Re: Merging threads was Re: Code generation was Re: [agi] More Info Please
Steve/Stephen: I am planning to archive all conversations .This is pretty simple with text, but when things move into real-time moving images from which to understand the world, this takes a little more storage. No one's yet actually trying to develop movie AI/AGI - an intelligence that can live in and/or respond to a continuous movie[s] of the world, are they? Ben's system, from the v. little I saw, gestures at this, but falls short. --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Merging threads was Re: Code generation was Re: [agi] More Info Please
2008/5/28 Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED]: No one's yet actually trying to develop movie AI/AGI - an intelligence that can live in and/or respond to a continuous movie[s] of the world, are they? Ben's system, from the v. little I saw, gestures at this, but falls short. I'm doing stuff with robotics which is mostly about processing sequences of images (I call the offline playbacks used for parameter optimisation dream sequences), although probably what I'm doing doesn't qualify as AGI in a strict sense - it's more reminiscent of the Grand/Urban Challenge stuff. --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Merging threads was Re: Code generation was Re: [agi] More Info Please
Bob: I'm doing stuff with robotics which is mostly about processing sequences of images (I call the offline playbacks used for parameter optimisation dream sequences), although probably what I'm doing doesn't qualify as AGI in a strict sense - it's more reminiscent of the Grand/Urban Challenge stuff. Sounds interesting. Can you give us a little more detail (or link). What kind of robot, where? Doing what? Watching what movie? And how does it dream - optimise/correct 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Merging threads was Re: Code generation was Re: [agi] More Info Please
2008/5/28 Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Sounds interesting. Can you give us a little more detail (or link). What kind of robot, where? Doing what? Watching what movie? And how does it dream - optimise/correct actions? Link: http://code.google.com/p/sentience/ A picture of the robot: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3280/2427779514_d28b368557_b.jpg --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 2:20 PM, Mark Waser wrote: Geez. What the heck is wrong with you people and your seriously bogus stats? Try a real recognized neutral tracking service like Netcraft (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html) Does anyone believe that they are biased and coking their data? March 2008 Percent April 2008 Percent Change Apache 82,454,415 50.69% 83,554,638 50.42% -0.27 Microsoft 57,698,503 35.47% 58,547,355 35.33% -0.14 Google 9,012,004 5.54% 10,079,333 6.08% 0.54 lighttpd 1,552,650 0.95% 1,495,308 0.90% -0.05 Sun 546,581 0.34% 547,873 0.33% -0.01 As I understand it, Netcraft's results are based on web sites, or more precisely, hostnames, rather than actual web servers. This introduces a bias because some servers run a large number of low-volume (or zero volume) web sites. This company attempts to survey web *servers* only (Note: Total is about 5% of Netcraft total) http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200804/ More detail here: http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200804/servers.html This gives 73% for Apache and 19% for Microsoft. BillK --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [agi] More Info Please
This doesn't distinguish Apache on Windows like in WAMP vs. LAMP but that is probably a small percentage. Uhm I've noticed with C# is that you hit some performance and resource issues when the app gets big. But that is the tradeoff I guess and it is workaroundable. Also VS2008 is buggy. It's nice to have alternate IDE's encouraging each one to outdo the other. With C# it's pretty limited. Also with C# if MS drops the ball, and they do, who ya gonna call? Still though I value C# as long as homage is paid to the borg once in awhile as in the repetitive prayer Oooohhmmm @[EMAIL PROTECTED]@@#$*%* Microsoft From: Mark Waser [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 7:20 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please However, I'll quote just one simple stat: About 90% of the Internet relies on Unix operating systems running Apache, the world's most widely used Web server. from http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/a/unix_win.htm http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/a/unix_win.htm Geez. What the heck is wrong with you people and your seriously bogus stats? Try a real recognized neutral tracking service like Netcraft ( http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html) Does anyone believe that they are biased and coking their data? March 2008 Percent April 2008 Percent Change Apache 82,454,415 50.69% 83,554,638 50.42% -0.27 Microsoft 57,698,503 35.47% 58,547,355 35.33% -0.14 Google 9,012,004 5.54% 10,079,333 6.08% 0.54 lighttpd 1,552,650 0.95% 1,495,308 0.90% -0.05 Sun 546,581 0.34% 547,873 0.33% -0.01 _ agi | http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now Archives http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Modify Your Subscription 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com image001.gif
RE: [agi] More Info Please
Mark Waser: Does anybody have any interest in and/or willingness to program in a different environment? I haven't decided to what extent I'll participate in OpenCog myself yet. For me, it depends more on whether the capabilities of the system seem worth exploring, which in turn depends as much on the underlying philosophy as the codebase. I'm thinking of OpenCog right now as a concrete way to understand the ideas of Bencompany. Frankly I find OpenCog a rather odd open source project given its open-ended nature -- no target end users, no clear applications, no (apparent) dedicated driving personality declaring here is exactly what we need to accomplish, who's with me?. I don't mean that Ben isn't dedicated, but I don't envision him herding this particularly ornery flock and browbeating people into actually finishing and debugging code. Still, it's a very cool effort wherever it leads. The language used doesn't particularly matter to me, so I'm willing to work in a different environment. I don't have a Linux machine at the moment so a requirement to work in Linux is a small but significant barrier to entry for me. Screwing around with operating systems is just about my least favorite thing to do.It's hard for me even to make my own guesses about the best way to go because the overall architecture isn't very clear to me yet. I guess that the central data structure -- the AtomTable, contains a persistent cached bunch nodes and links that come in various types and have numbers attached to them. But it's not clear to me whether the types are supposed to be part of the cognitive theory or not -- are OpenCog developers supposed to invent new node types or just work with those provided? If they can be created, does that mean changing the AtomTable implementation? Is the meaning of the numbers on links predetermined or can they be overloaded? If they can be overloaded, how do the Mind Agents cope with the ensuing chaos? If they can't be overloaded, how can the system be extended to include new ideas? If for example the AtomTable is sufficiently compartmentalized so that it won't need changing, it would seem that porting it to another language would be a lower priority than providing an environment where developing Mind Agents (which I am assuming is the really interesting stuff) could occur in whatever language individual developers feel most productive in. Or maybe the amount of work required to do even this is larger than the actual interest in using the code warrants. The more interesting issues to me are things like how the Atoms (and any other representational structures I don't know about yet) get their semantics and how adding new code changes those semantics... what is the representational flexibility and power of the knowledge representation scheme when applied to some non-toy cases... I'm sure the documentation will make things a lot clearer. --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
This company attempts to survey web *servers* only (Note: Total is about 5% of Netcraft total) No. You are not correct. Read their methodology (http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/faq.html?mondir=/200804domdir=domain=) which I have copied and pasted below We visit what we consider well-known sites. In our case, we define a well-known site as a site that had a link to it from at least one other site that we consider well-known. So, if we are visiting you, it means we know about you through a link from another site. If a site stops responding to our request for 3 consecutive months, we automatically remove it from the survey. In this fashion, our list of known servers remains up to date. Because of this technique, we find that we actually only visit about 10% of the web sites out on the web. This is because approximately 90% of all web sites are fringe sites, such as domain squatters, personal web sites, etc., that are considered unimportant by the rest of the web community (because no-one considers them important enough to link to.) - Original Message - From: BillK [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 10:00 AM Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 2:20 PM, Mark Waser wrote: Geez. What the heck is wrong with you people and your seriously bogus stats? Try a real recognized neutral tracking service like Netcraft (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html) Does anyone believe that they are biased and coking their data? March 2008 Percent April 2008 Percent Change Apache 82,454,415 50.69% 83,554,638 50.42% -0.27 Microsoft 57,698,503 35.47% 58,547,355 35.33% -0.14 Google 9,012,004 5.54% 10,079,333 6.08% 0.54 lighttpd 1,552,650 0.95% 1,495,308 0.90% -0.05 Sun 546,581 0.34% 547,873 0.33% -0.01 As I understand it, Netcraft's results are based on web sites, or more precisely, hostnames, rather than actual web servers. This introduces a bias because some servers run a large number of low-volume (or zero volume) web sites. This company attempts to survey web *servers* only (Note: Total is about 5% of Netcraft total) http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200804/ More detail here: http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200804/servers.html This gives 73% for Apache and 19% for Microsoft. BillK --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
On May 27, 2008, at 7:00 AM, BillK wrote: As I understand it, Netcraft's results are based on web sites, or more precisely, hostnames, rather than actual web servers. This introduces a bias because some servers run a large number of low-volume (or zero volume) web sites. Of course, many sites use reverse proxies or other shenanigans that run many servers through a single IP, which would have the opposite bias. Accurately counting server boxes is difficult. J. Andrew Rogers --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 3:53 PM, Mark Waser wrote: No. You are not correct. Read their methodology (http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/faq.html?mondir=/200804domdir=domain=) which I have copied and pasted below We visit what we consider well-known sites. In our case, we define a well-known site as a site that had a link to it from at least one other site that we consider well-known. So, if we are visiting you, it means we know about you through a link from another site. If a site stops responding to our request for 3 consecutive months, we automatically remove it from the survey. In this fashion, our list of known servers remains up to date. Because of this technique, we find that we actually only visit about 10% of the web sites out on the web. This is because approximately 90% of all web sites are fringe sites, such as domain squatters, personal web sites, etc., that are considered unimportant by the rest of the web community (because no-one considers them important enough to link to.) That's fine by me. They are trying to survey the web servers that are actually *used* on the internet. Ignoring millions of parked domains on IIS servers run by some major registrars. Their overall figure of 73% for Apache and 19% for Microsoft IIS sounds reasonable to me. As J. Andrew Rogers said, Apache is probably a larger % than this in Silicon Valley. BillK --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [agi] More Info Please
