Steve, You raise huge issues. I broadly agree with the direction you're going with your multilevelled approach to physically implementing verbal commands. However, I'm quite sure there is still more than you think - including a whole level of image schemas - useful here to think of the analogy of geometry as a whole supportive level of science's upper level of words and other symbols.
I seriously recommend, in fact insist that you have got to get into Lakoff-Johnson, and Rizzolatti-Gallese-Iacoboni & the mirror neurons crowd. These guys are working together & doing some of the hottest research at the mo. Try Chap 8 of Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body - and more. Basically, experiments show the brain does start to instantiate and process physical verbal commands and ideas on a pre-motor level all the time - and indeed has to, if you think about it. If someone says "come with me to the supermarket", your brain has to process that on a motor level for you to immediately reply: "I can't, I've got a weak ankle." Actually, come to think of it, verbal porn is probably a truly great area to explore in terms of multilevelled, and v. physical processing here! I haven't really thought about physical/robotic instantiation of commands much, except that the starting point will normally be that the body and its limbs typically offer something like a 180-360 degree spectrum of freedom of movement on any given plane, and then I guess, as you indicate, the brain-body will plump first for the easiest most direct line of physical approach to a target, and then adjust accordingly to obstacles. Clearly it will have certain movement sets/skills - so even if you are trying to dance around, say, freely, improvisationally, you tend to fall into certain familiar kinds of moves and find it difficult to "branch out in new directions." - As soon as one starts to think about these areas, it seems to me, the need for what I would call a loose "geoiconography" (as opposed to precise geometry/ geography) of thought - i.e. a system of mental image schemas - becomes apparent. ----- Original Message ----- From: Stephen Reed To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 4:30 AM Subject: Re: [agi] Microsoft Launches Singularity ----- Original Message ---- From: Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 5:30:12 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Microsoft Launches Singularity Steve, Some odd thoughts in reply. Thanks BTW for article. 1. You don't seem to get what's implicit in the main point - you can't reliably work out the sense of an enormous number of words by any kind of word lookup whatsoever. How do you actually work out how to "handle the object" - the slimy, slippery twisted ropey thing-y, or whatever? By looking at it. By looking at images of it - either directly or by entertaining them mentally - not consulting any kind of dictionary or word definitions at all. By imagining what parts of the object to grip, and how to configure your hands to grip it. Steve: Sorry that I missed that. But your clarifying issue is quite interesting. Let me try to tease appart your scenario and explain how the envisioned Texai system would process the command "handle the object". I assume that you agree that an AGI designed to our mutual satisfaction should in principle be able to process that particular command with at least the same competence as a human. So the issue for me is to explain in brief how Texai might do it. First I assume that Texai has a body of commsense knowledge about, and skills applicable to, the kinds of objects that can be handled. If not, then there is a knowledge acquisition phase, and skill acquistion phase, that must be completed beforehand. Second, I assume that the linquistic concepts are expressed internally by the system as symbolic terms. Many terms, for example objects that can be handled, are grounded to the real world by an abstraction hierarchy. Descending down this hierarchy, objects are represented less and less as symbols in logical statements, and more and more as clustered feature vectors, and perhaps, at the lowest levels, as no internal state at all - just sensors and actuators in contact with the real world. Thirdly, I distinguish between the understanding the command "handle the object" and generating the behavior required to perform the command. I think that you are conflating these two notions to make the scenario more difficult that it otherwise would be. Perhaps as you know, Texai is a hierarchical control system. I expect that skills will be present to handle various kinds of objects, so for me the issue is to determine the correct skill to invoke in order to perform the given command. As I explained in my previous post, Fluid Construction Grammar does not determine semantics by word lookup, rather it looks up constructions, which might be words, but often are not. Given these assumptions of mine, your scenario suggests that the object to be handled is one for which the system has no previous skill, or for which the existing skill cannot be recognized as applicable to the given object. Because I now building a bootstrap dialog system, that is motivated entirely by the need to process novel situations, I am tempted to say that the system should simply ask the user to teach it how to handle the novel object, or to ask if an existing skill can be applied to the given object. However, lets move beyond this approach, and I'll explain how the system uses existing perception and planning skills to handle the given object. By way of simplification, I'll assume your intent when asking the system to "handle the object" means to pick it up with some physical actuator. And I'll preface my explanation of this step by stating without proof that this task is analogous to those already solved by state-of-the-art, urban, driverless cars, e.g. "drive