluation of the conference based on specific points of fact, rather than just feel-good opinion (if, for example, that person noted a complete inability of the participants to talk about the main theme of the conference in a technically accurate way), that empirically-based observation would count for nothing, compared with the great feeling that everyone had about the meeting? Ben: I admire your patience. Richard: congrats - you just made my ignore list - and that's a first -- Stefan Pernar 3-E-101 Silver Maple Garden #6 Cai Hong Road, Da Shan Zi Chao Yang District 100015 Beijing P.R. CHINA Mobil: +86 1391 009 1931 Skype: Stefan.Pernar --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Evaluating Conference Quality [WAS Re: Symbol Grounding ...]
Stefan Pernar wrote: On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 10:10 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: Feedback on AGI-06 overall was overwhelmingly positive; in fact Richard's is the only significantly negative report I've seen. Of course, if the conference was filled with low-quality presentations and low-quality comments from participants, then all of those people who gave presentations and who made comments would be BOUND to give an objective evaluation of the quality of the conference, wouldn't they? ;-) They wouldn't have any vested interest in saying What a success!, would they? And if one person gave a poor evaluation of the conference based on specific points of fact, rather than just feel-good opinion (if, for example, that person noted a complete inability of the participants to talk about the main theme of the conference in a technically accurate way), that empirically-based observation would count for nothing, compared with the great feeling that everyone had about the meeting? Ben: I admire your patience. Richard: congrats - you just made my ignore list - and that's a first Another person who cannot discuss the issues. Another person who, instead, indulges in personal abuse. This field will stand or die according to the number of people in it who can address issues, even when those issues are challenging and/or embarrassing. 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI-08 videos
On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Note: Most of these complaints do *NOT* apply to Texai (except possibly the two to five level complaint -- except that Texai is actually starting at what I would call one of the middle levels and looks like it has reasonable plans for branching out. Texai has the added value of freshness, but the challenge Steve is facing now is perhaps bigger than the ones he has conquered already: to reflect on the system's state and to represent, learn and reason about actions. --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [agi] Evaluating Conference Quality [WAS Re: Symbol Grounding ...]
I didn't sign up to listen to you whine, but I certainly tried to cancel my subscription because you whine. Any ETA on when that'll actually go through, anyone? -Original Message- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: May 6, 2008 12:28 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] Evaluating Conference Quality [WAS Re: Symbol Grounding ...] Stefan Pernar wrote: On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 10:10 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: Feedback on AGI-06 overall was overwhelmingly positive; in fact Richard's is the only significantly negative report I've seen. Of course, if the conference was filled with low-quality presentations and low-quality comments from participants, then all of those people who gave presentations and who made comments would be BOUND to give an objective evaluation of the quality of the conference, wouldn't they? ;-) They wouldn't have any vested interest in saying What a success!, would they? And if one person gave a poor evaluation of the conference based on specific points of fact, rather than just feel-good opinion (if, for example, that person noted a complete inability of the participants to talk about the main theme of the conference in a technically accurate way), that empirically-based observation would count for nothing, compared with the great feeling that everyone had about the meeting? Ben: I admire your patience. Richard: congrats - you just made my ignore list - and that's a first Another person who cannot discuss the issues. Another person who, instead, indulges in personal abuse. This field will stand or die according to the number of people in it who can address issues, even when those issues are challenging and/or embarrassing. 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/?; 7356 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] organising parallel processes
Hi YKY, You said: The distributive agents would be owned by different people on the net, who would want their agents to do different things for them. This occurs simultaneously. We need to distinguish 2 situations: A) where all the agents cooperate to solve ONE problem B) where agents are solving their own problems Your scheme would be useful for A. But it seems that most AGI users would want B. Which problem do you intend to solve? In case B, your scheme would add a lot of complications and whether it'd be beneficial or not is rather unclear. I believe the opposite of what you say I hope that my following explanation will help converge our thinking. Let me first emphasize that I plan a vast multitude of specialized agencies, in which each agency has a particular mission. This pattern is adopted from human agencies. For example, an human advertising agency has as its mission the preparation of advertising media for its customers. Agents, who are governed by the agency, fulfill its mission by carrying out commanded tasks, responding