Hi Derek, Thank you for the thoughtful response . . . . There are a number of things that I'm very interested in within the OpenCog umbrella (starting with a lot of the hypergraph stuff and the optimized indexes that Ben has always been talking about but unwilling/unable to share) even though the core design itself isn't where I want to spend my research time. I *was* thinking that I'd like to give back in proportion to what I gain (which is my normal habit in the DotNetNuke and OpenACS communities) but it seems like that isn't going to be possible code-wise so I'll probably offer to help with the documentation instead (since design help clearly isn't welcome either -- and the documentation doesn't exist to support it anyways ;-). Given the reception here, I'll probably go off and do my own thing in .NET. I'm more interested in doing a lot more natural language stuff anyways -- and Novamente seems to have taken an expedient wrong turn on some of that work. I'll be real interested to see if OpenCog can develop the necessary management structure and coordination to get anywhere. Personally, I think that a someone or two is needed to step up and be a true system architect to go with Ben's visionary and to get some useful documentation out. Hacking at little pieces of the problem and then expecting the system to miraculously self-assemble itself is exactly what Loosemore is always screaming about and I'm afraid that the way this effort is being run will validate his concerns. I wonder if we should start a pool on the documentation arrival date . . . . :-) - Original Message - From: Derek Zahn To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 10:35 AM Subject: **SPAM** RE: [agi] More Info Please Mark Waser: Does anybody have any interest in and/or willingness to program in a different environment? I haven't decided to what extent I'll participate in OpenCog myself yet. For me, it depends more on whether the capabilities of the system seem worth exploring, which in turn depends as much on the underlying philosophy as the codebase. I'm thinking of OpenCog right now as a concrete way to understand the ideas of Bencompany. Frankly I find OpenCog a rather odd open source project given its open-ended nature -- no target end users, no clear applications, no (apparent) dedicated driving personality declaring here is exactly what we need to accomplish, who's with me?. I don't mean that Ben isn't dedicated, but I don't envision him herding this particularly ornery flock and browbeating people into actually finishing and debugging code. Still, it's a very cool effort wherever it leads. The language used doesn't particularly matter to me, so I'm willing to work in a different environment. I don't have a Linux machine at the moment so a requirement to work in Linux is a small but significant barrier to entry for me. Screwing around with operating systems is just about my least favorite thing to do. It's hard for me even to make my own guesses about the best way to go because the overall architecture isn't very clear to me yet. I guess that the central data structure -- the AtomTable, contains a persistent cached bunch nodes and links that come in various types and have numbers attached to them. But it's not clear to me whether the types are supposed to be part of the cognitive theory or not -- are OpenCog developers supposed to invent new node types or just work with those provided? If they can be created, does that mean changing the AtomTable implementation? Is the meaning of the numbers on links predetermined or can they be overloaded? If they can be overloaded, how do the Mind Agents cope with the ensuing chaos? If they can't be overloaded, how can the system be extended to include new ideas? If for example the AtomTable is sufficiently compartmentalized so that it won't need changing, it would seem that porting it to another language would be a lower priority than providing an environment where developing Mind Agents (which I am assuming is the really interesting stuff) could occur in whatever language individual developers feel most productive in. Or maybe the amount of work required to do even this is larger than the actual interest in using the code warrants. The more interesting issues to me are things like how the Atoms (and any other representational structures I don't know about yet) get their semantics and how adding new code changes those semantics... what is the representational flexibility and power of the knowledge representation scheme when applied to some non-toy cases... I'm sure the documentation will make things a lot clearer. -- agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription --- agi Archives: http
Re: Merging threads was Re: Code generation was Re: [agi] More Info Please
Steve Richfield said: A useful AGImust be able to rise above its own orders to be able to eliminate problems rather than destroying them! I agree that an AGI, to be friendly, must not blindly obey a human user. I would rather have it act according to humanity's collective volition as described by Yudkowsky. I.e. the AGI should do what a prudent set of representative humans would do when faced with the same command. But I have another solution to the abortion example you mentioned. I believe that Texai, which will be deployed as a distributed community of specialized agents acting in concert, should obey the laws of the geographical territory in which it operates, and should conform to the degree possible to the cultural mores of the user. So my progressive-issue-buddy AGI agent may well know a lot about pro-choice and how to advocate it, whereas someone else's Christian-church-buddy AGI agent may well know a lot about abortion alternatives and how to advocate those. In a country like the USA both of these agents may be operable. In some other country perhaps only one of them could operate (e.g. the Chinese government may have a policy that AGIs operating in their country fully support their one-child policies). Presuming that you do NOT want to store all of history and repeatedly analyze all of it as your future AGI operates, you must accept MULTIPLE potentially-useful paradigms, adding new ones and trashing old ones as more information comes in. For humans, forgetting is cognitively efficient, making a case that AGIs should likewise forget. But because computer storage is relatively cheap and knowledge relatively concise, I am planning to archive all conversations with users, to the degree permitted by the user's privacy policy. For users operating a local Texai instance, their private data will be archived locally and mirrored if permitted in an encrypted form on other (remote) Texai instances. Wikipediapresumes a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) or other single-paradigm view of the world, as do the AGI designs that I have observed. The English Wikipedia may have this unfortunate characteristic even though it is contrary to the organization's policies, but certainly that cannot be the case for all the other Wikipedias such as the Spanish Wikipedia. Interest in Texai is balanced between the USA and the rest of the world. Here is a cluster map of my blog readers. Having an AGI organized as a geographically distributed community may at least partially solve the issue you raise. 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: Steve Richfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 12:23:37 PM Subject: Merging threads was Re: Code generation was Re: [agi] More Info Please Steve, On 5/26/08, Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But I have a perhaps more troublesome issue in that abusive mentors may seek to teach destructive behavior to the system, and such abuse must be easily detected and its effects healed, to the frustration of the abusers. E.g. in the same fashion as Wikipedia. At this point, three discussion threads come together... 1. Erroneous motivations. Most human strife is based on erroneous motivations - which are often good ideas expressed at the wrong meta-level. For example, it would seem good to minimize the number of abortions, as this is one effort to simply counter another and hence is at minimum a waste of effort. However, stopping others from having abortions starts a needless battle when all that may be necessary is some subtle social engineering so that no one would ever want one. If we tell our AGI to stop all killing, you'll probably just get another war, whereas if you tell our AGI to do some social engineering to reduce/eliminate the motivation to kill, you will get a very different result. Unfortunately, this all goes WAY over the heads of most of the Wikipedia-filling population, not to mention many people working on an AGI. All of the discussions here (that I have seen) regarding AGIs gone berserk have presumed erroneous motivations, and then cringed at the prospective results. A useful AGI must be able to rise above its own orders to be able to eliminate problems rather than destroying them! 2. Learning and thinking. Presuming that you do NOT want to store all of history and repeatedly analyze all of it as your future AGI operates, you must accept MULTIPLE potentially-useful paradigms, adding new ones and trashing old ones as more information comes in. Our own very personal ideas of learning and thinking do NOT typically allow for the maintenance of multiple simultaneous paradigms, cross-paradigm translation, etc. If our future AGI is to function at an astronomical level as people here hope
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Derek, you make an excellent point about the OpenCog project appearing too open-ended and unfocused. Ben is writing documentation for a specific cognitive architecture, OpenCog Prime, that is intended to address these concerns. The first iteration of OpenCog Prime is targeted for July and will be announced on [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Mark, your reception would be warmer if your behavior was less incessantly abrasive and trollish. I think it's a good idea to work on a .NET implementation, and when it's compatible with the C++ core, you'll have enough specific knowledge about OpenCog to make intelligent conversation with the OpenCog systems designers, architects and coders (who are busy working on OpenCog rather than being sucked into trolls on public lists). -dave --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Mark, your reception would be warmer if your behavior was less incessantly abrasive and trollish. I can accept abrasive (since I do get frustrated with bad science, etc.) but believe that trollish is rather unfair . . . . I think it's a good idea to work on a .NET implementation, and when it's compatible with the C++ core, you'll have enough specific knowledge about As I said, I'd love to run parallel tracks . . . . except that public opinion seems to be that that would involve too much overhead and dilute the effort too much. But then again, you're head of the project so I guess that your opinion wins. If you're interested, I certainly am. - Original Message - From: David Hart To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 6:27 PM Subject: **SPAM** Re: [agi] More Info Please Derek, you make an excellent point about the OpenCog project appearing too open-ended and unfocused. Ben is writing documentation for a specific cognitive architecture, OpenCog Prime, that is intended to address these concerns. The first iteration of OpenCog Prime is targeted for July and will be announced on [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Mark, your reception would be warmer if your behavior was less incessantly abrasive and trollish. I think it's a good idea to work on a .NET implementation, and when it's compatible with the C++ core, you'll have enough specific knowledge about OpenCog to make intelligent conversation with the OpenCog systems designers, architects and coders (who are busy working on OpenCog rather than being sucked into trolls on public lists). -dave -- agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [agi] More Info Please
With all this lovely chit-chat about .NET, I have been wondering if anyone was entertaining the possibility of doing a port of NARS from Java to C#. Not that I have seriously considered working myself on it, just that before someone would undertake such an effort it would be beneficial to share goals. Going from Java to C# is less of a hit than from C++ to C#. John From: Mark Waser [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Mark, your reception would be warmer if your behavior was less incessantly abrasive and trollish. I can accept abrasive (since I do get frustrated with bad science, etc.) but believe that trollish is rather unfair . . . . I think it's a good idea to work on a .NET implementation, and when it's compatible with the C++ core, you'll have enough specific knowledge about As I said, I'd love to run parallel tracks . . . . except that public opinion seems to be that that would involve too much overhead and dilute the effort too much. But then again, you're head of the project so I guess that your opinion wins. If you're interested, I certainly am. - Original Message - From: David Hart mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Derek, you make an excellent point about the OpenCog project appearing too open-ended and unfocused. Ben is writing documentation for a specific cognitive architecture, OpenCog Prime, that is intended to address these concerns. The first iteration of OpenCog Prime is targeted for July and will be announced on [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Mark, your reception would be warmer if your behavior was less incessantly abrasive and trollish. I think it's a good idea to work on a .NET implementation, and when it's compatible with the C++ core, you'll have enough specific knowledge about OpenCog to make intelligent conversation with the OpenCog systems designers, architects and coders (who are busy working on OpenCog rather than being sucked into trolls on public lists). --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Merging threads was Re: Code generation was Re: [agi] More Info Please
