Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
Thanks! That's the trouble with wikipedia - you think you have half an idea (although I certainly wouldn't rate the thought below of mine as an idea) and some bugger has already had it. About a year ago, I was getting into the open source movement and realising how huge its effects would be, and thought Ah... open source religion..(real religion) ... and there already in wikip. was an entry and a whole movement. (Not a particularly good movement though). So, ATM, is anyone following up on your ideas and sourceforge framework? I like that you are thinking top-down in terms of mind modules - I doubt that any literal approach to integration in terms of let's find ways of connecting up what we've already got..and getting everything to talk to each other will possibly work. Everything will presumably have to be redesigned to a greater or lesser extent. I should stress that the challenge here of defining some integrational structure for AGI is a hugely creative one (including the business of simplying defining the mind and body modules or parts). No relatively simple, straightforward literal solution will work. The challenge for Jimmy Wales of developing a structure for Wikipedia was extremely simple and easy by comparison. And what all this helps focus on is a huge related challenge for neurology and biology. The great thing that evolution has already achieved is of course to solve this problem - to find ways that all the subsystems of the mind and body can talk to each other. Has anyone focussed the challenge of understanding nature's communication/integration systems? (Or, to put it another way, where's the entry in wikip. ?) I'm just realing Hawkins On INtelligence and of course, one of the big ideas he pushes - if you'll forgive my still-absorbing, still-garbled account - is Mountcastle's that the different senses are neurologically structured in the same ways, although I can't remember whether he links this up to show how they also interrelate. (Comments here would be extremely welcome). Of course, as someone I think just pointed out, the Internet solved the multimedia problem of how most of the enormously disparate kinds of information and media that existed could be brought together in a single medium of communication. That positively demands a comparable solution for AGI. - Original Message - From: A. T. Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 4:55 AM Subject: Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI Mike Tintner wrote: The greatest challenge - and these are my first, very stumbling thoughts here - is to find ways that people can work together on the overall problem - that all these systems (or subsystems) that people are working on can connect and evolve together. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_systems_integration says that [I]ntegrating what's already available is a more logical approach to broader A.I. than building monolithic systems from scratch. That's the only way that even an adaptive robotic worm [or equivalent] will be produced. (And a common systems/ common parts approach is after all that used by evolution itself). http://mind.sourceforge.net/aisteps.html breaks the AGO problem down into discrete mind-modles for specialists to work on. ATM -- http://www.advogato.org/person/mentifex/ - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?; -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.467 / Virus Database: 269.6.6/795 - Release Date: 09/05/2007 15:07 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
The open source idea sounds great and in general I agree with this approach. One of the main benefits in my view is ensuring that powerful new technology does not fall into the hands of any single individual, company or nation who could then monopolise its use, potentially with unfriendly results. In the proprietary situation you're really putting all your eggs into one basket and just hoping that the first mover is somewhat benevolent. But in practice it's difficult to do AI in an open source way, because I've found that at least up until the present there have been very few people who actually know anything about the algorithms involved and can make a useful contribution. The typical case is that there are a few folks who are enthusiastic but lack either the programming ability or the background knowledge of AI techniques, or both. Just learning about the history of AI in general so that you can recognise potential dead-end approaches takes some investment of time and energy. Another factor weighing against the open source approach is the lack of a well defined definition for an intelligent system. If you're writing a word processor or even an operating system you pretty much know in advance what it should do and roughly what the architecture of the program should look like. I think Linus Torvalds based his first version of linux on the description given in a book called operating systems: theory and implementation (or something like that). Unfortunately there are few implementable designs for an AGI described in sufficient detail to be able to divide the task up and allocate it amongst programmers. Ben's project may be an exception to this. On 11/05/07, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just been looking at the vids. of last year's AGI conference. One