On Jun 1, 2007, at 1:52 PM, Russell Wallace wrote:
So you think the people who created products like Windows, Excel and Firefox shouldn't be writing software? That's the sort of thing I'm talking about, not little utilities or version 3 of your company's payroll program using the same tools you used for versions 1 and 2. This is the frigging AGI list we're having this conversation on, after all, not the "writing small in-house scripting stuff" list.
The thing is, designing a product like Windows, Excel, and Firefox are to a significant extent pretty different than an AGI. It seems pretty obvious to me that an AGI will be a lot more like a systems engine design than a feature-centric user application. Windows would straddle this a bit since it does have an operating system kernel somewhere underneath that mess. I would expect the AGI userland to be pretty thin (at least at first) and fairly arbitrary. Lots of tightly specified magic that does not require that much code (relative to something like Firefox or Excel) underneath a very compact API, analogous to modern database engines (except that modern database engines have massive accreted userlands and relatively tiny kernels).
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
