2008/12/19 Philip Hunt <cabala...@googlemail.com>: > Why a virtual world preschool and not a real one? > > A virtual world, if not programmed accurately, may be subtly > differernet from the real world, so that for example an AGI is capable > of picking up and using a screwdriver in the virtual world but not > real real world, because the real world is more complex.
The trouble is that programming accurate physics simulations is non-trivial, although there is certainly a selection pressure in that direction being applied by games, virtual worlds and CAD applications. At least with robotics you don't have to worry about this stuff, since the simulation comes for free, but there other problems such as cost and repeatability (it's hard to make a unit test when the real world is in the loop, although you can record real world data and play it back as a "dream sequence"). I think the question is whether you can abstract away some of the messy aspects of real world interactions from the higher level logic, putting the touchy-feely stuff (vision/perception/etc) stuff on one side and the abstract reasoning "thinking" part on the other. My intuition is that probably in biological systems these two things are closely integrated in a horribly un-modular fashion. If your aim is to reproduce biological systems then it looks like you're either forced to do robotics, or spend a lot of time writing high quality physics simulations (good luck with that, as they say). I expect though that the aim of most AGI projects is not to exactly reproduce biological levels of competence. Even with crude or no real simulation ability in an environment such as Second Life, using some simple symbology to stand for "puck up screwdriver" you can still try to tackle problems such as autobiographical memory - how does the agent create a coherent story out of a series of activities, and how can it use that story in future to improve its skills or communication effectiveness. ------------------------------------------- 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=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