distributed community may at least partially solve the issue you raise. No, it makes things WORSE by factionalizing rather than drilling down to the underlying false assumptions. This is how wars are needlessly made. Again, I am amazed by my apparent TOTAL failure to communicate. Can someone here please debug this? Steve Richfield - Original Message From: Steve Richfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 12:23:37 PM Subject: Merging threads was Re: Code generation was Re: [agi] More Info Please Steve, On 5/26/08, Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But I have a perhaps more troublesome issue in that abusive mentors may seek to teach destructive behavior to the system, and such abuse must be easily detected and its effects healed, to the frustration of the abusers. E.g. in the same fashion as Wikipedia. At this point, three discussion threads come together... 1. Erroneous motivations. Most human strife is based on erroneous motivations - which are often good ideas expressed at the wrong meta-level. For example, it would seem good to minimize the number of abortions, as this is one effort to simply counter another and hence is at minimum a waste of effort. However, stopping others from having abortions starts a needless battle when all that may be necessary is some subtle social engineering so that no one would ever want one. If we tell our AGI to stop all killing, you'll probably just get another war, whereas if you tell our AGI to do some social engineering to reduce/eliminate the motivation to kill, you will get a very different result. Unfortunately, this all goes WAY over the heads of most of the Wikipedia-filling population, not to mention many people working on an AGI. All of the discussions here (that I have seen) regarding AGIs gone berserk have presumed erroneous motivations, and then cringed at the prospective results. A useful AGI must be able to rise above its own orders to be able to eliminate problems rather than destroying them! 2. Learning and thinking. Presuming that you do NOT want to store all of history and repeatedly analyze all of it as your future AGI operates, you must accept MULTIPLE potentially-useful paradigms, adding new ones and trashing old ones as more information comes in. Our own very personal ideas of learning and thinking do NOT typically allow for the maintenance of multiple simultaneous paradigms, cross-paradigm translation, etc. If our future AGI is to function at an astronomical level as people here hope that it will, it will NOT be thinking as we do, but will be doing something quite orthogonal to our own personal processes. Either people must tackle what will be needed to accomplish this (analysis), or there would seem to be little hope for future success because debugging would be impossible in a system whose correct operation is unknown/unthinkable. I tackled a very small part of this, as needed to support Dr. Eliza development. Obviously, MUCH more analysis is needed for the AGI that everyone hopes will come out of this process. Development without analysis (which covers most of the postings on this forum) simply consigns the results to the bit bucket. 3. Wikipedia miscreants. Wikipedia presumes a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) or other single-paradigm view of the world, as do the AGI designs that I have observed. If abusive mentors are a significant problem, then there is something wrong with the design. At worst, an abusive mentor should simply be bringing a dysfunctional paradigm into consideration, which may actually be useful, for communicating with the abusive mentor in their own terms. Wikipedia can never become really useful until it integrates a multiple-paradigm view of things, whereupon the concept of abuse should evaporate. Now, if we could just pull these all together and get our arms around multiple paradigms and erroneous motivations, we might have a really USEFUL discussion. Steve Richfield = - Original Message From: William Pearson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 2:28:32 PM Subject: Code generation was Re: [agi] More Info Please 2008/5/26 Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Regarding the best language for AGI development, most here know that I'm using Java in Texai. For skill acquisition, my strategy is to have Texai acquire a skill by composing a Java program to perform the learned skill. How will it memory manage between skills? You want to try and avoid thrashing the memory. The java memory system allows any program to ask for as much memory as they need, this could lead to tragedy of the commons situations. 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
Re: [agi] More Info Please
On May 26, 2008, at 5:52 PM, Mark Waser wrote: That you have less than a two-to-one market share and it's dwindling? I have ~100% market share. Not sure how it is two-to-one or dwindling, though I suppose it has nowhere to go but down. That technically .Net has blown past you and the gap only shows signs of widening? I concern myself with big server apps, and I am not sure what this .NET gap is. Which Silicon Valley companies are developing their server infrastructure using .NET? Other than Microsoft (presumably), I cannot think of any. When companies want server bindings and drivers, they ask for C++, Java, and (god help us) PHP. I have never had anyone anywhere in government or industry ask for .NET. I am sure they exist and it will happen eventually but the avalanche of demand is not there, probably because virtually no one uses .NET on Linux. That when Mono reaches the next version, you're going to switch? Seems unlikely, since it does not offer anything of value for anything I might do. C is faster and more scalable for server engines, particularly for server clusters; if you are going to write that much unmanaged code, you might as well bind it to a super-productive language like Python. Is Microsoft porting Visual Studio to Unix/ Linux in the near future? I already get a really fancy Unix development environment from Apple for free, though it does not support .NET. J. Andrew Rogers --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean by sane languages . . . . - Original Message - From: Lukasz Stafiniak [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 7:45 AM Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 1:26 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What I'd rather do instead is see if we can get a .NET parallel track started over the next few months, see if we can get everything ported, and see the relative productivity between the two paths. That would provide a provably true answer to the debate. There are also sane languages using the C++ object model (http://felix-lang.org/). And there is Mono, though I've heard it falls behind .NET considerably in terms of efficiency. The thing is, will multi-language sourcing be encouraged? (Will every contributor be allowed to write in his language, provided it compiles with the rest?) --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups OpenCog.org (Open Cognition Project) group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/opencog?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~--- --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
mark, What I'd rather do instead is see if we can get a .NET parallel track started over the next few months, see if we can get everything ported, and see the relative productivity between the two paths. That would provide a provably true answer to the debate. Well, it's an open-source project, so to each his own... However, at this point, folks working on OpenCog stuff under the -- GSoC -- SIAI -- Novamente organizations are going to be working on the current, actually existing C++ implementation IMO, the vast majority of work in this sort of project has to do with fiddling with the AI algorithms to make them work right, rather than nuts-and-bolts engineering, so I'm not sure the choice of language is going to make that much difference ... except that with C++ it's obviously more possible to make the code efficient where it needs to be. (Features like template metaprogramming are great but of course one can live without them.) And in the current phase, killer efficiency is not going to make much difference either, while we're still working out algorithm details. The potential for killer efficiency will come into play a little later once the main issue is scaling rather than algorithm refinement. I would much rather see work go into working out the various algorithmic details that are left pending by the OpenCog Prime documentation (not yet released by me, alas... and spending time on these emails doesn't help...) than on reimplementing the same code in multiple programming languages. But as an open-source project there is the opportunity for multiple forks and directions. In the event that a C# fork does get off the ground, it would be nice if things were worked out so that C++ MindAgents could act on the C# core. Ultimately the deeper code goes in the MindAgents not in the core system anyway, in the OpenCog design. If the same MindAgents could be used in both cores then having two cores would not impede development much, and might even accelerate it if it allows developers to do more work in their preferred languages and development environments. -- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Regarding the best language for AGI development, most here know that I'm using Java in Texai. For skill acquisition, my strategy is to have Texai acquire a skill by composing a Java program to perform the learned skill. I hope that the algorithmic (e.g. Java statement operation) knowledge that I teach it will be eventually portable to source code generation in machine language for the x64 architecture. One might hope that by initially teaching the register set, machine instructions, and cache-line characteristics for x64, the code generation might subsequently learn to perform many of the static and dynamic (e.g. execution profiling based) optimizations employed by the best compilers. Given algorithmic knowledge, it should be possible, for example, to avoid the need for type inference, or escape analysis to determine which objects can be allocated from the stack versus the heap. Likewise, algorithmic knowledge should enable the identification of single threaded code in which objects can be statically allocated or simply kept in a register. What I am suggesting is that compiler optimization is a skill, and that skill could be taught to an AGI - having the ability to learn by being taught. While I enjoy reading about, and sometimes participating in, a programming languages discussion, I suppose that what language an AGI should author is also interesting. 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: Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 7:48:29 AM Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And what is the value proposition of Java over any other language? It has no unique features. It's development is lagging. It's developers are defecting (again, look at the statistics). It's fragmenting just like Unix so it certainly isn't as portable as claimed. Java is clear and understandable, with clean semantics so that you can refactor the code without breaking it and IDE knows its way around the codebase, has garbage collection, a bit of functional programming stance, is fast enough, has decent infrastructure and everybody knows it. A bit verbose, but I haven't found it to be a serious problem. If you don't need fragmented odd parts, it's sufficiently portable. If you decide between .NET and Java, tradeoff is more subtle, as they are essentially the same thing, except that .NET is not open and more bloated -- which is more important for a particular project? I guess openness outweighs is for an open-source project. -- 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/?; 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
2008/5/26 J. Andrew Rogers [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Europe specifically excludes .NET as a development target for similar pragmatic reasons. And developing .NET is going to suck on a non-Windows workstation, eliminating one of the major advantages you tout. To be honest, I do not know of anyone that uses a Mac that is using it for .NET development -- total impedance mismatch. On Linux the performance of 3D distributed particle SLAM (a CPU intensive task) running on the Mono .NET (version 2) runtime is marginally faster than the same code running on Windows using the MS runtime, but only by a few milliseconds. Performance benchmarks are very similar to the same algorithms written in C++ and compiled with gcc. The advantages being advertised for C# (i.e. new functional programming features) only apply to .NET 3 or above, which isn't available on GNU/Linux systems and so is of no interest to me at this point. Arguments about programming languages are a popular topic on AI forums, but usually generate more heat than light. --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
