On Thursday 14 June 2007 02:12:29 am Joshua Fox wrote: > I don't want to join any herd -- perhaps I just want to figure out why there > is no AGI herd yet; as much a sociological question as a scientific one.
It's probably worth pointing out to this group that for the first 25 years of its history, mainstream AI *was* an "AGI herd". The universal assumption behind research was that they were going to build a full-fledged, language-speaking, cognitively complete, intelligent mind. Through the 60s AI got princely funding from ARPA (this in an era when computers cost, as a rule of thumb, a dollar per byte of memory). The funding, and AI with it, took a left turn during the 70s, towards applications, so that by the 80s the field was mostly "expert systems" and later neural nets. But the Golden Age had culminated in systems like Shrdlu and AM/Eurisko. If they had kept going on the original track, doing basic, general-intelligence-oriented research, they would have AGI now, I think. As far as I know, nobody even tried to put Shrdlu and Eurisko together to see what they would get until Novamente, which, I'm just guessing, is essentially that with a dollop of Copycat thrown in. (¿Ben?) Josh ----- 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