thing really hit me from the panel talk - and that was: but, of course, only open-source AGI will ever work. Sorry, but all these ideas of individual systems, produced by teams of - what? - say, twenty individuals at most - achieving some significant form of intelligence are, frankly, wild fantasies. We're talking re the human system about the most fabulously complex machine in the universe - and even a simple worm is mind-blowingly complex. Hey, a single cell is awesome. Not just complex as in having many parts but complicated as in having many subsystems. If you stand back and look at AI/ AGI and robotics, as a whole, what you already have anyway is a de facto division of labour of the problem, however crude - different groups are, in fact, going for different aspects of the problem, Emotions, navigation, proprioception, vision, etc. etc. And, you have different roboticists tackling more or less every stage of evolution - with robots from worms and snakes to humanoids. The greatest challenge - and these are my first, very stumbling thoughts here - is to find ways that people can work together on the overall roblem - that all these systems (or subsystems) that people are working on can connect and evolve together. That's the only way that even an adaptive robotic worm [or equivalent] will be produced. (And a common systems/ common parts approach is after all that used by evolution itself). Open-source creativity is the defining model of creativity in this century. The Human Genome Project provided the template not just for biology but for human creativity. And actually, the real singularity - the greatest leap forward - in this century, long before any form of machine intelligence, will be the leap in human creativity that is coming. The last century was that of universal education, this will be the century of universal creativity. Of course, the problem was relatively easy to define for the Human Genome Project. Defining and carving up the problem of AGI so that many teams and the whole world can work on it jointly, is a huge challenge in itself. But it can be done. (Stan Franklin, for example, talked of the problem of just achieving a common ontology, or terminology for AGI, and yet, if you think about it, people ARE using a great deal of common terminology anyway) Ben, I imagine, more or less knows the open-source truth in talking about an AGI Manhattan Project. But even that would be too small. The whole world - the whole Internet - will have to be involved.. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI...P.S.
I should add that part of the creative challenge of developing an integrational structure for AGI is to develop one that will allow CREATIVE minds to work together - and not just hacks a la Wikip. - and enable them to integrate whole sets of major new inventions and innovations. And that too, ironically, is a challenge that evolution has already solved, and that we are just beginning to get our minds around. Evolution IS the story of these continual major new inventions/modifications of subsystems that living systems as a whole.are designed so as to integrate. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI...P.S.
On 5/11/07, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I should add that part of the creative challenge of developing an integrational structure for AGI is to develop one that will allow CREATIVE minds to work together - and not just hacks a la Wikip. - and enable them to integrate whole sets of major new inventions and innovations. Yes, for those of us taking integrative approaches to AGI design, that is one of the initial challenges faced in creating an AI architecture. I believe the Novamente design satisfies this requirement quite well. There are many interrelated key aspects here, e.g.: -- What kind of main memory structures do the different modules utilize -- What facilities are there for adding new, specialized memory structures -- What facilities are there for scheduling operations -- Coordination of different processes for moving stuff in and out of memory -- Distributed processing: coordinated use of multiple machines The Webmind design that I worked on before Novamente enabled easy and flexible integration of diverse AI modules, addressing all these issues ... but lacked adequate computational efficiency in terms of its use of memory and threading. Novamente does not have those problems. The main deficiencies we've had in Novamente regarding integration of diverse AI methods have actually been at the low-level API level: the prior API for the core system was too complex and sort of a pain to work with in spite of its excellent conceptual properties. It is now being re-vamped (without changing much of the underlying system, mostly just on the interface level). The other key point to be grokked is that you can't just throw a bunch of clever AI modules together and hope that the whole will come out more than the sum of the parts. Often as not, if you do this, the whole will come out LESS than the sum of the parts. The parts need to be combined with careful theoretical attention paid to the emergent effects that will arise from putting those particular parts together, in the context of a system operating in a particular environment. -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
