On May 31, 2007, at 4:21 PM, Russell Wallace wrote:
*sigh* I thought you knew better than this. The idea that the bottleneck in AGI was the discovery of "secret sauce" algorithms was excusable back in the 80s. We've known better for a good many years now. Ditto across the board: sure there is this and that algorithm that isn't known that would make life somewhat easier, but in practice the limiting factor is almost entirely in putting the pieces together the right way, and hardly at all in missing any particular piece.
To virtually everyone else that works in theoretical computer science "putting the pieces together the right way" is pretty much the *definition* of an algorithm -- that is what you call the sequence of "putting together" steps. It appears that your definition of an "algorithm" is whatever you want it to mean, and everything else is "putting pieces together".
Using your unique perspective of the situation, it would seem that no new algorithms have been invented since Alan Turing showed up. Try selling that idea to the computer science community at large. The existence of universal computers does not mean that every possible algorithm has been invented ipso facto, yet that is what you seem to be asserting.
I take it that you are a dabbler in computer science, considering your lack of familiarity with the volume of new algorithms that are published every year, including several groundbreaking ones (read: add significant new capabilities to what is possible in software) in most years. New algorithm design is not a trivial thing and it generally is not done by programmers, though the people that do it usually can program. You have some very strange ideas about where new algorithms come from and what is involved in creating them. It is still a very active space because there are still many things we cannot do in software as a practical with the extant set of algorithms computer science literature provides no matter how hard you try.
Cheers, J. Andrew Rogers ----- 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