I deliberately used specifiers such as a bit or sufficiently to imply relation with the problem and not with other languages, that is to show why I think it's adequate for the task, not that it's optimal. Why go with adequate when optimal is available? Aren't you the one who is concerned with the existential risks of someone else getting to AGI first? Or is this your way of slowing the process down? C# may have advantages over Java, but it doesn't mean that these advantages are particularly relevant for a particular project. Then make project-specific assertions. The fact that functional programming is an integral part of C# is huge for AGI. (Your turn to make a valid point :-) alone .NET. As for language anarhcy and feature bloating that .NET provides, it is not necessarily a good thing, project needs to enforce reasonable uniformity to be manageable. Tell us a little bit about yourself . . . . How many large projects have you managed? Over what time period? In what language? How long were you responsible for maintenance and enhancements afterwards? How many subsequent, enhanced versions of your large projects were there? How many times have you ported a large project from one environment/language to another (or even one major software rev to another)? - Original Message - From: Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 11:15 AM Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please That list wasn't about the comparison with .NET, I only added a couple of words about .NET at the end. I deliberately used specifiers such as a bit or sufficiently to imply relation with the problem and not with other languages, that is to show why I think it's adequate for the task, not that it's optimal. C# may have advantages over Java, but it doesn't mean that these advantages are particularly relevant for a particular project. As Ben noted, even C++ goes, even when it clearly doesn't have some of the important features that even Java has, let alone .NET. As for language anarhcy and feature bloating that .NET provides, it is not necessarily a good thing, project needs to enforce reasonable uniformity to be manageable. On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 6:19 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How is Java is *more* clear and understandable? The IDE is *known* to be inferior. Are you arguing otherwise. Every modern language has garbage collection. Java has a functional programming stance? No, it does not. Look at what you can do in the newest version of C# much less F#. If you believe that Java has functional programming, you don't have any clue what you are talking about. Java's infrastructure is *much* smaller than that of .Net and fragmented. Everybody knows it? The way syntax is these days, everybody knows Java and C# and VB.Net because they're basically the same language. It is *not* any more portable for any sufficiently advanced application than anything else. Oh, and for your reference, the vast majority of .Net is actually open and has been submitted to standards bodies. The problem is that Microsoft advances it faster than the less-interested Linux people can port it so Mono always looks seriously inferior to what's available on Windows. What's going to be embarrassing is about three to five years down the line when Mono kicks Java's butt *and* it's still vastly inferior to what is available under Windows at that time. - Original Message - From: Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 8:48 AM Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And what is the value proposition of Java over any other language? It has no unique features. It's development is lagging. It's developers are defecting (again, look at the statistics). It's fragmenting just like Unix so it certainly isn't as portable as claimed. Java is clear and understandable, with clean semantics so that you can refactor the code without breaking it and IDE knows its way around the codebase, has garbage collection, a bit of functional programming stance, is fast enough, has decent infrastructure and everybody knows it. A bit verbose, but I haven't found it to be a serious problem. If you don't need fragmented odd parts, it's sufficiently portable. If you decide between .NET and Java, tradeoff is more subtle, as they are essentially the same thing, except that .NET is not open and more bloated -- which is more important for a particular project? I guess openness outweighs is for an open-source project. -- 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/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Where do you live, if you do not mind me asking? The preference for server environments is very much a local phenomenon. Using California as an example, in Los Angeles there is a strong preference for Windows systems, but in Silicon Valley you will find that Unix is pervasive. I live in Northern Virginia, near Washington, DC. .NET may be ubiquitous in abstract because it is associated with Windows, but if you actually look at some rather important tech centers like Silicon Valley, there is not a Windows server in sight. The dominance of Unix-based systems there is so complete that it is not even a contest any more. You are apparently under the impression that this is not true, Where do you get your statistics? What exactly are you measuring? If you're looking solely at servers like Google's which require extremely high performance for very specific, very tailored purposes, you are correct. If you're looking at more generic business-type work, you're just plain wrong. And, realistically, AGI development is *MUCH* closer to the business-type work than the high-performance work. A lot of business in Europe specifically excludes .NET as a development target for similar pragmatic reasons. A lot of other business in Europe specifically excludes *nux. It's a cultural difference in contracting. I'm starting to distrust your claims when you come up with BS like this that I know is wrong from my own experience. How much European contracting have you done? I worked with the World Bank for a number of years and then was spun off with the Global Development Gateway. Do you really want to argue European contracting? To be honest, I do not know of anyone that uses a Mac that is using it for .NET development -- total impedance mismatch. Your original quote was about Mac notebooks at conferences -- not development systems. I know numerous people who use their Mac notebooks as a gateway to their non-Mac development machines. It's very common here for the reasons I stated previously. To use Silicon Valley as an example, C/C++, Java, and Python will give you about 90% coverage of the developer pool. The .NET languages are in the residue. OK. Show me your statistics. I have *NEVER* seen statistics anywhere like what you're quoting. One of us is *very* misinformed or you're quoting a very odd little subset that has no relevance to the real world. In Bangalore, .NET is a major percentage of the developer pool. Which is most likely to usefully contribute to your project, programming languages aside? It sounds an awful lot like you are simply trying to rationalize your personal preference for programming language/environment. Nice ad hominem. I have yet to see anyone attempt to deny my claim about the relative development speed on .Net vs. anything else. That sounds like a solid reason, not a rationalization. And what is the value proposition of Java over any other language? It has no unique features. It's development is lagging. It's developers are defecting (again, look at the statistics). It's fragmenting just like Unix so it certainly isn't as portable as claimed. The value proposition of Java is a deep pool of technically proficient hackers know it and it works on all the platforms many such people prefer. MacOS has a C/C++, Python, and Java development environment out of the box (among other less common languages), but no .NET. Linux has similar coverage out of the box. By selecting .NET you have tacitly excluded most developers in Silicon Valley, and a huge number in Europe and many other countries. Java casts a much wider net even if it is an inferior environment. Not that much wider and it should give you a clue that the pool is shrinking by most statistics. Why can't Java win even against C++ and C? Oh, and further, you don't want hackers for a development project of any size -- you want qualified professionals who can do large-scale systems development, not quick-and-dirty little systems that quickly fall apart or become unmanageable shortly after they grow more than the slightest amount. The language/environment is a secondary concern to the developer pool because you could develop this project in *any* language. The difference in overhead costs intrinsic to the environment are nominal. I don't like Java myself, but I think a better argument can be made for it *in this instance* relative to .NET because language features are not that important at the end of the day. If you were doing a closed shop project then .NET would be very arguably a superior choice. So, why do you believe that all these developers are staying away from the superior choice? Why aren't the smarter ones defecting? Are you sure that they aren't? Are you sure you want that huge developer pool of those who aren't smart enough to defect? If you hate Java, there are other environments with a better feature
Re: [agi] More Info Please
On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And what is the value proposition of Java over any other language? It has no unique features. It's development is lagging. It's developers are defecting (again, look at the statistics). It's fragmenting just like Unix so it certainly isn't as portable as claimed. Java is clear and understandable, with clean semantics so that you can refactor the code without breaking it and IDE knows its way around the codebase, has garbage collection, a bit of functional programming stance, is fast enough, has decent infrastructure and everybody knows it. A bit verbose, but I haven't found it to be a serious problem. If you don't need fragmented odd parts, it's sufficiently portable. If you decide between .NET and Java, tradeoff is more subtle, as they are essentially the same thing, except that .NET is not open and more bloated -- which is more important for a particular project? I guess openness outweighs is for an open-source project. -- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
That list wasn't about the comparison with .NET, I only added a couple of words about .NET at the end. I deliberately used specifiers such as a bit or sufficiently to imply relation with the problem and not with other languages, that is to show why I think it's adequate for the task, not that it's optimal. C# may have advantages over Java, but it doesn't mean that these advantages are particularly relevant for a particular project. As Ben noted, even C++ goes, even when it clearly doesn't have some of the important features that even Java has, let alone .NET. As for language anarhcy and feature bloating that .NET provides, it is not necessarily a good thing, project needs to enforce reasonable uniformity to be manageable. On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 6:19 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How is Java is *more* clear and understandable? The IDE is *known* to be inferior. Are you arguing otherwise. Every modern language has garbage collection. Java has a functional programming stance? No, it does not. Look at what you can do in the newest version of C# much less F#. If you believe that Java has functional programming, you don't have any clue what you are talking about. Java's infrastructure is *much* smaller than that of .Net and fragmented. Everybody knows it? The way syntax is these days, everybody knows Java and C# and VB.Net because they're basically the same language. It is *not* any more portable for any sufficiently advanced application than anything else. Oh, and for your reference, the vast majority of .Net is actually open and has been submitted to standards bodies. The problem is that Microsoft advances it faster than the less-interested Linux people can port it so Mono always looks seriously inferior to what's available on Windows. What's going to be embarrassing is about three to five years down the line when Mono kicks Java's butt *and* it's still vastly inferior to what is available under Windows at that time. - Original Message - From: Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 8:48 AM Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And what is the value proposition of Java over any other language? It has no unique features. It's development is lagging. It's developers are defecting (again, look at the statistics). It's fragmenting just like Unix so it certainly isn't as portable as claimed. Java is clear and understandable, with clean semantics so that you can refactor the code without breaking it and IDE knows its way around the codebase, has garbage collection, a bit of functional programming stance, is fast enough, has decent infrastructure and everybody knows it. A bit verbose, but I haven't found it to be a serious problem. If you don't need fragmented odd parts, it's sufficiently portable. If you decide between .NET and Java, tradeoff is more subtle, as they are essentially the same thing, except that .NET is not open and more bloated -- which is more important for a particular project? I guess openness outweighs is for an open-source project. -- 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/?; 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/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 8:33 PM, J. Andrew Rogers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Replying to myself, I'll let Mark have the last word since, after all, it is *his* project and not mine. :-) I assume that last sentence was sarcastic ;-) Of course, while Mark is a valued participant in OpenCog, it's not *his* personal project ... and the initial OpenCog system is C++, mainly tested in a Unix environment ... FWIW, my impression about the ubiquity of Unix servers in Silicon Valley agrees w/yours. This is obviously because Silicon Valley is currently obsessed with Web apps, and Unix is generally recognized as a better platform for the large-scale deployment of Web apps. And no, I don't feel like spending my whole evening looking up copious statistics to support this assertion. However, I'll quote just one simple stat: About 90% of the Internet relies on Unix operating systems running Apache, the world's most widely used Web server. from http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/a/unix_win.htm I spent 10 minutes looking for data regarding developer productivity on Linux vs. Windows, but mostly just found bullshit about M$ vs. IBM, concerning fatally flawed, mock-scientific studies funded by Microsoft ;-p http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/46828.htm (note that this study, while conducted by M$ in an extremely dishonest way, is also really about IBM WebSphere rather than about Linux C++ programming, so it's not directly pertinent to this discussion anyway. Except to highlight the difficulties of doing this sort of comparison in a meaningful way.) OK ... enough of that ... back to doing useful work ;-) -- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
