Wannabe, Your qualification is totally appropriate.
When I say "such systems are not even close to human brain level" I mean not close to human level at the types of things human brains current outperform computers. Obviously there are many ways in which just current PC's outperform human by thousands or millions of times. But there still are many tasks at which human minds greatly outperform computers, and that is where a lot of the focus in AGI is. By a human level AGI, I mean a computer that can do almost all the things a human brain does as fast as a human. But such hardware will probably be capable of performing many of the things a PC can already do much faster than a human, many times faster than a PC. A machine that can do all the types of things a human does as fast as a human, and that can also do many tasks millions of times faster than a human --- and that can mix and match, blend, and interface between these two different types of processes rapidly will be extremely powerful. For example, such a system could scan text at very high speeds (millions of pages a second), and where it found combinations of words that looked interesting slow down and read them at a fast skim (10s to 1000s of times faster than a human), and then read the texts from the skim that seem interesting at roughly human speed would be able to find and understand relevant information in large volumes of thousands of times faster than a human. And of course, once such texts have been read they would be indexed and be much more rapidly available for future access when relevant. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2008 3:36 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] WHAT SORT OF HARDWARE $33K AND $850K BUYS TODAY FOR USE IN AGI There was one little line in this post that struck me, and I wanted to comment: Quoting Ed Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > With regard to performance, such systems are not even close to human brain > level but they should allow some interesting proofs of concepts Mentioning some huge system. My thought was, wow, that's just sounds sad. But I guess it depends on what you mean by performance. One thing that computers now way exceed brain performance in is reliability of the operations. Sure, it's difficult to say what a basic brain operation is (is a synapse reaction equivalent to a multiply accumulate?), but one thing that can be said about them is that they aren't very reliable or precise. They have a sort of a range of operation, where they kind of will act in a certain way given an input. It's got to be really hard to get valuable behavior out of this kind of a system, so the brain uses massive redundancy. Now, it might well be that in addition to just the reliability, this kind of a system gets other value from it, like a nice probabilistic operation that has additional value in itself. Maybe the inherent unpredictability is part of what we mean by intelligence. Personally I suspect that to be true. But this all stands in great contrast to how computers naturally work--obeying information processing instructions with absolute precision (possibly error-free, depending on how you look it). There is a sort of mismatch between good human brain behavior and good computer behavior. It seems like the AGI project is about making a computer act like a good brain. We can focus on how to get a computer to act in ways that are ideal for a brain to act intelligently. And by this I mean something like having some basic operations and systems that can be used in all situations. But I think it might also be good to try to think of it in terms of looking for the best ways for a computer to be intelligent. I'm a patchwork AGI kind of guy, and while surely there must be some general mechanism, it seems to make sense that there could also be many very finely crafted modules. Unfortunately, if we are restricting modules to human written modules, then that's the basic problem. A basic function of an AGI should be that it can write programs for itself to handle tasks. Or I guess for other systems. But if it can do that, then these programs don't need such huge amounts of computer power. andi ------------------------------------------- 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/?&; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- 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=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
