--- On Fri, 9/12/08, Bryan Bishop [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Wednesday 10 September 2008, Matt Mahoney wrote:
I have asked this list as well as the singularity and
SL4 lists
whether there are any non-evolutionary models
(mathematical,
software, physical, or biological) for recursive self
improvement
(RSI), i.e. where the parent and not the environment
decides what the
goal is and measures progress toward it. But as far as
I know, the
answer is no.
Have considered resource constraint situations where
parents kill their
young? The runt of the litter or, sometimes, others - like
when a lion
takes over a pride. Mostly in the non-human, non-Chinese
portions of
the animal kingdom. (I refer to current events re:
China's population
constraints on female offspring, of course.)
There are two problems with this approach. First, if your child is smarter than
you, how would you know? Second, this approach favors parents who don't kill
their children. How do you prevent this trait from evolving?
Secondly, I'm still wondering about the representations
of goals in the
brain. So far, there has been no study showing the
neurobiological
basis of 'goal' in the human brain. As far as we
know, it's folk
psychology anyway, and it might not be 'true',
since there's no hard
physical evidence of the existence of goals. I'm
talking about
bottom-up existence, not top-down (top being
us, humans and our
social contexts and such).
You can define an algorithm as goal-oriented if it can be described as having a
utility function U(x): X - R (any input, real-valued output) and an iterative
search over x in X such that U(x) increases over time.
Whether a program has a goal depends on how you describe it. For example,
linear regression has the goal of finding m and b such the straight line
equation (y = mx + b) minimizes RMS error given a set of (x,y) points, but only
if you solve it by iteratively adjusting m and b and evaluating the error,
rather than use the conventional closed form solution.
The human brain is easiest to describe as having a utility function described
by Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Or you could describe it as a state table with
2^(10^15) inputs.
Does RSI have to be measured with respect to goals? Can you
prove to me
that there exists no non-goal oriented improvement
methodology?
No, it is a philosophical question. What do you mean by improvement?
-- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---
agi
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