[agi] The resource allocation problem
Will Pearson wrote : The resource allocation problem and why it needs to be solved first ... 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). 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. === I don't know exactly what Will meant when he said that resource management should not be algorithmic, but I feel that resource management can be done logically since the management of allocating and combining resources and then finding them when needed can be separated from the conceptual complexities that are necessary for advanced AI. While the initial management decisions of resources would be dependent on these conceptual complexities, this dependence does not have to subsequently reflect every dynamic of that complexity. A better way to say this might to be to declare that Will's idea of resource management can be seen as being comprised of two distinct parts, the one that is fully integrated into the conceptual complexity that is necessary for such a system and another part that is managing the resources once the conceptual interrelations are decided on. This second part can be logical. Although many of these interrelations are going to be changing, the logical part can take over again after the conceptual relations are decided on. The only problem with this analysis is that current logical methods of indexing are probably not adequate to work with the kind of complexity that we are currently thinking of because the Frame Problem is relevant to the problem of quickly finding relevant data in a massive collection of distributed data that is highly associative and interrelated. You can add indexing to alleviate the burden of the problem, but this only works up to the point where the rate of complexity of the additional indexing overtakes the decrease in complexity that the indexing can offer, and this point can be reached pretty quickly. Jim Bromer --- 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=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The resource allocation problem
William Pearson wrote: On 01/04/2008, Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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. I am agnostic to how much things are separate. At any particular time a machine can be doing less or more of each of these things. For example in humans it is quite common to talk of concentration. E.g. I'm sorry I wasn't concentrating on what you said, could you repeat it. Stop thinking about the girl, concentrate on the problem at hand. Do you think this is meaningful? I recently wrote a paper (with Trevor Harley) which included some comments of relevance to this issue. This is known as attention rather than concentration, and there is a huge literature on it (in the cognitive psychology area). Our recent paper was analyzing a neuroscience claim that related to the location of attentional mechanisms in the brain. One thing that I pointed out was that people differ greatly in their interpretation of exactly what kind of mechanism is involved, and some of them (like me) see attention as being more of a distributed, flexible spotlight rather than a specific place. That means that if my proposal is correct then resources are extremely flexible for some mechanisms like attention. But that does not mean it is flexible for everything. In the above list of different mechanisms I would say that any decision about resource allocation cannot be made at this date. I think we need to discover this empirically, by finding out what the actual performance limitations are. Of course this is easy for me to say, given that my architecture involves exttreme flexibiity anywhere. Richard Loosemore 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.). It boils down to the same thing. If more low level elements are devoted (neuron-equivalents?) to a task in general it is giving it more potential memory, processing power and bandwidth. How is that decided? In some connectionist systems, I would associate it with the stability-plasticity problem described here in section 6. http://www.cns.bu.edu/Profiles/Grossberg/Gro1987CogSci.pdf The nutshell is if you have new learning, should it overwrite the old? If so, which information, if not, please can I have your infinite memory system. Assuming you are implementing this on a normal computer you can easily see that it all boils down to these resources. In the brain not all elements can work at peak effectiveness at the same time (consider the perils of driving while on the mobile *). So even if you had devoted the elements, then further decisions need to be made at run time. Different regions of elements become the resources to be rationed. For example Short-term memory becomes a resource you have to decide how to use. Also oxygen would seem to be a resource in short supply, within the brain. The question remains the same, how should a system choose what to do or what to be. Will * http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/bmj.38537.397512.55v1 --- 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=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The resource allocation problem