How is Java is *more* clear and understandable? The IDE is *known* to be inferior. Are you arguing otherwise. Every modern language has garbage collection. Java has a functional programming stance? No, it does not. Look at what you can do in the newest version of C# much less F#. If you believe that Java has functional programming, you don't have any clue what you are talking about. Java's infrastructure is *much* smaller than that of .Net and fragmented. Everybody knows it? The way syntax is these days, everybody knows Java and C# and VB.Net because they're basically the same language. It is *not* any more portable for any sufficiently advanced application than anything else. Oh, and for your reference, the vast majority of .Net is actually open and has been submitted to standards bodies. The problem is that Microsoft advances it faster than the less-interested Linux people can port it so Mono always looks seriously inferior to what's available on Windows. What's going to be embarrassing is about three to five years down the line when Mono kicks Java's butt *and* it's still vastly inferior to what is available under Windows at that time. - Original Message - From: Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 8:48 AM Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And what is the value proposition of Java over any other language? It has no unique features. It's development is lagging. It's developers are defecting (again, look at the statistics). It's fragmenting just like Unix so it certainly isn't as portable as claimed. Java is clear and understandable, with clean semantics so that you can refactor the code without breaking it and IDE knows its way around the codebase, has garbage collection, a bit of functional programming stance, is fast enough, has decent infrastructure and everybody knows it. A bit verbose, but I haven't found it to be a serious problem. If you don't need fragmented odd parts, it's sufficiently portable. If you decide between .NET and Java, tradeoff is more subtle, as they are essentially the same thing, except that .NET is not open and more bloated -- which is more important for a particular project? I guess openness outweighs is for an open-source project. -- 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/?; 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 1:26 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What I'd rather do instead is see if we can get a .NET parallel track started over the next few months, see if we can get everything ported, and see the relative productivity between the two paths. That would provide a provably true answer to the debate. There are also sane languages using the C++ object model (http://felix-lang.org/). And there is Mono, though I've heard it falls behind .NET considerably in terms of efficiency. The thing is, will multi-language sourcing be encouraged? (Will every contributor be allowed to write in his language, provided it compiles with the rest?) --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 6:26 PM, Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Regarding the best language for AGI development, most here know that I'm using Java in Texai. For skill acquisition, my strategy is to have Texai acquire a skill by composing a Java program to perform the learned skill. I hope that the algorithmic (e.g. Java statement operation) knowledge that I teach it will be eventually portable to source code generation in machine language for the x64 architecture. One might hope that by initially teaching the register set, machine instructions, and cache-line characteristics for x64, the code generation might subsequently learn to perform many of the static and dynamic (e.g. execution profiling based) optimizations employed by the best compilers. This sounds good, though a nitpick... Given algorithmic knowledge, it should be possible, for example, to avoid the need for type inference, or escape analysis to determine which objects can be allocated from the stack versus the heap. By avoid the need for... you probably mean have the AI figure out how to do... by itself, thus avoiding the need to manually figure out the rules? --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Good luck on your trip! Personally, I would rather start a debate page on virtually *anything* else. I will start a couple on other AGI issues elsewhere but language debates just aren't worth the time because most people have virulent opinions without the requisite knowledge to support them -- not to mention the fact that I wasn't arguing language but architecture and infrastructure. Check out the fact that you can now do functional programming in the newest version of C# and get back to me on how cool that is. What I'd rather do instead is see if we can get a .NET parallel track started over the next few months, see if we can get everything ported, and see the relative productivity between the two paths. That would provide a provably true answer to the debate. - Original Message - From: Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Cc: Linas Vepstas [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 8:26 PM Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please Mark, For OpenCog we had to make a definite choice and we made one. Sorry you don't agree w/ it. I agree that you had to make a choice and made the one that seemed right to various reason. The above comment is rude and snarky however -- particularly since it seems to come *because* you can't justify your choice. I would expect better of you. = = = = = = = Let's try this again. Get your experts together and create a short list of why C++ on Linux (and any infrastructure there that isn't immediately available under .Net) is better than the combination of all the .Net languages and all the infrastructure available there that isn't immediately available under Linux. No resorting to pseudo-democracies of experts, how about real reasons that YOU will stand behind and be willing to defend. This would be a reasonable exercise, but I simply don't have time to deal with it right now. I'm about to leave on a 2.5 weeks business / research-collaboration trip to Asia, and en route I hope to make some progress on mutating Novamente docs into OpenCog docs. No time to burn on these arguments at the moment. However, it might be worthwhile to create a page on the OpenCog wiki focused on this issue, if others are also interested in it. There could be a section on the page arguing the potential advantages of .Net for OpenCog; a section on the page arguing the intended advantages of the current approach; and other sections written by folks advocating other approaches (e.g. LISP-centric, whatever...). Perhaps if you create this page and get it started w/ your own arguments, others will contribute theirs and we can advance the debate that way. -- 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/?; 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
J. Andrew Rogers said: For open source projects, ideal environments play second fiddle to broad language support. Painless portability is the reason C is often selected over C++ for open source projects -- universality is that important. J. Andrew Rogers --- Would you please direct me to open source project web sites that may be of interest to AI projecteers, and a C++ compiler to use with them. I never found any comments on a good compiler to use on a Windows XP system (other than the microsoft compiler of course.) I am also looking for a web site that also has some introductory material on how one goes about working on a listed open source project. 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
What is your approach on ensuring AGI safety/Friendliness on this project? --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Hi Peter, Ben, and Panu What is your approach on ensuring AGI safety/Friendliness on this project? I would immediately gather reason to assert that if there's money in AGI, and money is made from such a project, it is bound to be one of a friendly nature. That assertion of course makes for a sad joke, yet seems to be not so for the economic sort of good in contemporary practice, one in which the lives of the industrials are currently based. It is for this reason I'm highly critical of for profit AGI projects or any other for profit enterprise for that matter. Profit comes from dependence on consumption and the destruction of that which is consumed. AGI has the capacity to provide abundance to all domains, to make robber barons of us all if we so chose (of course that would be a choice of fantasy, not that other facets of life are not as such), ending all market activity altogether. As long as the culture of scarcity, consumption, and the marketplace remain, the only way to keep things circulated will be to continue destruction or dependence. Obliteration and continuous necessity is profitable within current industrial frames, you see. Read that line or the one before it again if you don't. If you see market activity as a benefit in the long run you are either ignorant or greedy, and if so, it will only precipitate destruction, misery, and more competitive behavior--something AGI would only enhance if such a mindset where kept and practiced. How do you feel and reason about selling AGI to weapon manufacturers? They are the only realm that could keep market activity intact in a world of AGI. If so, why would you do this? I argue that forming a new ethical and normative economic base will greatly influence whether AGI is used for friendliness or otherwise. It is in everyone's best interest to focus on projects like OpenCog that do not encourage the destructive behaviors of the marketplace. It is my hope that market based economies are seen only as a means rather than an end. If it is seen as a conclusion for how we 'should' live then we will surely lose our lives. Economic zero-sum games must end or they will end us. Non-zero-sum economies will save us from ourselves. Scarcity divides (eventually to nothing or less) and abundance multiplies (an infinity of choices). Of course the two will need to be in balance. Both will always persist to one degree or another. We must lean toward abundance to remain in the game. I'm curious as to what your investors want out of the technology. Telling them that AGI will eventually put them out of business won't attract investment, yet that would be withholding a very likely scenario. Now that information is freely available to investors that cared to read and believe this or that of my work in Effortless Economy. As it is, AGI is difficult for most to fathom as possible, for now. So in the field I'm developing, it is somewhat more abstract or incomprehensible of an idea, yet AGI has potentially dramatic concrete consequences in one direction or another. Money will only be made from this in the short run, and if not, for those with a capacity to muster life, misery will prevail, unless you are the last one or ones standing after (or ongoing) a ruthless zero-sum game for which may or may not consist of human survivors. Nathan --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
My own view is that our state of knowledge about AGI is far too weak for us to make detailed plans about how to **ensure** AGI safety, at this point What we can do is conduct experiments designed to gather data about AGI goal systems and AGI dynamics, which can lead us to more robust AGI theories, which can lead us to detailed plans about how to ensure AGI safety (or, pessimistically, detailed knowledge as to why this is not possible) However, it must of course be our intuition that guides these experiments. My intuition tells me that a system with probabilistic-logic-based goal-achievement at its core is much more likely to ultimately lead to a safe AI than a system with neural net dynamics at its core. But vague statements like the one in the previous sentence are of limited use; their main use is in leading to more precise formulations and experiments... -- Ben G On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 6:26 AM, Panu Horsmalahti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What is your approach on ensuring AGI safety/Friendliness on this project? agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
