My feeling on dog-level intelligence is that the *cognition* aspects of dog-level intelligence are really easy, but the perception and action components are significantly difficult and subtle.
In other words, once a dog's brain has produced abstract patterns not tied to particular environmental stimuli, the stuff it does with these patterns is probably not all that fancy. But the dog's brain is really good at recognizing and enacting complex patterns, and doing this recognizing & enacting in a coordinated way. Peter Voss's (www.adaptiveai.com) approach to AI aims to emulate biological evolution on Earth, in the sense that it wants to start with a dog-level brain (very roughly speaking) and then incrementally build more cognition on top of this. This is a reasonable approach, to be sure. But if I had to make a guess, I'd say this approach should probably begin with robotics, with real sensors and actuators and a system embodied in a real physical environment. I am skeptical that simplistic simulated worlds provide enough richness to support development of robust dog-level intelligence... as perception and action oriented as dog intelligence is... The current Novamente engineering plan is based on an opposite approach that does not try to emulate biological evolution. One *could* develop the Novamente design in a biologically-inspired way, beginning with perception/action and gradually adding cognition. However, we are in fact developing it in an opposite way, beginning with cognition in environments requiring only very simple perception/action and then later adding more advanced perception/action. Of course, we realize that this cognition-centric approach has been carried out in philosophically incorrect ways by many AI researchers in the past, but, we believe we are not making any of the basic errors that traditional cognition-focused AI researchers have made. Furthermore, I suspect that this is the only approach that has any prayer of succeeding in the absence of either sophisticated robotic sensors/actuators, or incredibly good VR environments... -- Ben G ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
