Re: [agi] Setting up the systems....

2005-01-23 Thread David Clark
 With just a little success, you could fund your operation via the stock
 market predictions, this would also prove your models capability.
 All you have to do is be able to make more than the losses.


The stock market on a macro scale does move according to business and known
principles but only small 5-6% returns can be had investing in broad
spectrum investing.  On the microscopic scale (where the real money is)
there are no overriding rules the market follows.  Human behavior is *not*
particularly rational.  It is possible to bet on the irrationality of
mankind but just after you place your bet *that* stock will behave
rationally.



Programs to predict stock prices are all over the place and their presence
only makes the market include that fact in it's current price.  Playing the
stock market by an AGI will not be the way to fund more research IMHO.



-- David Clark

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RE: [agi] Setting up the systems....

2005-01-23 Thread Ben Goertzel

About computational finance...

I think this is one plausible approach to funding AGI research -- but it's
not a surefire route to success, IMO it's just another interesting narrow-AI
problem to attack, with the potential to generate a lot of cash and the
certainty of absorbing a lot of attention along the way...

My experience is that in building any narrow-AI app based on Novamente
components, around 80% of the work goes into the application and the
domain-engineering and 20% into stuff of general value for Novamente.  This
is the nature of narrow AI.  I'm sure it's the same with financial
prediction.

The Novamente learning algorithms definitely have the potential to yield
powerful financial predictions -- but building, tuning and testing an actual
trading system around these predictions is not a trivial matter.  It's not
something I could do in my spare time  (Want to invest $30K so I can pay
someone to create a Novamente-based trading system?  Send me an e-mail and
we'll talk ;-)

I would say that, of all the narrow-AI application areas out there, the
bioinformatics area interests me most (www.biomind.com), because in addition
to having revenue-generation potential and helping to build up Novamente, it
involves both

-- doing good science
-- doing good (e.g. some of our recent work has helped biologists gain new
insight into the roots of Parkinson's disease)

along the way.  Life extension research is important to me, though not as
important as AGI, and Biomind's work -- based on some Novamente components
wrapped in a lot of bioinformatics code -- has a lot of potential in this
area.  Computational finance is appealing in terms of its potential for
highly rapid revenue generation, but lacks the scientific interest and moral
value of biology-related commercial AI work.

-- Ben

 -Original Message-
 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Behalf Of David Clark
 Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2005 12:34 PM
 To: agi@v2.listbox.com
 Subject: Re: [agi] Setting up the systems


  With just a little success, you could fund your operation via the stock
  market predictions, this would also prove your models capability.
  All you have to do is be able to make more than the losses.


 The stock market on a macro scale does move according to business
 and known
 principles but only small 5-6% returns can be had investing in broad
 spectrum investing.  On the microscopic scale (where the real money is)
 there are no overriding rules the market follows.  Human behavior is *not*
 particularly rational.  It is possible to bet on the irrationality of
 mankind but just after you place your bet *that* stock will behave
 rationally.



 Programs to predict stock prices are all over the place and their presence
 only makes the market include that fact in it's current price.
 Playing the
 stock market by an AGI will not be the way to fund more research IMHO.



 -- David Clark

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 To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate
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Re: [agi] Setting up the systems....

2005-01-23 Thread J . Andrew Rogers
On Jan 23, 2005, at 10:01 AM, Ben Goertzel wrote:
About computational finance...
I think this is one plausible approach to funding AGI research -- but 
it's
not a surefire route to success, IMO it's just another interesting 
narrow-AI
problem to attack, with the potential to generate a lot of cash and the
certainty of absorbing a lot of attention along the way...

My experience is that in building any narrow-AI app based on Novamente
components, around 80% of the work goes into the application and the
domain-engineering and 20% into stuff of general value for Novamente.  
This
is the nature of narrow AI.  I'm sure it's the same with financial
prediction.

I would say that general high-quality financial market prediction 
implementation is more of a generalist domain than many other possible 
narrow-AI domains, such that really good implementations would only be 
narrow in an application sense.  The abstract classes of data you 
have to integrate will map directly into most of the sensory fields 
that are often considered important for general purpose AI.

The difficulty is that the financial community is not so interested in 
funding blue-sky research as they are in acquiring interesting 
implementations of theory.  If you have something that works then money 
is no object, but most won't pay you to develop your ideas unless you 
already have a some examples of efficacy in the problem space to show.

On the other hand, they are probably more explicitly aware of AI than 
just about any other business community.

j. andrew rogers
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Re: [agi] Setting up the systems....

2005-01-23 Thread Philip Sutton
Ben said:

 My experience is that in building any narrow-AI app based on Novamente
 components, around 80% of the work goes into the application and the
 domain-engineering and 20% into stuff of general value for Novamente 

Abdrew said:

 I would say that general high-quality financial market prediction
 implementation is more of a generalist domain than many other possible
 narrow-AI domains, such that really good implementations would only be
 narrow in an application sense.  The abstract classes of data you
 have to integrate will map directly into most of the sensory fields
 that are often considered important for general purpose AI. 
 ..(snip)
 On the other hand, they are probably more explicitly aware of AI than
 just about any other business community. 

If financial work or other topic actually has a high demand for general 
intellligence, then if Novamente or any other AGI project teamed with a narrow 
AI group maybe the AGI team could develote most of it's time/money to the 
general AI aspects and the narrow AI team could worry about the 80% of the 
total task that is narrow.

I know that the general and narrow systems have to integrate so each team 
will have to think about the work the other is doing but presumably the AGI 
team, under the two team scenario could spend more than 20% of its time on 
general AI work.

Cheers, Philip

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RE: [agi] Setting up the systems....

2005-01-23 Thread Ben Goertzel

Hey Phil,

Sounds good to me.  Know anyone who wants to collaborate and split the
profits?  ;-)

ben

 -Original Message-
 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Behalf Of Philip Sutton
 Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2005 7:49 PM
 To: agi@v2.listbox.com
 Subject: Re: [agi] Setting up the systems


 Ben said:

  My experience is that in building any narrow-AI app based on Novamente
  components, around 80% of the work goes into the application and the
  domain-engineering and 20% into stuff of general value for Novamente

 Abdrew said:

  I would say that general high-quality financial market prediction
  implementation is more of a generalist domain than many other possible
  narrow-AI domains, such that really good implementations would only be
  narrow in an application sense.  The abstract classes of data you
  have to integrate will map directly into most of the sensory fields
  that are often considered important for general purpose AI.
  ..(snip)
  On the other hand, they are probably more explicitly aware of AI than
  just about any other business community.

 If financial work or other topic actually has a high demand for general
 intellligence, then if Novamente or any other AGI project teamed
 with a narrow
 AI group maybe the AGI team could develote most of it's time/money to the
 general AI aspects and the narrow AI team could worry about the
 80% of the
 total task that is narrow.

 I know that the general and narrow systems have to integrate so each team
 will have to think about the work the other is doing but
 presumably the AGI
 team, under the two team scenario could spend more than 20% of
 its time on
 general AI work.

 Cheers, Philip

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