to perceived events, reporting to superiors and controlling subordinates. In the Texai organization I envisage, it would never be the case that all agents or agencies try to solve the same problem - not (A) above. Rather, if a problem arose that is both urgent and sufficiently important, then the agency capable of solving that problem would commandeer the computing resources of other, lower priority, agencies. This is analogous to a natural disaster affecting a human organization - in a flood, everyone changes roles to move materials above the water line. In my plan for Texai, the agents could cooperate together only to the extent that the problem to be solved could be decomposed to match the capabilities of particular agencies. Agents lacking the capability to help out would be omitted from that job. From the standpoint of AGI users, a Texai agent exists for each specialized role (i.e. interest, activity-type) that the user wants - (B) above. My current thinking is to a first provide an instant-message chatbot that intelligent acquires knowledge and skills. The user would only require an instant messaging client, (e.g. text messaging on a cellphone, Google Chat, Yahoo Chat, IRC, AIM, email, etc.). The user would name one or more Texai chatbots and assign them roles (i.e. sports buddy, family buddy, work buddy, cooking buddy, financial buddy, product adviser buddy, matchmaker buddy, etc. ). The required servers would, at the kickoff, be supplied by me. Users would be offered a higher level of benefit if they agree to download a Texai instance, and to leave it running as much as possible, connected to the net. When not providing work for the owning user, it would add its agent-hosting server capability to the Texai cloud. At the time that the Texai bootstrap English dialog system is available, I'll begin fleshing out the hundreds of agencies for which I hope to recruit human mentors. Each agency I establish will have paragraphs of English text to describe its mission, including its relationship with commanding and subordinate agencies. Mentors then will use the dialog system to teach each of their respective agencies the knowledge and skills it requires for its mission. Learned skills will be compiled into Java code for execution. Hopefully this will advance into automatic programming from high level requirements, because programming is a skill which can be taught. Furthermore, I plan agencies whose missions will accomplish recursive self-improvement (e.g. propagate best practices from the discovering agency to all applicable agencies). While at Cycorp, I created two previous small versions of the agency graph, which of course were very much focused on the needs of Cycorp. Now I am inspired by the Wikipedia, to work first on agencies that are required for basic infrastructure and then let mentors, governed by locally-applicable human law, and governed by consensus, establish agencies as they see fit. When I get further along on these ideas, especially when I have an initial set of agencies and missions, I would very much like to vet that organization chart with the readers of this list, before tying to deploy it. Cheers. -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 - Original Message From: YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, May 6, 2008 10:36:16 AM Subject: Re: [agi] organising parallel processes On 5/4/08, Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As perhaps you know, I want to organize Texai as a vast multitude of agents situated in a hierarchical control system, grouped as possibly redundant, load-sharing, agents within an agency sharing a specific mission. I have given some thought to the message content, and
Re: [agi] AGI-08 videos
Hi Lukasz , With regard to the Texai approach, I have subjected myself to these constraints: * to author the bootstrap portion of the system by myself * to write the least amount of code (e.g. not to write an ideal AI language first) * to reuse existing narrow AI solutions and infrastructure to the widest possible extent * as Turing suggested, to build a 'child' mechanism capable of being taught, and to subsequently train it to achieve 'adult' capability * to design a scalable architecture having a multitude of mentors and users It looks now that I am trying to solve at least the following AI-hard problems simultaneously: * to communicate with humans using natural language * to learn by being taught * to achieve generally applicable commonsense behavior * to achieve automatic programming, e.g. programming from very high level specifications, using algorithmic and domain knowledge, plus real-time advice from human mentors Although daunting, I believe small progress on this combination of problems will procede into a virtuous circle of exponential improvement. Cheers, -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 - Original Message From: Lukasz Stafiniak [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, May 6, 2008 11:25:35 AM Subject: Re: [agi] AGI-08 videos On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Note: Most of these complaints do *NOT* apply to Texai (except possibly the two to five level complaint -- except that Texai is actually starting at what I would call one of the middle levels and looks like it has reasonable plans for branching out. Texai has the added value of freshness, but the challenge Steve is facing now is perhaps bigger than the ones he has conquered already: to reflect on the system's state and to represent, learn and reason about actions. --- 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 Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] organising parallel processes
--- YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 5/4/08, Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As perhaps you know, I want to organize Texai as a vast multitude of agents situated in a hierarchical control system, grouped as possibly redundant, load-sharing, agents within an agency sharing a specific mission. I have given some thought to the message content, and assuming that my bootstrap English dialog effort actually works, then English language as an Agent Control Language vocabulary becomes possible at the more deliberative, higher levels of the hierarchy, when the duration of NL parsing and generation is small compared to the overall task duration. Let me offer my naive opinion: The distributive agents would be owned by different people on the net, who would want their agents to do *different* things for them. This occurs simultaneously. We need to distinguish 2 situations: A) where all the agents cooperate to solve ONE problem B) where agents are solving their own problems Your scheme would be useful for A. But it seems that most AGI users would want B. Which problem do you intend to solve? In case B, your scheme would add a lot of complications and whether it'd be beneficial or not is rather unclear. YKY We already have many examples where cooperation between selfish agents results in solving problems that could not be solved individually. AIs would ultimately communicate faster and more effectively than humans, resulting in a more efficient division of labor and better coordination of efforts. -- Matt Mahoney, [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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] organising parallel processes
On 5/6/08, Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I believe the opposite of what you say I hope that my following explanation will help converge our thinking. Let me first emphasize that I plan a vast multitude of specialized agencies, in which each agency has a particular mission. This pattern is adopted from human agencies. For example, an human advertising agency has as its mission the preparation of advertising media for its customers. Agents, who are governed by the agency, fulfill its mission by carrying out commanded tasks, responding to perceived events, reporting to superiors and controlling subordinates. If the agents have common sense, they can use their common sense to broker capabilities among themselves, but that is begging the question because we don't have commonsense AGI yet. A more interesting possibility is whether we can spawn a large number of very *weak* intelligent agents over the net, who don't have common sense, and let commonsense emerge out of them. It seems possible, but we'll need to design distributive algorithms for reasoning, especially distributive deduction... YKY --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] organising parallel processes
Stephen Reed wrote: At the time that the Texai bootstrap English dialog system is available, I'll begin fleshing out the hundreds of agencies for which I hope to recruit human mentors. Each agency I establish will have paragraphs of English text to describe its mission, including its relationship with commanding and subordinate agencies. Mentors then will use the dialog system to teach each of their respective agencies the knowledge and skills it requires for its mission. Learned skills will be compiled into Java code for execution. Hopefully this will advance into automatic programming from high level requirements, because programming is a skill which can be taught. Furthermore, I plan agencies whose missions will accomplish recursive self-improvement (e.g. propagate best practices from the discovering agency to all applicable agencies). This jumped out at me because I just read an article where someone was talking about how we don't know how to program: http://paulspontifications.blogspot.com/2008/05/under-appreciated-fact-we-dont-know-how.html There is no real process for it. We don't really know how it works. There are plenty of courses, and it seems like we teach people to do it, but it is a very mysterious thing. A good portion of people just don't get it when they try to learn. Anyway, it is a very hard problem, and I wouldn't be surprised if programming were an AI-complete problem, because it sure seems like programming always involves arbitrary amounts of domain knowledge, theories of mind, and who knows what all else. But I have to admit I am a fan of compiled programs as part of a set of skills of an intelligent computer agent. The idea showed up in an essay (OK, blog entry) I wrote recently. Also, I want to thank Stephen for adding to this community. He really stood out at AGI-08 as a level-headed, diligent creative force working toward AGI. andi --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] organising parallel processes
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://paulspontifications.blogspot.com/2008/05/under-appreciated-fact-we-dont-know-how.html Computer programming is an art, as Knuth observed. I teach classes in C++, Java, and x86 assember. I can show my students some simple drawings and show them how to hold a brush. But I can't make a Picasso out of them. -- Matt Mahoney, [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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] organising parallel processes
The blog entry is amusing. I started writing software at quite young age (about 10), and I always assumed that it was an art rather like writing a novel or a musical composition. So when I grew older and became employed to write programs I was shocked in my early career to find that some people consider programming to be an activity requiring no creative input. --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] organising parallel processes