2008/5/25 Nathan Cravens [EMAIL PROTECTED]: yet AGI has potentially dramatic concrete consequences in one direction or another. Money will only be made from this in the short run, and if not, for those with a capacity to muster life, misery will prevail, unless you are the last one or ones standing after (or ongoing) a ruthless zero-sum game for which may or may not consist of human survivors. In many ways we may at present be living in a golden age, although it might not seem like it. There's no doubt that AGI will bring about substantial changes in time. If a machine with even the intelligence of a five year old child could be created that would have huge implications for the economy, meaning that many jobs currently done by humans could be automated. But even the idea of replacing human workers with robot equivalents is probably too conservative, in the same manner that early computer systems simply tried to replace legacy card file systems with an equivalent database. There will be a period of time, and optimistically this could be a few decades in duration, during which AGI tycoons can prosper, riding the technological wave. But once tools turn into sentient beings the reign of the tycoons will be over. --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 10:42 AM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My own view is that our state of knowledge about AGI is far too weak for us to make detailed plans about how to **ensure** AGI safety, at this point I disagree strenuously. If our arguments will apply to *all* intelligences (/intelligent architectures) -- like Omohundro attempts to do -- instead of just certain AGI subsets, then I believe that our lack of knowledge about particular subsets is irrelevant. yes, but I don't think these general arguments are going to tell us all that much about particular AGI systems ... they can go only so far, and not far enough... I believe that there is a location in the state space of intelligence that is a viable attractor that equates to Friendliness and morality. I think that a far more effective solution to the Friendliness problem would be to ensure that we place an entity in that attractor rather than attempt to control it's behavior via it's architecture. Ah, so you're OK with beliefs but not intuitions ??? '-) I hope such an attractor exists but I'm not as certain as you seem to be What we can do is conduct experiments designed to gather data about AGI goal systems and AGI dynamics, which can lead us to more robust AGI theories, which can lead us to detailed plans about how to ensure AGI safety (or, pessimistically, detailed knowledge as to why this is not possible) I think that this is all spurious pseudo-scientific BS. I think that the state space is way too large to be thoroughly explored from first principles. Start with human friendliness and move out and you stand a chance. Trying to compete with billions of years of evolution and it's parallel search over an unimaginably large number of entities by re-inventing the wheel is just plain silly. I disagree. Obviously you could make the same argument about airplanes. Experiments with different shaped wings helped us to refine the relevant specializations of fluid dynamics theory, which now let us calculate a bunch more relevant stuff from first principles than we could before these experiments and this theory were done. But we still can't solve the Navier-Stokes Equation in general in any useful way. However, it must of course be our intuition that guides these experiments. My intuition tells Intuition is not science. Intuition is just hardened opinion. Intuition has been scientifically proven to *frequently* be a bad guide where morality and ethics are concerned (don't you read the papers I post to the list?). Why don't we use real science? Something has got to guide the choice of which experiments to do. In a field without any solid theory yet, how do you choose which experiments to run, except via intuition [or replace some related word if you don't like that one] I would scientifically/logically argue that your intuition is correct because it is more possible to analyze, evaluate, and *redirect* a goal-achievement architecture than a system with inscrutable neural net dynamics at its core. Your intuition wasn't particularly helpful because it gave no reasoning or basis for your belief. My statement was more worthwhile because it gave reasons that can be further analyzed, refined, and/or disproved. I have reasoning and basis for that intuition but I omitted it due to not having time to write a longer email. Also I though the reasoning and basis were obvious. Note however that NN dynamics are not totally inscrutable, e.g. folks have analyzed the innards of backprop neural nets using PCA and other statistical methods. And of course a huge logic system with billions of propositions continually combining via inference may be pretty damn inscrutable. So the point is not irrefutable by any means, which is why I called it an intuitive argument rather than a rigorous one. -- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
I disagree strenuously. If our arguments will apply to *all* intelligences (/intelligent architectures) -- like Omohundro attempts to do -- instead of just certain AGI subsets, then I believe that our lack of knowledge about particular subsets is irrelevant. yes, but I don't think these general arguments are going to tell us all that much about particular AGI systems ... they can go only so far, and not far enough... Huh? If an argument applies to *all* systems, it will apply to *any* particular system. The problem with Omohundro's arguments are that they provably don't apply to *all* systems (if, indeed, *any* systems) since obvious counter-examples exist (human beings). I believe that there is a location in the state space of intelligence that is a viable attractor that equates to Friendliness and morality. I think that a far more effective solution to the Friendliness problem would be to ensure that we place an entity in that attractor rather than attempt to control it's behavior via it's architecture. Ah, so you're OK with beliefs but not intuitions ??? '-) :-) Great jab :-) Beliefs and intuitions are exact synonyms as far as I'm concerned. I'm okay with both as long as they are both required to be backed with facts and logical reasoning -- even if they aren't 100% provable. My problem with intuitions is that most people think that they have greater weight than mere opinions (or beliefs :-). I'm currently finishing writing up my description of the attractor so that people can throw darts at it. You may laugh at me if you complete the initial OpenCog docs before you see it. ;-) I hope such an attractor exists but I'm not as certain as you seem to be A fair statement. I've put *a lot* of time, work, and research into this that you don't have the benefit of -- yet. What we can do is conduct experiments designed to gather data about AGI goal systems and AGI dynamics, which can lead us to more robust AGI theories, which can lead us to detailed plans about how to ensure AGI safety (or, pessimistically, detailed knowledge as to why this is not possible) I think that this is all spurious pseudo-scientific BS. I think that the state space is way too large to be thoroughly explored from first principles. Start with human friendliness and move out and you stand a chance. Trying to compete with billions of years of evolution and it's parallel search over an unimaginably large number of entities by re-inventing the wheel is just plain silly. I disagree. Obviously you could make the same argument about airplanes. No. The airplane argument is a silly strawman. Airplanes have nothing to do with birds. Airplanes are based upon exactly *one* scientific principle that is demonstrated easily by Cub Scouts. Airplanes were difficult when the (easily isolated) pre-requisites weren't there (like lightweight, powerful engines and reasonable control structures). I can (and have) easily made an airplane out of balsa wood and a rubber band. Everything else is just an elaboration on that seed. If your experiments started with a seed AGI, then I would buy your arguments -- but not otherwise. Experiments with different shaped wings helped us to refine the relevant specializations of fluid dynamics theory, which now let us calculate a bunch more relevant stuff from first principles than we could before these experiments and this theory were done. But we still can't solve the Navier-Stokes Equation in general in any useful way. But the point is -- functioning wings existed before the refinement experiments. Omohundro and others are trying to perform analysis and refinement of *non-existent* systems. The Navier-Stokes equations (plural is correct) describe a complex system (fluid dynamics). It is entirely possible/probable that there NEVER will be a totally general, easily calculable solution for all circumstances -- but a totally general solution is not necessary. In many areas of the fluid dynamics state space (particularly the most accesssible ones), there are more than enough accurate simplifying assumptions and attractors that we don't need a general solution. Any wing that has a certain general shape and texture and doesn't try to move faster than a certain speed relative to the fluid (which cannot have greater than a certain viscosity) will provide lift *regardless* of the exact details of the system. In order for your scientific experiments to work though, you need to prove that the same things are true of goals, ethics, and friendliness. And these proofs are *always* derived by varying from existings solution -- just as they were for wings. A clearer example of why this sort of reasoning without examples is foolish is the stupid oft-repeated statement that According to science, bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly. Science explicitly recognizes the fact that there always could be some variables that we
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Please, if you're going to argue something -- please take the time to argue it and don't pretend that you can't magically solve it all with your guesses (I mean, intuition). time for mailing list posts is scarce for me these days, so sometimes I post a conclusion w/out the supporting arguments ... but the arguments are usually already there in prior publications ;-) 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Certainly there are plenty of folks with equal software engineering experience to you, advocating the Linux/C++ route (taken in the current OpenCog version) rather than the .Net/C# route that I believe you advocate... No, I believe he advocates OCaml vs. F# ;-) (sorry for leaving-out Haskell and others) --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Certainly there are plenty of folks with equal software engineering experience
to you, advocating the Linux/C++ route (taken in the current OpenCog version)
rather than the .Net/C# route that I believe you advocate...
Cool. An *argument from authority* without even having an authority. Show me
those plenty of folks and their reasons for advocating Linux/C++. Times have
changed. Other alternatives have advanced tremendously. You are out of date
and using and touting obsolete software and development methods. I *don't*
believe that you can find an expert who has remained current on technology who
will back your point.
{NOTE: It's also always interesting to see someone say that the argument is
OS/language vs. framework/language (don't you know enough to compare apples to
apples?)]
More importantly, I don't believe that I've ever explicitly endorsed C#. What
I've always pushed is the .NET framework because 1) it's got far more already
built infrastructure than anything else and 2) you can mix and match languages
so that you can use the most appropriate language in any given place and still
use another language where it is more appropriate.
So, I'll take up your challenge . . . .
I've developed in multiple flavors of Basic, Pascal, Assembly Language, LISP,
Prolog, C, C++, TCl, etc.
For experimental development, C++ is probably the worst choice. It's the old
first-attempt camel you use when you're trying to get speed and object-oriented
programming. The things that you *have* to worry about like memory management
and the errors that you can *easily* make are only offset where speed is truly
a concern. Except that development speed and iteration is more important to
this effort than sheer system speed. Except that the maximum speed-up that you
can get from C++ isn't that great -- and you only get that if you are *really*
good. Why aren't you using C++ only in really core systems and something more
appropriate for development elsewhere? Oh yeah, because there is no really
good way to easily integrate multiple languages like when using .NET.
If you were serious about speed, you'd be using straight C. If you were
serious about development time and ease of development, you'd be using a better
object-oriented language -- or better yet, in many places, a functional
language.
Face it, you're using what you know and what you've *been* developing in -- and
it's obsolete technology . . . . Your systems people are not keeping up as is
REQUIRED to maintain your edge in the systems field.
The newest version of C# now has virtually all of the functional capacity of
OCaml -- or, why not just use F# where appropriate? For web stuff, there's far
more infrastructure available under .NET than is available under any *nix or
Java and if you like the languages available on *nix, there's always IronPython
and Iron Ruby.
I claim as FACT that general development under .NET is at least twice as fast
as in any other environment due to the existing tools and infrastructure.
Can you find anyone who is familiar with both .NET 3.5 and Linux/C++ who is
willing to claim otherwise?
What is your reason for using C++? Other than the fact that porting your
application is going to be expensive, I'm not sure that you have a valid one.
And I'm reasonably sure that the advantages of porting will *rapidly* provide a
return on investment sufficient to offset the porting cost.
So, please, back up your claim. Find some experts who are up-to-date to
explain why Linux/C++ is better.
- Original Message -
From: Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please
One of the things that I've been tempted to argue for a while is an entirely
alternate underlying software architecture for OpenCog -- people can then
develop in the architecture that is most convenient and then we could have
people cross-port between the two. I strongly contend that the current
architecture does not take advantage of a large part of the newest advances
and infrastructures of the past half-decade. I think that if people saw
what could be done with far less time and code utilizing already existing
functionality and better tools that C++ would be a dead issue.
Somehow I doubt that this list will be the place where the endless OS/language
wars plaguing the IT community are finally solved ;-p
Certainly there are plenty of folks with equal software engineering experience
to you, advocating the Linux/C++ route (taken in the current OpenCog version)
rather than the .Net/C# route that I believe you advocate...
-- Ben G
---
agi
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Re: [agi] More Info Please
Intuition is not science. Intuition is just hardened opinion.