On Friday 11 May 2007 05:16:44 am Bob Mottram wrote: ... But in practice it's difficult to do AI in an open source way, because I've found that at least up until the present there have been very few people who actually know anything about the algorithms involved and can make a useful contribution. The typical case is that there are a few folks who are enthusiastic but lack either the programming ability or the background knowledge of AI techniques, or both. Just learning about the history of AI in general so that you can recognise potential dead-end approaches takes some investment of time and energy. ... It must be remembered that Open Source projects, at least the significant and successful ones, typically start around a core written by one brilliant individual (or very small group). Linus comes to mind, or ESR, or RMS. (Also think of Thomson, Kernaghan Ritchie with C and the original Unix.) These were all brilliant programmers. http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html The innards of an OS -- scheduler, filesystem, device drivers -- are not the sort of thing that the average Joe Appcoder knows a lot about either. Most projects of that kind continue to have a small group of indispensable experts at their core. Given that, they can be as arcane as any project -- consider cryptography software -- and remember that many projects are started in universities as research software. Furthermore, there are a lot of parts available as open source that can be included in an AI project, from numerical algorithms to theorem provers. We don't have to invent it, or even in many cases rewrite it. I just have to know why I would want to take eigenvalues or solve a SAT problem, not how to do it. Thus Open Source allows the AI developer to work at level well above the raw metal. The 4.4bsd kernel was about 200k lines of code. Industry standard is about 20 lines per day per programmer. If you assume that an AI is the same complexity as an early Unix, you're talking 27 man-years. We could imagine that one or two really smart people were really productive (and also got the basic design right!) and could do half of something that size in a few years, and the rest could be filled in by the community. Linux 0.001 was in Aug 1991, Linux 1.0 in Mar 1994. Note that a proper AI will be a learning meachine. It's quite conceivable that the core could be fairly small by software standards, but that the baby AI would need to be raised -- something that could be done in great profusion and with great variety by an O.S.-like community. Josh - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
Mike Tintner wrote: Thanks! [...] So, ATM, is anyone following up on your ideas and sourceforge framework? http://AIMind-I.com is where Mr. Frank J. Russo (FJR) has created its own website for his version of my http://mind.sourceforge.net/mind4th.html AI in Forth. On another note, Ben Goertzel et al. keep harping here about the sorry state of AGI funding. My own A(G)I funding has always come just from working odd jobs. Now as Mind.Forth starts to proliferate and others like FJR create their own versions of the AI Mind -- with Internet communication features more advanced that what I initially created -- the funding problem gets laid off (like a racetrack bet) onto the finances of whoever jumps on the AI Mind bandwagon. For instance, I don't know what Frank J. Russo pays for http://AIMind-I.com but I could not afford to pay it. I like that you are thinking top-down in terms of mind modules - I doubt that any literal approach to integration in terms of let's find ways of connecting up what we've already got..and getting everything to talk to each other will possibly work. Everything will presumably have to be redesigned to a greater or lesser extent. Recently I discovered (through my Site Meter log hits) that it was possible to place AI Help Wanted ads on SourceForge, publicly visible for two weeks with option to renew the ads. A high-powered recruit responded to my ad http://sourceforge.net/people/viewjob.php?group_id=31619job_id=28185 Looking for the Johnny Appleseed of artificial intelligence. I intend to put the mind-module jobs up for grabs on SourceForge as Open-Source AI Help Wanted blurbs. http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/helpnews tells about it. I should stress that the challenge here of defining some integrational structure for AGI is a hugely creative one (including the business of simplying defining the mind and body modules or parts). No relatively simple, straightforward literal solution will work. The challenge for Jimmy Wales of developing a structure for Wikipedia was extremely simple and easy by comparison. [...] ATM -- http://www.advogato.org/person/mentifex/ - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
[agi] Open-Source AGI
