On Nov 12, 2007 5:02 PM, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm going to try to put some words into Richard's mouth here since > I'm curious to see how close I am . . . . (while radically changing the > words). > > I think that Richard is not arguing about the possibility of > Novamente-type solutions as much as he is arguing about the predictability > of *very* flexible Novamente-type solutions as they grow larger and more > complex (and the difficulty in getting it to not instantaneously > "crash-and-burn"). Indeed, I have heard a very faint shadow of Richard's > concerns in your statements about the "tuning" problems that you had with > BioMind. >
You seem to be thinking about Webmind, an AI company I was involved in during the late 1990's; as opposed to Biomind, a bioinformatics company in which I am currently involved, and which is doing pretty well. The Webmind AI Engine was an order of magnitude more complex than the Novamente Cognition Engine; and this is intentional. Many aspects of the NM design were specifically originated to avoid problems that we found with the Webmind system. > I've got many doubts because I don't think that you have a handle on > the order -- the big (O) -- of many of the operations you are proposing (why > I harp on scalability, modularity, etc.). > The big-O order is almost always irrelevant. Most algorithms useful for cognition are exponential-time worst-case complexity. What matters is average-case complexity over the probability distribution of problem instances actually observed in the real world. And yeah, this is very hard to estimate mathematically. > Richard is going further and saying that the predictability of even some > of your smaller/simpler operations is impossible (although, as he has > pointed out, many of them could be constrained by attractors, etc. if you > were so inclined to view/treat your design that way). > Oh, I thought **I** was the one who pointed that out. > > Personally, I believe that intelligence is *not* complex -- despite > the fact that it does (probably necessarily) rest on top of complex pieces > -- because those pieces' interactions are constrained enough that > intelligence is stable. I think that this could be built into a > Novamente-type design *but* you have to be attempting to do so (and I think > that I could convince Richard of that -- or else, I'd learn a lot by trying > :-). > That is part of the plan, but we have a bunch of work of implementing/tuning components first. > > Richard's main point is that he believes that the search space of > viable parameters and operations for Novamente is small enough that you're > not going to hit it by accident -- and Novamente's very flexibility is what > compounds the problem. > The Webmind system had this problem. Novamente is carefully designed not to. Of course, I can't prove that it won't, though. > Remember, life exists on the boundary between order and chaos. Too much > flexibility (unconstrained chaos) is as deadly as too much structure. > > I think that I see both sides of the issue and how Novamente could be > altered/enhanced to make Richard happy (since it's almost universally > flexible) -- > Novamente is universally capable but so are a lot of way simpler, pragmatically useless system. Saying a system is universally capable doesn't mean hardly anything, and isn't really worth saying. The question as you know is what can a system do given a pragmatic amount of computational resources and life-experience. > but doing so would also impose many constraints that I think that you > would be unwilling to live with since I'm not sure that you would see the > point. I don't think that you're ever going to be able to change his view > that the current direction of Novamente is -- pick one: a) a needle in an > infinite haystack or b) too fragile to succeed -- particularly since > I'm pretty sure that you couldn't convince me without making some serious > additions to Novamente > I believe Richard's complaints are of a quite different character than yours. And, I don't know what additions you are suggesting, so I can't say if I would consider them useful or not. -- Ben ----- 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=8660244&id_secret=64353724-b6705c