Mark, without intuition the development of science would grind to a halt.
Logic doesn't come from god who made science in your image, those things
come from humans with faulty, sometimes elegant, perceptions.
Ben and Peter. Do you plan to sell your systems to weapons firms if they
show an interest? Will you submit to them because you know someone else will
anyway?
Next, how can OpenCog be expected to remain safe in a society of scarcity?
It's not the technology itself that worries me, it's the interests of the
few that do. That's a big question. What are your thoughts?
Nathan
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Certainly there are plenty of folks with equal software engineering
experience
to you, advocating the Linux/C++ route (taken in the current OpenCog
version)
rather than the .Net/C# route that I believe you advocate...
Cool. An *argument from authority* without even having an authority. Show
me those plenty of folks and their reasons for advocating Linux/C++.
Times have changed. Other alternatives have advanced tremendously. You are
out of date and using and touting obsolete software and development
methods. I *don't* believe that you can find an expert who has remained
current on technology who will back your point.
{NOTE: It's also always interesting to see someone say that the argument
is OS/language vs. framework/language (don't you know enough to compare
apples to apples?)]
More importantly, I don't believe that I've ever explicitly endorsed C#.
What I've always pushed is the .NET framework because 1) it's got far more
already built infrastructure than anything else and 2) you can mix and match
languages so that you can use the most appropriate language in any given
place and still use another language where it is more appropriate.
So, I'll take up your challenge . . . .
I've developed in multiple flavors of Basic, Pascal, Assembly Language,
LISP, Prolog, C, C++, TCl, etc.
For experimental development, C++ is probably the worst choice. It's the
old first-attempt camel you use when you're trying to get speed and
object-oriented programming. The things that you *have* to worry about like
memory management and the errors that you can *easily* make are only offset
where speed is truly a concern. Except that development speed and iteration
is more important to this effort than sheer system speed. Except that the
maximum speed-up that you can get from C++ isn't that great -- and you only
get that if you are *really* good. Why aren't you using C++ only in really
core systems and something more appropriate for development elsewhere? Oh
yeah, because there is no really good way to easily integrate multiple
languages like when using .NET.
If you were serious about speed, you'd be using straight C. If you were
serious about development time and ease of development, you'd be using a
better object-oriented language -- or better yet, in many places, a
functional language.
Face it, you're using what you know and what you've *been* developing in --
and it's obsolete technology . . . . Your systems people are not keeping up
as is REQUIRED to maintain your edge in the systems field.
The newest version of C# now has virtually all of the functional capacity
of OCaml -- or, why not just use F# where appropriate? For web stuff,
there's far more infrastructure available under .NET than is available under
any *nix or Java and if you like the languages available on *nix, there's
always IronPython and Iron Ruby.
I claim as FACT that general development under .NET is at least twice as
fast as in any other environment due to the existing tools and
infrastructure.
Can you find anyone who is familiar with both .NET 3.5 and Linux/C++ who is
willing to claim otherwise?
What is your reason for using C++? Other than the fact that porting your
application is going to be expensive, I'm not sure that you have a valid
one. And I'm reasonably sure that the advantages of porting will *rapidly*
provide a return on investment sufficient to offset the porting cost.
So, please, back up your claim. Find some experts who are up-to-date to
explain why Linux/C++ is better.
- Original Message - From: Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please
One of the things that I've been tempted to argue for a while is an
entirely
alternate underlying software architecture for OpenCog -- people can
then
develop in the architecture that is most convenient and then we could
have
people cross-port between the two. I strongly contend that the current
architecture does not take advantage of a large part of the newest
advances
and infrastructures of the past half-decade. I think that if people saw
what could be done with far less time and code utilizing
Re: [agi] More Info Please
without intuition the development of science would grind to a halt.
Nathan, please elaborate more. Your second sentence about logic is obviously
true but I can't see where it has anything to do with your halting statement
unless you are totally misinterpreting me.
- Original Message -
From: Nathan Cravens
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 6:43 PM
Subject: **SPAM** Re: [agi] More Info Please
Intuition is not science. Intuition is just hardened opinion.
Mark, without intuition the development of science would grind to a halt.
Logic doesn't come from god who made science in your image, those things come
from humans with faulty, sometimes elegant, perceptions.
Ben and Peter. Do you plan to sell your systems to weapons firms if they show
an interest? Will you submit to them because you know someone else will anyway?
Next, how can OpenCog be expected to remain safe in a society of scarcity?
It's not the technology itself that worries me, it's the interests of the few
that do. That's a big question. What are your thoughts?
Nathan
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Certainly there are plenty of folks with equal software engineering
experience
to you, advocating the Linux/C++ route (taken in the current OpenCog
version)
rather than the .Net/C# route that I believe you advocate...
Cool. An *argument from authority* without even having an authority. Show
me those plenty of folks and their reasons for advocating Linux/C++. Times
have changed. Other alternatives have advanced tremendously. You are out of
date and using and touting obsolete software and development methods. I
*don't* believe that you can find an expert who has remained current on
technology who will back your point.
{NOTE: It's also always interesting to see someone say that the argument
is OS/language vs. framework/language (don't you know enough to compare apples
to apples?)]
More importantly, I don't believe that I've ever explicitly endorsed C#.
What I've always pushed is the .NET framework because 1) it's got far more
already built infrastructure than anything else and 2) you can mix and match
languages so that you can use the most appropriate language in any given place
and still use another language where it is more appropriate.
So, I'll take up your challenge . . . .
I've developed in multiple flavors of Basic, Pascal, Assembly Language,
LISP, Prolog, C, C++, TCl, etc.
For experimental development, C++ is probably the worst choice. It's the
old first-attempt camel you use when you're trying to get speed and
object-oriented programming. The things that you *have* to worry about like
memory management and the errors that you can *easily* make are only offset
where speed is truly a concern. Except that development speed and iteration is
more important to this effort than sheer system speed. Except that the maximum
speed-up that you can get from C++ isn't that great -- and you only get that if
you are *really* good. Why aren't you using C++ only in really core systems
and something more appropriate for development elsewhere? Oh yeah, because
there is no really good way to easily integrate multiple languages like when
using .NET.
If you were serious about speed, you'd be using straight C. If you were
serious about development time and ease of development, you'd be using a better
object-oriented language -- or better yet, in many places, a functional
language.
Face it, you're using what you know and what you've *been* developing in --
and it's obsolete technology . . . . Your systems people are not keeping up as
is REQUIRED to maintain your edge in the systems field.
The newest version of C# now has virtually all of the functional capacity
of OCaml -- or, why not just use F# where appropriate? For web stuff, there's
far more infrastructure available under .NET than is available under any *nix
or Java and if you like the languages available on *nix, there's always
IronPython and Iron Ruby.
I claim as FACT that general development under .NET is at least twice as
fast as in any other environment due to the existing tools and infrastructure.
Can you find anyone who is familiar with both .NET 3.5 and Linux/C++ who is
willing to claim otherwise?
What is your reason for using C++? Other than the fact that porting your
application is going to be expensive, I'm not sure that you have a valid one.
And I'm reasonably sure that the advantages of porting will *rapidly* provide a
return on investment sufficient to offset the porting cost.
So, please, back up your claim. Find some experts who are up-to-date to
explain why Linux/C++ is better.