Just been looking at the vids. of last year's AGI conference. One thing really hit me from the panel talk - and that was: but, of course, only open-source AGI will ever work. Sorry, but all these ideas of individual systems, produced by teams of - what? - say, twenty individuals at most - achieving some significant form of intelligence are, frankly, wild fantasies. We're talking re the human system about the most fabulously complex machine in the universe - and even a simple worm is mind-blowingly complex. Hey, a single cell is awesome. Not just complex as in having many parts but complicated as in having many subsystems. If you stand back and look at AI/ AGI and robotics, as a whole, what you already have anyway is a de facto division of labour of the problem, however crude - different groups are, in fact, going for different aspects of the problem, Emotions, navigation, proprioception, vision, etc. etc. And, you have different roboticists tackling more or less every stage of evolution - with robots from worms and snakes to humanoids. The greatest challenge - and these are my first, very stumbling thoughts here - is to find ways that people can work together on the overall roblem - that all these systems (or subsystems) that people are working on can connect and evolve together. That's the only way that even an adaptive robotic worm [or equivalent] will be produced. (And a common systems/ common parts approach is after all that used by evolution itself). Open-source creativity is the defining model of creativity in this century. The Human Genome Project provided the template not just for biology but for human creativity. And actually, the real singularity - the greatest leap forward - in this century, long before any form of machine intelligence, will be the leap in human creativity that is coming. The last century was that of universal education, this will be the century of universal creativity. Of course, the problem was relatively easy to define for the Human Genome Project. Defining and carving up the problem of AGI so that many teams and the whole world can work on it jointly, is a huge challenge in itself. But it can be done. (Stan Franklin, for example, talked of the problem of just achieving a common ontology, or terminology for AGI, and yet, if you think about it, people ARE using a great deal of common terminology anyway) Ben, I imagine, more or less knows the open-source truth in talking about an AGI Manhattan Project. But even that would be too small. The whole world - the whole Internet - will have to be involved.. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
Ben, I imagine, more or less knows the open-source truth in talking about an AGI Manhattan Project. But even that would be too small. The whole world - the whole Internet - will have to be involved.. I don't really agree with this. A Manhattan project would be awesome and would maximize odds of success ... but I'm confident that with brilliance, a good AGI design and a bit of luck, a small team can get to the finish line ;-) Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
On 5/11/07, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The greatest challenge - and these are my first, very stumbling thoughts here - is to find ways that people can work together on the overall roblem - that all these systems (or subsystems) that people are working on can connect and evolve together. Agreed. And to do this we need to create a framework/language in which such software is most naturally expressed in a way that's casually reusable - in which apply Alice's genetic algorithm to Bob's vision system on Carol's test set, and distribute the computation across all Dave's spare lab machines whose overnight cycles he's volunteered (where the people involved had not been aware of each other's existence when doing their work) becomes as casual an act as calling sqrt() is today. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
On May 10, 2007, at 6:29 PM, Benjamin Goertzel wrote: Ben, I imagine, more or less knows the open-source truth in talking about an AGI Manhattan Project. But even that would be too small. The whole world - the whole Internet - will have to be involved.. I don't really agree with this. A Manhattan project would be awesome and would maximize odds of success ... but I'm confident that with brilliance, a good AGI design and a bit of luck, a small team can get to the finish line ;-) I tend to agree. Many hands and eyeballs are great for a project of many relatively isolatable components whose requirements and interaction are relatively understood. But AGI is pushing the envelope tremendously and, to the degree I understand current designs and design strategies, a set of very tightly inter-related parts need to be designed and build. Many of the parts themselves much less their interaction are being created and integrated out of whole cloth. Small, high bandwidth, concentrated and brilliant teams are required.The vast majority of all programmers/hackers are not qualified. Even of the number that is only a small subset can be formed into a cohesive enough team for this intense a task. If anything is likely to be a natural cathedral rather than a bazaar it is AGI. - samantha - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
On 5/11/07, Samantha Atkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I tend to agree. Many hands and eyeballs are great for a project of many relatively isolatable components whose requirements and interaction are relatively understood. But AGI is pushing the envelope tremendously and, to the degree I understand current designs and design strategies, a set of very tightly inter-related parts need to be designed and build. Many of the parts themselves much less their interaction are being created and integrated out of whole cloth. Small, high bandwidth, concentrated and brilliant teams are required.The vast majority of all programmers/hackers are not qualified. Even of the number that is only a small subset can be formed into a cohesive enough team for this intense a task. If anything is likely to be a natural cathedral rather than a bazaar it is AGI. Well there are two phases, framework and content. The framework is as you say: it needs to be a cathedral. The content needs to be of volume such that only a whole industry can create it: definitely a bazaar. The hard part then is designing a framework such as to allow content to easily flow together. Compare it to the Web: the first browser was created by an individual or small team, but the Web itself was not. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
