It seems that the debate over recursive self improvement depends on what you mean by "improvement". If you define improvement as intelligence as defined by the Turing test, then RSI is not possible because the Turing test does not test for superhuman intelligence. If you mean improvement as more memory, faster clock speed, more network bandwidth, etc., then yes, I think it is reasonable to expect Moore's law to continue after we are all uploaded. If you mean improvement in the sense of competitive fitness, then yes, I expect evolution to continue, perhaps very rapidly if it is based on a computing substrate other than DNA. Whether you can call it "self" improvement or whether the result is desirable is debatable. We are, after all, pondering the extinction of Homo Sapiens and replacing it with some unknown species, perhaps gray goo. Will the nanobots look back at this as an improvement, the way we view the extinction of Homo Erectus?
My question is whether RSI is mathematically possible in the context of universal intelligence, i.e. expected reward or prediction accuracy over a Solomonoff distribution of computable environments. I believe it is possible for Turing machines if and only if they have access to true random sources so that each generation can create successively more complex test environments to evaluate their offspring. But this is troubling because in practice we can construct pseudo-random sources that are nearly indistinguishable from truly random in polynomial time (but none that are *provably* so). -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=111637683-c8fa51 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
