On 5/22/07, Derek Zahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Pei, As part of my ongoing AGI education, I am beginning to study NARS in some detail.
Thanks for the interest. I'll do my best to help, though since I'm on vacation in China, I may not be able to process my emails as usual.
As has been discussed recently here, you define intelligence as: "Intelligence is the capability of an information system to adapt to its environment while operating with insufficient knowledge and resources." In later discussion about an adaptive system, you introduce the phrase "it attempts to improve its performance in carrying out the tasks". This would seem to be an important further specification. Would it be accurate for my own understanding to rephrase your definition to be: "Intelligence is the capability of a task-performing information system to adapt to its environment while operating with insufficient knowledge and resources" where "task-performing" means that the system's purpose is the performance of one or more simultaneously active "tasks" where a task is defined in terms of a goal state and a (perhaps approximate) method for measuring whether the goal state has been achieved? If "goal state" is not a good way to describe tasks in the sense you intend, could you explain a little bit about your definitions of "carrying out the tasks" and "improve its performance"? Sorry if this seems like a trivial issue, I'm just trying to understand as clearly as possible how you define the goals for the NARS project.
It is not a trivial point at all, though I haven't had the pressure (until now) to explain this aspect of my definition publicly. I mostly agree with your description, though rather not to modify the definition in that way, because to me "task performing" and "goal achieving" have been mostly implied by the notion of "information system", so your description sounds redundent to me. I touched this issue in my first book, though plan to reserve it for my other book, which will be less technical and more philosophical. A few people on this list who was associated with Webmind Inc. should had browsed my extended abstract years ago. The relevent part of that book is to put "intelligent system" into a larger picture, within a hierachy roughly like the following: 1. system: things/events that should be analyzed as interalating parts, with internal structure and external function 1.1 information system: systems whose structure and function can be analyzed abstractly as goal-achieving (or task-performing), without depending too much on the lower level description (using the terms of physics, chemistry, biology, ...) 1.1.1 intelligent system: information systems that are adaptive and work with insufficient knowledge and reources 1.1.2 instinctive system: information systems that work with sufficient knowledge and resources 1.2 non-information system: systems whose structure and function cannot be analyzed abstractly, and have to be explained in terms of physics, chemistry, biology, ... I know the above description is brief and controversal --- the working definition of "information" is no less complicated than that of "intelligence". Since you asked, I give the above position statement, though I won't argue for it, since it is not that crucial for AGI at the current time. Another topic is "goal" --- as you noticed, I don't follow the common practice of specifying "goal" as "goal state", because to me this is a big mistake of traditional AI. In the usual sense, a "state" is indicated by a COMPLETE description of the relevant part of the domain/environment, which cannot be obtained if insufficient knowledge and resources is assumed. Roughly speaking, in NARS a goal is a description, which is a PARTIAL description of the environment. Furthermore, a goal is usualy achieved/satisfied to a degree, which is not a matter of "yes/no". Since each goal in NARS is "satisfied" by a statement, the degree of satisfaction is related to (though not completely reduced to) the truth value of the statement. A more detailed and formal description is in my book, and I'm also working on a paper focusing on this aspect of the system. I'll post a draft when it is finished. Pei ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