On May 10, 2007, at 6:49 PM, Russell Wallace wrote: Well there are two phases, framework and content. The framework is as you say: it needs to be a cathedral. The content needs to be of volume such that only a whole industry can create it: definitely a bazaar. The hard part then is designing a framework such as to allow content to easily flow together. Compare it to the Web: the first browser was created by an individual or small team, but the Web itself was not. I think (could be wrong) that part of the goal of the core team is to create a mind that can largely navigate huge amounts of data for itself, something that has the basis to learn autonomously on the Web. It may take a phase of a lot of input from many hands to get there but then again it may not. - samantha - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
On 5/11/07, Samantha Atkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think (could be wrong) that part of the goal of the core team is to create a mind that can largely navigate huge amounts of data for itself, something that has the basis to learn autonomously on the Web. It may take a phase of a lot of input from many hands to get there but then again it may not. *nods* That is certainly an idea, one that I myself spent quite a while studying, and not with a view to disproving it. Alas it doesn't work; the contents of the Web are not information unless you already have a great deal of knowledge beforehand (the old problem of learning Chinese with only a Chinese-Chinese dictionary); and that previously required knowledge is precisely the content that will require an industry, not just a team, to create. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
Open source vs closed source is one of the most difficult decisions I faced in my entire AGI career. I've always championed open source AND for-profit, which is the middleground of open-free and closed-commercial, though it may seem like a contradiction. Sometimes I think it may work in a paradoxical way. Some other times, I have a feeling that such a middleground is not the best. One surprising thing I learned is how many AGI people actually insist on the product being free and opensource. Perhaps it is the backlash created by Bill Gates' extraordinary success and wealth, at the expense of his competitors and other startups. * * * The second question is whether the AGI core can be built by a closed team of say 10-20 people. I think the answer is yes and no. It depends on what kind of people we're talking about. AGI requires solving some *open research problems* such as probabilistic logic. Normally any one of such problems requires at least several years of a devoted and brilliant researcher to solve. Notice that this situation is distinctly different from many other traditional startups where basically no major technological breakthrough / research is required (most notably Microsoft). So it seems that we need to INCREASE the level of ideas-sharing and collaboration among researchers. And opensource *may* be able to help achieve that. But then again, notice that most traditional opensource projects are very technologically conservative -- they're not known for bring about breakthroughs. We have tough problems ahead, to say the least. YKY - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
Mind you, the free/commercial and closed/open-source decisions are separate ones. They're strategic decisions; there's nothing about the problem that intrinsically requires either, it's a matter of coming up with a strategy that can let the participants pay the rent while they work on the project, without compromising its usefulness. That's separate from the technical necessity for focused framework, industry-wide content. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
Re: [agi] Open-Source AGI
Mike Tintner wrote: The greatest challenge - and these are my first, very stumbling thoughts here - is to find ways that people can work together on the overall problem - that all these systems (or subsystems) that people are working on can connect and evolve together. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_systems_integration says that [I]ntegrating what's already available is a more logical approach to broader A.I. than building monolithic systems from scratch. That's the only way that even an adaptive robotic worm [or equivalent] will be produced. (And a common systems/ common parts approach is after all that used by evolution itself). http://mind.sourceforge.net/aisteps.html breaks the AGO problem down into discrete mind-modles for specialists to work on. ATM -- http://www.advogato.org/person/mentifex/ - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415user_secret=fabd7936
