On 18/04/2008, Pei Wang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I believe AGI is basically a theoretical problem, which will be solved > by a single person or a small group, with little funding.
I'm not sure I believe this. After working on this a bit, it has become clear to me that there are more ideas than there is time to explore them all. Exploration is further hindered by a lack of software infrastructure. There are no "lab facilities", no easy way to perform high-level experiments. I know certainly that I have some high-level theoreies I want ot explore, but I can't even get started due to the lack of infrastructure. I think what Ben is trying to do is to provide those facilities by providing OpenCog. I think opeen-source programmers *can* help build this. And, judging by the Google summer-of-code applications, many of the students have a strong understanding of many of the basic concepts. Richard wrote: >.... Though it is unlikely to do so, because collaborative open-source projects are best suited >to situations in which the fundamental ideas behind the design has been solved. >Just having a large gang of programmers on an open-source project does not address Pei's >point about AGI being the "most complicated problem in the history of science". Yes, but a large gang of open source programmers can help build the infrastructure. Curing the Manhattan project, it may have been Feynmann and von Neumann and Teller and Oppenheimer doing all the thinking, but it sure wasn't them that built 42 acres of uranium enrichment plants. This was done by large gangs. The fundamental ideas behind Bayesian nets and whatever have "been solved" but there is no way, not without a lot of work, to hook Bayesian nets to english language parsers, or to any sort of predicate reasoning systems, or knowledge representation systems or ontologies. Doing such a hookup is "scientifically straight-foward" and "scientifically easy" but a huge pain-in-the-arse. Until this hookup is done, we can't run experiments,. can't test theories, can't even get started on solving the scientifically hard part of the problem. --linas ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
