Re: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
OK, understood... On Dec 4, 2007 9:32 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Benjamin Goertzel wrote: > >> Thus: building a NL parser, no matter how good it is, is of no use > >> whatsoever unless it can be shown to emerge from (or at least fit with) > >> a learning mechanism that allows the system itself to generate its own > >> understanding (or, at least, acquisition) of grammar IN THE CONTEXT OF A > >> MECHANISM THAT ALSO ACCOMPLISHES REAL UNDERSTANDING. When that larger > >> issue is dealt with, a NL parser will arise naturally, and any previous > >> work on non-developmental, hand-built parsers will be completely > >> discarded. You were trumpeting the importance of work that I know will > >> be thrown away later, and in the mean time will be of no help in > >> resolving the important issues. > > > > Richard, you discount the possibility that said NL parser will play a key > > role in the adaptive emergence of a system that can generate its own > > linguistic understanding. I.e., you discount the possibility that, with the > > right learning mechanism and instructional environment, hand-coded > > rules may serve as part of the initial seed for a learning process that will > > eventually generate knowledge obsoleting these initial hand-coded > > rules. > > > > It's fine that you discount this possibility -- I just want to point out > > that > > in doing so, you are making a bold and unsupported theoretical hypothesis, > > rather than stating an obvious or demonstrated fact. > > > > Vaguely similarly, the "grammar" of child language is largely thrown > > away in adulthood, yet it was useful as scaffolding in leading to the > > emergence of adult language. > > The problem is that this discussion has drifted away from the original > context in which I made the remarks. > > I do *not* discount the possibility that an ordinary NL parser may play > a role in the future. > > What I was attacking was the idea that a NL parser that does a wonderful > job today (but which is built on a formalism that ignores all the issues > involved in getting an adaptive language-understanding system working) > is IPSO FACTO going to be a valuable step in the direction of a full > adaptive system. > > It was the linkage that I dismissed. It was the idea that BECAUSE the > NL parser did such a great job, therefore it has a very high probability > of being a great step on the road to a full adaptive (etc) language > understanding system. > > If the NL parser completely ignores those larger issues I am justified > in saying that it is a complete crap shoot whether or not this > particular parser is going to be of use in future, more complete > theories of language. > > But that is not the same thing as making a blanket dismissal of all > parsers, saying they cannot be of any use as (as you point out) seed > material in the design of a complete system. > > I was objecting to Ed's pushing this particular NL parser in my face and > insisting that I should respect it as a substantial step towards full > AGI . and my objection was that I find models like that all show > and no deep substance precisely because they ignore the larger issues > and go for the short-term gratification of a parser that works really well. > > So I was not taking the position you thought I was. > > > > > Richard Loosemore > > > > > > - > This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email > To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: > http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; > - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72155184-923590
[agi] Re: A global approach to AI in virtual, artificial and real worlds
> What makes anyone think OpenCog will be different? Is it more > understandable? Will there be long-term aficionados who write > books on how to build systems in OpenCog? Will the developers > have experience, or just adolescent enthusiasm? I'm watching > the experiment to find out. Well, OpenCog has more than one possible development avenue associated with it. On the one hand, I have some quite specific AGI design ideas which I intend to publish next year (major aspects of the Novamente AGI design), which are suited to be implemented within OpenCog. As I believe these ideas are capable to lead to the development of AGI at the human-level and beyond (though there are many moderate-sized research problems that must be solved along the way, and yes I realize the possibility that one of these blows up and becomes a show-stopper, but I'm betting that won't happen and I've certainly thought about it a lot...) ... thus I believe OpenCog has big potential in this regard, if folks choose to develop it in that way. On the other hand OpenCog may also be quite valuable as a platform for the development of other folks' AGI ideas, potentially ones quite different from my own. I don't know what will develop and neither do any of us, I would suppose... -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72154694-0749bf
RE: [agi] None of you seem to be able ...