- Original Message -
From: Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: [agi] More Info
Re: [agi] More Info Please
of development, you'd be using a better object-oriented language -- or better yet, in many places, a functional language. Face it, you're using what you know and what you've *been* developing in -- and it's obsolete technology . . . . Your systems people are not keeping up as is REQUIRED to maintain your edge in the systems field. The newest version of C# now has virtually all of the functional capacity of OCaml -- or, why not just use F# where appropriate? For web stuff, there's far more infrastructure available under .NET than is available under any *nix or Java and if you like the languages available on *nix, there's always IronPython and Iron Ruby. I claim as FACT that general development under .NET is at least twice as fast as in any other environment due to the existing tools and infrastructure. Can you find anyone who is familiar with both .NET 3.5 and Linux/C++ who is willing to claim otherwise? What is your reason for using C++? Other than the fact that porting your application is going to be expensive, I'm not sure that you have a valid one. And I'm reasonably sure that the advantages of porting will *rapidly* provide a return on investment sufficient to offset the porting cost. So, please, back up your claim. Find some experts who are up-to-date to explain why Linux/C++ is better. - Original Message - From: Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 4:26 PM Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please One of the things that I've been tempted to argue for a while is an entirely alternate underlying software architecture for OpenCog -- people can then develop in the architecture that is most convenient and then we could have people cross-port between the two. I strongly contend that the current architecture does not take advantage of a large part of the newest advances and infrastructures of the past half-decade. I think that if people saw what could be done with far less time and code utilizing already existing functionality and better tools that C++ would be a dead issue. Somehow I doubt that this list will be the place where the endless OS/language wars plaguing the IT community are finally solved ;-p Certainly there are plenty of folks with equal software engineering experience to you, advocating the Linux/C++ route (taken in the current OpenCog version) rather than the .Net/C# route that I believe you advocate... -- 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/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- 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/?; 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Continuing on from a mistaken send . . . I'm aware .Net has evolved a lot in recent years, but so has the C++ world, especially the Boost libraries which are extremely powerful. Boost is not particularly powerful. Using Boost involves a *lot* of work because the interfaces are not particularly good. Of course, the real question is -- why are you arguing any of this when you could be also using C++ and Boost from .Net? Not that I would since previous e-mails on the OpenCog list haven't been hapy with Boost . . . . So . . . I'm glad you believe that you're aware .Net has evolved. How has it evolved? Regarding Linux versus Windows, this seems to be more of an individual-preference thing. Why do you keep bringing up this old dead horse? I keep deliberately removing it since it is as you say an individual preference thing -- except in terms of what is available under it and all sorts of market share arguments (which I actually deliberately removed from MY last e-mail so as not to cloud the issue with random facts like you're doing). Obviously these are not simple issues since there are smart, experienced, insightful people arguing both sides of the dichotomy. There are people arguing both sides of the global warming issue as well. Can't we argue this from REASONS instead of authority? For OpenCog we had to make a definite choice and we made one. Sorry you don't agree w/ it. I agree that you had to make a choice and made the one that seemed right to various reason. The above comment is rude and snarky however -- particularly since it seems to come *because* you can't justify your choice. I would expect better of you. = = = = = = = Let's try this again. Get your experts together and create a short list of why C++ on Linux (and any infrastructure there that isn't immediately available under .Net) is better than the combination of all the .Net languages and all the infrastructure available there that isn't immediately available under Linux. No resorting to pseudo-democracies of experts, how about real reasons that YOU will stand behind and be willing to defend. I've seen a lot of speculation on the OpenCog list about using this or that or the other thing and I've seen *a lot* of stuff dismissed and virtually nothing embraced. I mainly mention this because I'm actually surprised at how little seems to be reusable (i.e. less than I would have guessed). So . . . . how about it? Real reasons or more random sidetracks and insults? --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Mark, For OpenCog we had to make a definite choice and we made one. Sorry you don't agree w/ it. I agree that you had to make a choice and made the one that seemed right to various reason. The above comment is rude and snarky however -- particularly since it seems to come *because* you can't justify your choice. I would expect better of you. = = = = = = = Let's try this again. Get your experts together and create a short list of why C++ on Linux (and any infrastructure there that isn't immediately available under .Net) is better than the combination of all the .Net languages and all the infrastructure available there that isn't immediately available under Linux. No resorting to pseudo-democracies of experts, how about real reasons that YOU will stand behind and be willing to defend. This would be a reasonable exercise, but I simply don't have time to deal with it right now. I'm about to leave on a 2.5 weeks business / research-collaboration trip to Asia, and en route I hope to make some progress on mutating Novamente docs into OpenCog docs. No time to burn on these arguments at the moment. However, it might be worthwhile to create a page on the OpenCog wiki focused on this issue, if others are also interested in it. There could be a section on the page arguing the potential advantages of .Net for OpenCog; a section on the page arguing the intended advantages of the current approach; and other sections written by folks advocating other approaches (e.g. LISP-centric, whatever...). Perhaps if you create this page and get it started w/ your own arguments, others will contribute theirs and we can advance the debate that way. -- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Mark. Intuition is a form of vague perception, a kind of logic in the making. Like a grain of sand with pearl potential. AGI has a lot of power to cure the society of scarcity situation. So it's up to us to roll out the beneficial apps before others roll out the nasty ones. This is not a complete answer, but it's part of the answer... Ben. I suppose there is really no complete answer. The one given speaks volumes. I'm glad we're on the same page in this regard. The problem with selling even defensive weapons systems to enterprise means that safety has a price. I find that, either way, terribly unsound . To prevent reason for military action in the first place, the meme of abundance must become a more sound alternative than that of military strategy and the scarcity frame that supports it. I'm all for a Forbin Project. Call it, say, OpenReg, a sort of decision making system at the core of an AGI system. Preference Utilitarianism is a lovely moral philosophy. Teach those baby AIs to program, multiply them to do relevant tasks and tests, then run the code and make it happen! ;P Nathan --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Some not-quite-random observations that hopefully injects some moderation: - There are a number of good arguments for using C over C++, not the least of which is that it is dead simple to implement very efficient C bindings into much friendlier languages that hide the fact that it is still mostly C. There are a lot more problems doing this in C++ than C. If you are doing a project end-to-end in one language though, C++ manages the complexity better than C (though I would observe that some very large yet very tidy and understandable code bases are in C e.g. PostgreSQL). In the big picture, this becomes a detail depending on relatively unimportant design choices. - At every technical conference on a variety of non-platform-specific topics I have been to in the last year that was full of people that actually work on code, I and many others have noticed that at least half the people attending were using MacOS laptops. This is very strongly correlated with Unix-based server back-ends, usually Linux out in the real world these days. The great thing about MacOS X as a developer is that it is Unix, and so there is a good impedance match between the developer desktop and the production cluster. Using a .NET technology for anything is tacitly excluding a huge swath of talent and a significant portion of the developer market. This is particularly true if we are talking about server-like or engine-like code, in which .NET is very much a minority player. - Selecting any narrow platform technology (like .NET or Objective-C) only really makes sense if there is no intention of widely disseminating or collaborating with the code. Having nicer libraries or syntactic sugar does not do a hell of a lot of good if you cannot find enough competent developers to make that feature provide return on the investment -- killer libraries and environment save time, not developer talent. This has been often cited as a key failure of the Ruby community that has caused many projects to move away from it: lots of hype and interest but there is a dearth of top-quality developers that actually choose to work with it, making complex projects effectively non-viable for lack of appropriate talent. I honestly do not give a crap about the subject being argued, but if the goal is to have decent environment support *and* cast the widest possible with respect to developer talent, the obvious choice is actually Java. This coming from someone who does not even like Java and thinks .NET is a better designed environment; the differences between environments is noise in the big picture, but the differences in the breadth and depth of developer talent is not. If the object of this project is *not* to engage the maximum amount of developer talent then the point is moot and it is hard to figure out why it is being argued at all. In short, if it is a closed shop project not meant for wide dissemination, then the benefits of .NET significantly outweigh the benefits of C/C++ (unless performance is paramount) and is a defensible choice. If it is intended to be an open source project that maximizes participation, I cannot imagine why anyone would choose .NET over Java or even C unless they were deluded about the distribution of developer talent on the wild and wooly Internet. The right tool for the job, and all that. Cheers, J. Andrew Rogers --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Peter has some technical info on his overall (adaptive neural net) based approach to AI, on his company website, which is based on a paper he wrote in the AGI volume Cassio and I edited for Springer (written 2002, published 2006). However, he has kept his specific commercial product direction tightly under wraps. I believe Peter's ideas are interesting but I have my doubts that his approach is really AGI-capable. However, I don't feel comfortable going into great deal on my reasons, because Peter seems to value secrecy regarding his approach... I've had a mild amount of insider info regarding the approach (e.g. due to visiting his site a few years ago, etc.) and don't want to blab stuff on this list that he'd want me to keep secret... Ben On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 5:40 PM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... on this: http://www.adaptiveai.com/news/index.htm Towards Commercialization It's been a while. We've been busy. A good kind of busy. At the end of March we completed an important milestone: a demo system consolidating our prior 10 months' work. This was followed by my annual pilgrimage to our investors in Australia. The upshot of all this is that we now have some additional seed funding to launch our commercialization phase late this year. On the technical side we still have a lot of hard work ahead of us. Fortunately we have a very strong and highly motivated team, so that over the next 6 months we expect to make as much additional progress as we have over the past 12. Our next technical milestone is around early October by which time we'll want our 'proto AGI' to be pretty much ready to start earning a living. By the end of 2008 we should be ready to actively pursue commercialization in addition to our ongoing RD efforts. At that time we'll be looking for a high-powered CEO to head up our business division which we expect to grow to many hundreds of employees over a few years. Early in 2009 we plan to raise capital for this commercial venture, and if things go according to plan we'll have a team of around 50 by the middle of the year. Well, exciting future plans, but now back to work. Peter --- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [agi] More Info Please
Thanks, Ben. The technical details of our design and business plan details are indeed confidential. All I can really say publicly is that we are confident that we have pretty direct path to high-level AGI from where we are, and that we have an extremely viable business plan to make this happen. Initial commercialization next year will utilize the current 'low-grade' version of our AGI engine that will be able to perform certain tasks that are quite dumb (in human terms) but still commercially valuable. Our AGI 'brain' can potentially be utilized in many different kinds of systems/ applications. More details will probably become available late this year. Peter PS. I also have *some* doubts about the ultimate capabilities of our AGI engine, but probably no greater than yours about NM :) -Original Message- From: Ben Goertzel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, May 23, 2008 2:56 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] More Info Please Peter has some technical info on his overall (adaptive neural net) based approach to AI, on his company website, which is based on a paper he wrote in the AGI volume Cassio and I edited for Springer (written 2002, published 2006). However, he has kept his specific commercial product direction tightly under wraps. I believe Peter's ideas are interesting but I have my doubts that his approach is really AGI-capable. However, I don't feel comfortable going into great deal on my reasons, because Peter seems to value secrecy regarding his approach... I've had a mild amount of insider info regarding the approach (e.g. due to visiting his site a few years ago, etc.) and don't want to blab stuff on this list that he'd want me to keep secret... Ben On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 5:40 PM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... on this: http://www.adaptiveai.com/news/index.htm Towards Commercialization It's been a while. We've been busy. A good kind of busy. At the end of March we completed an important milestone: a demo system consolidating our prior 10 months' work. This was followed by my annual pilgrimage to our investors in Australia. The upshot of all this is that we now have some additional seed funding to launch our commercialization phase late this year. On the technical side we still have a lot of hard work ahead of us. Fortunately we have a very strong and highly motivated team, so that over the next 6 months we expect to make as much additional progress as we have over the past 12. Our next technical milestone is around early October by which time we'll want our 'proto AGI' to be pretty much ready to start earning a living. By the end of 2008 we should be ready to actively pursue commercialization in addition to our ongoing RD efforts. At that time we'll be looking for a high-powered CEO to head up our business division which we expect to grow to many hundreds of employees over a few years. Early in 2009 we plan to raise capital for this commercial venture, and if things go according to plan we'll have a team of around 50 by the middle of the year. Well, exciting future plans, but now back to work. Peter --- 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/?; 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Peter Voss wrote: Thanks, Ben. The technical details of our design and business plan details are indeed confidential. All I can really say publicly is that we are confident that we have pretty direct path to high-level AGI from where we are, and that we have an extremely viable business plan to make this happen. Initial commercialization next year will utilize the current 'low-grade' version of our AGI engine that will be able to perform certain tasks that are quite dumb (in human terms) but still commercially valuable. Our AGI 'brain' can potentially be utilized in many different kinds of systems/ applications. More details will probably become available late this year. Peter PS. I also have *some* doubts about the ultimate capabilities of our AGI engine, but probably no greater than yours about NM :) Peter, Interesting: I wonder if these doubts are the same as the doubts that I have about both NM and your own engine? Doubts, of course, that I do not have about Safaire. Nevertheless, good luck with your work. 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