Thanks Andi for the kind words. My directly preceding post is about the combination of AI-hard problems that I am trying to solve. It hints that incrementally solving the bunch of them may be achievable, but that sufficiently solving one of them alone may not be. I've given automatic programming a lot of thought over my rather long (i.e. 40 years) experience programming computers. While at Cycorp, I persisted abstract syntax trees for an Turing-complete agent control language into the Cyc knowledge base. I had the idea then that Cyc could thus reason about programs and begin to author portions of them. But the idea did not gain traction with our sponsors nor with Cycorp management, so it languished. My current thinking about automatic programming (a.k.a program synthesis) is centered on the notion of program composition. This activity is a skill that involves both algorithmic knowledge as well as domain knowledge. I am now building an essential set of agent capabilities to compose Java classes, variables, methods, and statements. These capabilities will be associated with preconditions, input/output bindings, and postconditions. A capability matcher library will find candidate agent capabilities that match the given task preconditions and postconditions via subsumption reasoning. I intend to hand-craft some of these compositions into executable Java programs to build use cases for the essential programming skills required. Note that I am building a program composition facility rather than a task-solving interpreter. What I hope to accomplish is a system that solves a problem by writing a program that, when compiled, performs the given task. This will be much faster to repeatedly execute because the overhead of program composition greatly diminishes once the tasks are well understood (e.g. task variations become program parameters and thus no need to compose a new program). Earlier in the project I had hoped to postpone this phase until after the bootstrap English dialog system is completed. But I see now that the general facility of skill acquisition will require precondition and postcondition vocabulary. And because all skills will bottom out into the execution of a Java method, I made the decision to precede now with defining these primitives as skills. For representing pre-and-post conditions I am using an elaborated version of RDF, based upon formula-manipulating classes that I previously released for the Incremental Fluid Construction Grammar vocabulary. I added IMPLIES, NOT, OR, and AND logical operators and variables. Today I finished a class that performs canonicalization (i.e. transformation to conjunctive normal form) and hopefully tomorrow I will complete the capability subsumption matcher. Interested readers can follow my source code commits here. Having a dialog system simplifies automatic programming because Texai will be able to ask for help when required from its mentor, and will not be expected to complete the job on its own. I am resigned to the fact however that initially programming via English dialog will be much more tedious than directly performing the task myself. Until the student exceeds the skill of the mentor, programming this way will be hard. Cheers, -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 - Original Message From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, May 6, 2008 3:36:38 PM Subject: Re: [agi] organising parallel processes Stephen Reed wrote: At the time that the Texai bootstrap English dialog system is available, I'll begin fleshing out the hundreds of agencies for which I hope to recruit human mentors. Each agency I establish will have paragraphs of English text to describe its mission, including its relationship with commanding and subordinate agencies. Mentors then will use the dialog system to teach each of their respective agencies the knowledge and skills it requires for its mission. Learned skills will be compiled into Java code for execution. Hopefully this will advance into automatic programming from high level requirements, because programming is a skill which can be taught. Furthermore, I plan agencies whose missions will accomplish recursive self-improvement (e.g. propagate best practices from the discovering agency to all applicable agencies). This jumped out at me because I just read an article where someone was talking about how we don't know how to program: http://paulspontifications.blogspot.com/2008/05/under-appreciated-fact-we-dont-know-how.html There is no real process for it. We don't really know how it works. There are plenty of courses, and it seems like we teach people to do it, but it is a very mysterious thing. A good portion of people just don't get it when
Re: [agi] jamming with OpenCog / Novamente
Predicate logic vs term logic won't be an issue for OpenCog, as the AtomTable knowledge representation supports both (and many other) formalisms. I don't **think** the sentential KB will be a problem because i believe each of your sentences will be representable as an Implication or Equivalence relationship in the AtomTable. If you give me a specific example of a sentence in your representation, I will tell you how it could most straightforwardly be represented in the AtomTable using the PLN-friendly node and link types. thanks Ben On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 11:40 AM, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm wondering if it's possible to plug in my learning algorithm to OpenCog / Novamente? The main incompatibilities stem from: 1. predicate logic vs term logic 2. graphical KB vs sentential KB If there is a way to somehow bridge these gaps, it may be possible YKY --- 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 -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Goal Driven Systems and AI Dangers [WAS Re: Singularity Outcomes...]
