Hi Joel, Thanks for the comments...
> Ben's doing an amazing job of balancing everything he's involved with, Thanks! > but the odds are stacked. That's part of what makes it an adventure, right? ;) ... When the Hollywood movie version of the OpenCog story is made, the fact that the odds looked stacked against us from the start, is part of what will make the story so compelling... I'm just hoping my role in the movie can be played by a David Hanson designed robot !!! >Especially when the funding for researchers > is scarce. Ben is hopeful that setting up in geographies where > software engineers can be employed relatively cheaply will get the > most output for funding amounts, however I am less convinced. I'd > rather have 4-5 amazingly talented and experienced developers than a > dozen reasonably good developers (which is to say nothing of the > people who are already involved in the project, there *are* amazingly > talented individuals involved, but I'd prefer if that was the focus > for future team building rather than building up numbers). Joel, as you know, what I have done is to set up an OpenCog team in the place I was able to get some funding for it.... It's not as though I got a fixed amount of location-independent funding for OpenCog and chose to utilize it in Hong Kong.... Hong Kong does have some interesting advantages (e.g. it's possible to bring Westerners and mainland Chinese together conveniently there), but the core reason for putting the current project in HK is that (with the help of Gino Yu) I managed to get the HK gov't to provide most of the funding... The focus of team building on the OpenCog Hk team is not building up numbers. Rather, the $$ for that project is provided by a government grant with certain strings attached, and the hiring is being done within that context. It would be nice to have OpenCog R&D $$ to be spent unrestrictedly, but that's proved more difficult to find so far. If we want low cost and numbers, Ethiopia is the place to go; there a good C++ programmer costs perhaps US$100-$150/month.... Compared to that, Hong Kong and Silicon Valley are roughly equally overpriced ;p I think OpenCog has aspects that would benefit from a large team of developers. But for the core cognitive algorithm development, I agree with you that a small team of superheroes would be most effective... ;) ben ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