yourself to location X", where the driverless car has never been to X. Rather than a futile attempt to explain all cases that come to mind, I'll discuss a couple to give a flavor my approach. Case 1 The system can sense that the novel object is not dangerous and cannot be easily destroyed by its actuators. Then I propose that the first strategy tried should be to pick it up in the most direct fashion, and compensate in subsequent attempts for failure modes that resulted from from the earlier attempts. This is like the pole balancing task that can be accomplished by connectionist methods and no symbolic planning. Case 2 The system senses that the actions to pick up the object are not subject to experimentation, but must be performed correctly on the first attempt. For this task, the system must observe all the object state that it can to remove uncertainty. It must create a symbolic model of the object and its dynamics at the right level of abstraction, and perform planning using symbolic representions of its possible actions in order to create a trajectory that satisfies the command to "handle the object". Then it must execute the plan, repairing the plan as needed as problem state evolves that was not planned in advance for (e.g. the object starts slipping from the system's grasp). At lower abstraction levels, reactive behavior can substitute for planning (e.g. when slippage is detected by a sensor, tighen the gripping actuator). 2. This discussion brings up an interesting question. I suspect that there is a great deal of selectivity going into what texts NLP chooses to process - and that they don't include how-to, instructional texts, like recipe books (and most educational texts), which tell you to do things - like "take a cup," "add water etc" - and deal with a real world situation, in-the-world. (?) If you're dealing more in historical texts, - "the cat sat on the mat" etc - you don't have to confront the open-ended nature of words, quite so violently. Hey, the cat did some kind of sitting - as long as that's possible, who cares exactly what kind it was? But if you're a cool cat told to "sit" on a real mat that happens to be full of objects - , and you have to put those instructions into deeds rather than more words, - you care, and words' open-endedness becomes apparent. Steve: I agree with your insight. Much of NLU research is now focused on either information / document retrievel, or machine translation. My main gripe while at Cycorp was that Cyc, in the same fashion you describe, concentrated on being taught facts and rules and then deductively answering queries. But what could Cyc do beyond that? An AGI aspiring system should be capable of representing skills (e.g. codelets or procedures), acquiring them by being taught, and able to perform them as commanded, or on its own initiative. I speculate that it will be easier to ground linguistic symbolic terms in the rather precise world of computer programming and algorithms, but that truth remains to be seen. (e.g. Texai, compile and run the unit tests for the program that we wrote yesterday). 3. While philosophically, intellectually, most people dealing with this area may expect words to have precise meanings, they know practically and intuitively that this is impossible and work on the basis that words can have different meanings according to who uses them - and that they themselves keep shifting their usage of words. Philosophers, for example may argue philosophically that words can and should have precise meanings and be treated as true or false, but know in practice that pretty well all the major words/concepts in philosophy, like "mind"/"consciousness"/"determinism" - have multiple, indeed endless definitions. Or just think about AGI'ers and "intelligence." Steve: Actually at Cycorp, at one time we had dozens of Ph.D. philosophers whose responsibity was to add precise symbolic concepts to the Cyc knowledge base. The company likewise had a smaller staff of Ph.D. computational linguists whose job was to interface NLP to the rather precise Cyc concepts. My experiences at Cycorp with their parsers (i.e. Link Grammar, HPSG, Stanford Parser & Charniak Parser) also have strongly influenced my choice to embrace Fluid Construction Grammar. Despite the current lack of English coverage in FCG, there is much less impedence mismatch between sytactic form and semantics. IOW any general intelligence that wants to successfully use language must have a metacognitive/ metalinguistic level of thought - where it asks explicitly, as we do, "what does that word mean?"/"do I like that definition?" / "is it reliable?" / "how should I use/order words?" / "what is the best kind of diction when talking about this subject?".Life's complicated! Steve: Given this statement, you might agree with my bootstrap English dialog approach, in which metalinguistic skills are the first ones hard-coded. P.S. If you haven't read, I recommend Lakoff's Case Study on "Over" at end of "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" - shows vast number of meanings and schemas that can be attached to that word - and amplifies this discussion. Steve: No I actually do not yet have this text by Lakoff, but I have some recent experience with another preposition "on". In my first use case "the book is on the table", I accomodate the following alternative interpretations in order to test my design for disambiguation: a.. book - a bound book copy b.. book - a sheath of paper, e.g. match book c.. is - has as an attribute d.. is - situation described as e.. on - an operational device f.. "on the table" - subject to negotiation [ a multiword construction ] g.. on - located on the surface of I hope you don't mind me using your issues to explain how Texai should work. -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. 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