On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 12:24 AM, William Pearson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 01/04/2008, Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This question supposes a specific kind of architecture, where these things are in some sense separate from each other. I am agnostic to how much things are separate. At any particular time a machine can be doing less or more of each of these things. For example in humans it is quite common to talk of concentration. E.g. I'm sorry I wasn't concentrating on what you said, could you repeat it. Stop thinking about the girl, concentrate on the problem at hand. Do you think this is meaningful? It is in some sense, but you need to distinguish levels of description. Implementation of system doesn't have a thinking-about-the-girl component, but when system obtains certain behaviors, you can say that this process that is going now is a thinking-about-the-girl process. If, along with learning this process, you form a mechanism for moving attention elsewhere, you can evoke that mechanism by, for example, sending a phrase Stop thinking about the girl to sensory input. But these specific mechanisms are learned, what you need as a system designer is provide ways of their formation in general case. Also, your list contained 'reasoning', 'seeing past experiences and how they apply to the current one', 'searching for new ways of doing things' and 'applying each heuristic'. Only in some architectures will these things be explicit parts of system design. From my perspective, it's analogous to adding special machine instructions for handling 'Internet browsing' in general-purpose processor, where browser is just one of thousands of applications that can run on it, and it would be inadequately complex for processor anyway. You need to ration resources, but these are anonymous modelling resources that don't have inherent 'bicycle-properties' or 'language-processing-properties'. Some of them happen to correlate with things we want them to, by virtue of being placed in contact with sensory input that can communicate structure of those things. Resources are used to build inference structures within the system that allow it to model hidden processes, which in turn should allow it to achieve its goals. If there are high-level resource allocation rules to be discovered, these rules will look at goals and formed inference structures and determine that certain changes are good for overall performance. Discussion of such rules needs at least some notions about makeup of inference process and its relation to goals. Even worse, goals can be implicit in inference system itself and be learned starting from a blank slate, in which case the way resources got distributed describes the goals, and not the other way around. In this case the 'ultimate metagoal' can be formation of coherent models (including models of system's goals in its model of its own behavior), at which point high-level modularity and goal-directed resource allocation disappear in a puff of mind projection fallacy. -- 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=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The resource allocation problem
On 05/04/2008, Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 12:24 AM, William Pearson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 01/04/2008, Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This question supposes a specific kind of architecture, where these things are in some sense separate from each other. I am agnostic to how much things are separate. At any particular time a machine can be doing less or more of each of these things. For example in humans it is quite common to talk of concentration. E.g. I'm sorry I wasn't concentrating on what you said, could you repeat it. Stop thinking about the girl, concentrate on the problem at hand. Do you think this is meaningful? It is in some sense, but you need to distinguish levels of description. Implementation of system doesn't have a thinking-about-the-girl component, Who ever said it did? All I have said is there needs to be the mechanisms for an economy, not exactly what the economic agents are. I don't know what they should be. It is body/environment specific, most likely. but when system obtains certain behaviors, you can say that this process that is going now is a thinking-about-the-girl process. If, along with learning this process, you form a mechanism for moving attention elsewhere, you can evoke that mechanism by, for example, sending a phrase Stop thinking about the girl to sensory input. But these specific mechanisms are learned, what you need as a system designer is provide ways of their formation in general case. You also need a way to decide that something should get more attention than something else. Being told to attend to something is not always enough. Also, your list contained 'reasoning', 'seeing past experiences and how they apply to the current one', 'searching for new ways of doing things' and 'applying each heuristic'. Only in some architectures will these things be explicit parts of system design. I don't have them as explicit parts of system design, I have nothing that people would call a cognitive design at the moment. I am not so interested in thinking at the moment as building a more *useful* system (although under some circumstances a thinking system will be a useful one). From my perspective, it's analogous to adding special machine instructions for handling 'Internet browsing' in general-purpose processor, where browser is just one of thousands of applications that can run on it, and it would be inadequately complex for processor anyway. I'd agree, I'm just adding a very loose economy. Any actor is allowed to exist in an economy, I was just giving some examples of potential ways to separate things. If they don't fit in your system ignore them and add what does fit. You need to ration resources, but these are anonymous modelling resources that don't have inherent 'bicycle-properties' or 'language-processing-properties'. So does the whatever allows your system to differentiate between bicycle and non-bicycle somehow manage to not take up resources when not being used? Some of them happen to correlate with things we want them to, by virtue of being placed in contact with sensory input that can communicate structure of those things. Resources are used to build inference structures within the system that allow it to model hidden processes, which in turn should allow it to achieve its goals. I'm still not seeing why it should model the right hidden