On 06/07/06, Russell Wallace <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 7/6/06, William Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> A
> generic PC almost fulfils the description, programmable, generic and
> if given the right software to start with can solve problems. But I am
> guessing it is missing something. As someone interested in RL systems
> I would say an overarching goal system for guiding programmability,
> but I would be interested to know what you think.
A useful line of inquiry. Okay, let's see... a PC isn't a general purpose
problem solver at all. To see why not, suppose you just have bare hardware,
a PC and whatever peripherals you want but no software at all. Well the
thing'll just sit there, it won't solve any problems.
True. I was more thinking about a PC with a nominal amount of software
pre-installed, just as we have certain things pre-installed. Say the
gcc, make and the apt-get package management system.
Now assembler might seem general purpose, yes? But in practice you find
when you set out to actually solve any problem in it, you spend almost all
your time dealing with the headaches of assembler, leaving so little for
actually solving the problem that you'll die of old age before you get very
much done. If you get up to a block structured language like C (Algol, PL/1,
Pascal etc), it might appear to be closing off possible ways of doing things
but in practice the way of doing things it provides is greatly superior in
very many contexts so you'll get much more done.
Agreed, but I think looking at it in terms of a single language is a
mistake. Humans use body language and mimicry to acquire spoken
language and spoken/body to acquire written and then onto maths etc.
So a starting general problem solver may have a simple
language/representation that is uses to bootstrap to other
languages/representations suited to the tasks that it is attempting to
do.
So we have the distinction between:
Generic: equally good or bad across a wide range of situations.
General: Good across a wide range of situations.
And we note that to be generic you need only be flexible, but to be general
you need to be high level, have a powerful collection of prebuilt tools.
Agreed about the need for pre-built tools. Would you agree that some
of these tools are tools that allow the building of other tools? I
would also contend that language that the new tools are built in needs
to be generic so that a general system can be created.
If you agree with this then hopefully you will also see that there
needs to be someway of constraining the tools built so that bugs are
not introduced into the system or that if they are they can be
corrected. This I think needs a low level approach as well as the high
level tools that we have been talking about. This is what I am
interested in.
<snip agreed parts>
But that is a way to think of the problem: how to create a software system
that includes a sufficiently powerful collection of tools to render
tractable things you can't do with what we have at the moment.
I don't claim to have any definite answers on this level. But the
sorts of systems I am going to experiment with once I have built the
low-level constraining mechanism are things like the following.
Systems that have tools that build new search
algorithms/representations and language parsers based on lingual
instruction and experimentation.
Will Pearson
-------
To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription,
please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