Kaj, Richard, et al, On 5/5/08, Kaj Sotala [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Drive 2: AIs will want to be rational This is basically just a special case of drive #1: rational agents accomplish their goals better than irrational ones, and attempts at self-improvement can be outright harmful if you're irrational in the way that you try to improve yourself. If you're trying to modify yourself to better achieve your goals, then you need to make clear to yourself what your goals are. The most effective method for this is to model your goals as a utility function and then modify yourself to better carry out the goals thus specified. Well, again, what exactly do you mean by rational? There are many meanings of this term, ranging from generally sensible to strictly following a mathematical logic. Rational agents accomplish their goals better than irrational ones? Can this be proved? And with what assumptions? Which goals are better accomplished is the goal of being rational better accomplished by being rational? Is the goal of generating a work of art that has true genuineness something that needs rationality? And if a system is trying to modify itself to better achieve its goals, what if it decides that just enjoying the subjective experience of life is good enough as a goal, and then realizes that it will not get more of that by becoming more rational? This was somewhat wrung out in the 1950s by Herman Kahn of the RAND Corp, who is credited with inventing MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) built on vengeance, etc. Level1: People are irrational, so a rational path may play on that irrationality, and hence be irrational against an unemotional opponent. Level 2: By appearing to be irrational you also appear to be dangerous/violent, and hence there is POWER in apparent irrationality, most especially if on a national and thermonuclear scale. Hence, a maximally capable AGI may appear to be quite crazy to us all-too-human observers. Story: I recently attended an SGI Buddhist meeting with a friend who was a member there. After listening to their discussions, I asked if there was anyone there (from ~30 people) who had ever found themselves in a position of having to kill or injure another person, as I have. There were none, as such experiences tend to change people's outlook on pacifism. Then I mentioned how Herman Kahn's MAD solution to avoiding an almost certain WW3 involved an extremely non-Buddhist approach, gave a thumbnail account of the historical situation, and asked if anyone there had a Buddhist-acceptable solution. Not only was there no other solutions advanced, but they didn't even want to THINK about such things! These people would now be DEAD if not for Herman Kahn, yet they weren't even willing to examine the situation that he found himself in! The ultimate power on earth: An angry 3-year-old with a loaded gun. Hence, I come to quite the opposite solution - that AGIs will want to appear to be IRrational, like the 3-year-old, taking bold steps that force capitulation. I have played tournament chess. However, when faced with a REALLY GREAT chess player (e.g. national champion), as I have had the pleasure of on a couple of occasions, they at first appear to play as novices, making unusual and apparently stupid moves that I can't quite capitalize on, only to pull things together later on and soundly beat me. While retrospective analysis would show them to be brilliant, that would not be my evaluation early in these games. Steve Richfield --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Goal Driven Systems and AI Dangers [WAS Re: Singularity Outcomes...]
--- Steve Richfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have played tournament chess. However, when faced with a REALLY GREAT chess player (e.g. national champion), as I have had the pleasure of on a couple of occasions, they at first appear to play as novices, making unusual and apparently stupid moves that I can't quite capitalize on, only to pull things together later on and soundly beat me. While retrospective analysis would show them to be brilliant, that would not be my evaluation early in these games. As your example illustrates, a higher intelligence will appear to be irrational, but you cannot conclude from this that irrationality implies intelligence. -- Matt Mahoney, [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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Evaluating Conference Quality [WAS Re: Symbol Grounding ...]
On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 12:27 AM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Stefan Pernar wrote: On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 10:10 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED]mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: DELETED Ben: I admire your patience. Richard: congrats - you just made my ignore list - and that's a first Another person who cannot discuss the issues. Richard - after having spent time looking through your stuff here is my conclusion: You postulate that Achieving AGI requires solving a complex problem and that you do not see this being properly incorporated in current AGI research. As pointed out by others this position puts you in the scruffies camp of AI research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_vs._scruffies) What follows are wild speculations and grand pie-in-the-sky plans without substance with a letter to investors attached. Oh, come on! PS: obviously my ignore list sucks ;-) -- Stefan Pernar 3-E-101 Silver Maple Garden #6 Cai Hong Road, Da Shan Zi Chao Yang District 100015 Beijing P.R. CHINA Mobil: +86 1391 009 1931 Skype: Stefan.Pernar --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