processes. Stick your system in the real world, which processes (from other people, the weather, fluid dynamics, itself) should it try and model? Why do some people have a lot more elaborate models of these things than other people? If there are high-level resource allocation rules to be discovered, these rules will look at goals and formed inference structures and determine that certain changes are good for overall performance. What happens if two rules conflict? Which rule wins? What happens if rules can only be discovered experimentally? Discussion of such rules needs at least some notions about makeup of inference process and its relation to goals. I'm not creating rules to determine how resources are distributed. That would not be a free market economy. I agree the creation of the rules will come about when the cognitive system is being designed, but would be local to each agent. Even worse, goals can be implicit in inference system itself and be learned starting from a blank slate, There is no useful system that is a blank slate. All learning systems have bias as you well know, and so have implicit information about the world. I would view an economy as having an implicit goal. The closest thing to an explicit goal for an agent in my economy is, to survive, but it is in no way hard binding. To survive credit is needed to purchase resources (including memory to stay in and processing power to earn more credit), for which you need to please the
Re: [agi] The resource allocation problem
Note that in the brain, there is a fair extent to which functions are mapped to physical areas -- this is why you can find out anything using fMRI, for example, and is the source of the famous sensory and motor homunculi (e.g. http://faculty.etsu.edu/currie/images/homunculus1.JPG). There's plasticity but it's limited and operates over a timescale of days or weeks or more. The architecture seems to have a huge parallelism at the lower levels, but ties into a serial bottleneck at the very top, i.e. conscious, level(s) -- hence the need for attentional mechanisms. On Tuesday 01 April 2008 10:30:13 am, William Pearson 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 etc... --- 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=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The resource allocation problem
J Storrs Hall, PhD wrote: Note that in the brain, there is a fair extent to which functions are mapped to physical areas -- this is why you can find out anything using fMRI, for example, This is not correct. fMRI gives the illusion that functions are mapped to specific areas, whereas in fact what is usually being localized is the signal picked up the fMRI scanner, not a 'function' as such. The problem is analogous to the dialog-joke that starts with some kind of noise, then Person A says What was that? and Person B responds A noise. As I mentioned in my previous post, Trevor Harley and I went to the trouble of detailing several examples of this in a recent paper. Richard Loosemore and is the source of the famous sensory and motor homunculi (e.g. http://faculty.etsu.edu/currie/images/homunculus1.JPG). There's plasticity but it's limited and operates over a timescale of days or weeks or more. The architecture seems to have a huge parallelism at the lower levels, but ties into a serial bottleneck at the very top, i.e. conscious, level(s) -- hence the need for attentional mechanisms. On Tuesday 01 April 2008 10:30:13 am, William Pearson 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 etc... --- 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=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The resource allocation problem
On 01/04/2008, Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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. I am agnostic to how much things are separate. At any particular time a machine can be doing less or more of each of these things. For example in humans it is quite common to talk of concentration. E.g. I'm sorry I wasn't concentrating on what you said, could you repeat it. Stop thinking about the girl, concentrate on the problem at hand. Do you think this is meaningful? 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.). It boils down to the same thing. If more low level elements are devoted (neuron-equivalents?) to a task in general it is giving it more potential memory, processing power and bandwidth. How is that decided? In some connectionist systems, I would associate it with the stability-plasticity problem described here in section 6. http://www.cns.bu.edu/Profiles/Grossberg/Gro1987CogSci.pdf The nutshell is if you have new learning, should it overwrite the old? If so, which information, if not, please can I have your infinite memory system. Assuming you are implementing this on a normal computer you can easily see that it all boils down to these resources. In the brain not all elements can work at peak effectiveness at the same time (consider the perils of driving while on the mobile *). So even if you had devoted the elements, then further decisions need to be made at run time. Different regions of elements become the resources to be rationed. For example Short-term memory becomes a resource you have to decide how to use. Also oxygen would seem to be a resource in short supply, within the brain. The question remains the same, how should a system choose what to do or what to be. Will * http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/bmj.38537.397512.55v1 --- 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=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=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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=8660244id_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 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=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
