Ben, I think there's a prior question to a Novamente learning how to perceive/act through an agent in a simulated world.
I think the first issue is for Novamente to discover that, as an intrinsic part of its nature, it can interact with the world via more than one agent interface. Biological intelligences are born with one body and a predetermined set of sensors and actuators. Later humans learn that we can extend our powers via technologically added sensors and actuators. But an AGI is a much more plastic beast at the outset - it can be hooked to any number of sensor/actuator sets/combinations and these can be in the real world or in virtual reality. My guess is that it might be useful for an AGI to learn from the outset that it needs to make conscious choices about which sensor/actuator set to use when trying to interact with the world 'out there'. Probably to reduce early learning confusion it might be useful initially to give the AGI only 2 choices - between an agent that is a fixed-location box and an agent that is mobile - but with similar sensor sets so that it can fairly quickly learn that there is a relationship between what it perceives/learns via each sensor/actuator set. (Biligual children often learn to speak quite a bit later than monolingual children - the young AGI doesn't want to have early leaning hurdles set too high.) What I've said above I guess only matters if you are going to let a Novamente persist for a long period of time ie. you don't just reset it to the factory settings every time you run a learning session. If the Novamente persists as an entity for any length of time then its early learning is going to play a huge role in shaping its capabilities and personality. On a different matter, I think that it would be good for the AGI to learn to live initially in a world that is governed by the laws of physics, chemistry, ecology, etc. So, although the best initial learning environment might be virtual world (mainly to reduce the need for massive sensory processing power), I think that world should simulate the bounded/non magical nature of the real world we live in. Even if an AGI chooses to live in a non-bounded/magical virtual world most of the time in later life it needs to know that its fundamental existence is tied to a real world - it's going to need non-magical computational power and that's going to need real physical energy and it dependence on the real world has consequences for the other entities that live in the real world ie you and me an a few billion other people and some tens of million of other forms of life. Cheers, Philip ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]