> From: Benjamin Goertzel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > As an example of a creative leap (that is speculative and may be wrong, > but is > certainly creative), check out my hypothesis of emergent social- > psychological > intelligence as related to mirror neurons and octonion algebras: > > http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2007/mirrorself.pdf > > I happen to think the real subtlety of intelligence happens on the > emergent level, > and not on the level of the particulars of the system that gives rise > to the emergent > phenomena. That paper conjectures some example phenomena that I believe > occur on the emergent level of intelligent systems. > This paper really takes the reader though a detailed walk of a really nice application of octonionic structure applied to the mind. The concept of mirrorhouses is really creative and thought provoking especially applied in this way. I like thinking about a mind in this sort of crystallographic structure yet there is no way I could comb through the details like this. This type of methodology has so many advantages such as - * being visually descriptive yet highly complex * modular and building block friendly * computers love this sort of structure, it's what they do best * there is an enormous amount of math existing related to this already worked out * scalable, extremely extensible, systematic * it fibrillates out to sociologic systems * etc.. Even if this phenomena is not emergent or partially emergent, (I favor partially at this point as crystal clear can be a prefecture of emergence), you can build AGI based on optimal emergent structures that the human brain might be coalescing in a perfect world, and also come up with new and better ones that the human brain hasn't got to yet either by building them directly or baking new ones in a programmed complex system. John - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72153159-51ae59
RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
Matt, Perhaps your are right. But one problem is that big Google-like compuplexes in the next five to ten years will be powerful enough to do AGI and they will be much more efficient for AGI search because the physical closeness of their machines will make it possible for them to perform the massive interconnected needed for powerful AGI much more efficiently. Ed Porter -Original Message- From: Matt Mahoney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 9:18 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research] --- Ed Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >MATT MAHONEY=> My design would use most of the Internet (10^9 P2P > nodes). > ED PORTER=> That's ambitious. Easier said than done unless you have a > Google, Microsoft, or mass popular movement backing you. It would take some free software that people find useful. The Internet has been transformed before. Remember when there were no web browsers and no search engines? You can probably think of transformations that would make the Internet more useful. Centralized search is limited to a few big players that can keep a copy of the Internet on their servers. Google is certainly useful, but imagine if it searched a space 1000 times larger and if posts were instantly added to its index, without having to wait days for its spider to find them. Imagine your post going to persistent queries posted days earlier. Imagine your queries being answered by real human beings in addition to other peers. I probably won't be the one writing this program, but where there is a need, I expect it will happen. > In a message passing network, the critical parameter is the ratio of > messages > out to messages in. The ratio cannot exceed 1 on average. > ED PORTER=> Thanks for the info. By "unmaintainable" what do you mean? > > I don't understand why more messages coming in than going out creates a > problem, unless most of what nodes do is relay message, which is not what > they do in my system. I meant the other way, which would flood the network with duplicate messages. But I believe the network would be stable against this, even in the face of spammers and malicious nodes, because most nodes would be configured to ignore duplicates and any messages that it deemed irrelevant. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72151542-9bffdb
RE: [agi] None of you seem to be able ...
RICHARD LOOSEMOORE> There is a high prima facie *risk* that intelligence involves a significant amount of irreducibility (some of the most crucial characteristics of a complete intelligence would, in any other system, cause the behavior to show a global-local disconnect), ED PORTER=> Richard, "prima facie" means obvious on its face. The above statement and those that followed it below may be obvious to you, but it is not obvious to a lot of us, and at least I have not seen (perhaps because of my own ignorance, but perhaps not) any evidence that it is obvious. Apparently Ben also does not find your position to be obvious, and Ben is no dummy. Richard, did you ever just consider that it might be "turtles all the way down", and by that I mean experiential patterns, such as those that could be represented by Novamente atoms (nodes and links) in a gen/comp hierarchy "all the way down". In such a system each level is quite naturally derived from levels below it by learning from experience. There is a lot of dynamic activity, but much of it is quite orderly, like that in Hecht-Neilsen's Confabulation. There is no reason why there has to be a "GLOBAL-LOCAL DISCONNECT" of the type you envision, i.e., one that is totally impossible to architect in terms of until one totally explores global-local disconnect space (just think how large an exploration space that might be). So if you have prima facie evidence to support your claim (other than your paper which I read which does not meet that standard), then present it. If you make me eat my words you will have taught me something sufficiently valuable that I will relish the experience. Ed Porter -Original Message- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 9:17 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] None of you seem to be able ... Benjamin Goertzel wrote: > On Dec 4, 2007 8:38 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Benjamin Goertzel wrote: >> [snip] >>> And neither you nor anyone else has ever made a cogent argument that >>> emulating the brain is the ONLY route to creating powerful AGI. The closest >>> thing to such an argument that I've seen >>> was given by Eric Baum in his book "What Is >>> Thought?", and I note that Eric has backed away somewhat from that >>> position lately. >> This is a pretty outrageous statement to make, given that you know full >> well that I have done exactly that. >> >> You may not agree with the argument, but that is not the same as >> asserting that the argument does not exist. >> >> Unless you were meaning "emulating the brain" in the sense of emulating >> it ONLY at the low level of neural wiring, which I do not advocate. > > I don't find your nor Eric's nor anyone else's argument that brain-emulation > is the "golden path" very strongly convincing... > > However, I found Eric's argument by reference to the compressed nature of > the genome, more convincing than your argument via the hypothesis of > irreducible emergent complexity... > > Sorry if my choice of words was not adequately politic. I find your argument > interesting, but it's certainly just as speculative as the various AGI theories > you dismiss It basically rests on a big assumption, which is that the > complexity of human intelligence is analytically irreducible within pragmatic > computational constraints. In this sense it's less an argument than a > conjectural > assertion, albeit an admirably bold one. Ben, This is even worse. The argument I presented was not a "conjectural assertion", it made the following coherent case: 1) There is a high prima facie *risk* that intelligence involves a significant amount of irreducibility (some of the most crucial characteristics of a complete intelligence would, in any other system, cause the behavior to show a global-local disconnect), and 2) Because of the unique and unusual nature of complexity there is only a vanishingly small chance that we will be able to find a way to assess the exact degree of risk involved, and 3) (A corollary of (2)) If the problem were real, but we were to ignore this risk and simply continue with an "engineering" approach (pretending that complexity is insignificant), then the *only* evidence we would ever get that irreducibility was preventing us from building a complete intelligence would be the fact that we would simply run around in circles all the time, wondering why, when we put large systems together, they didn't quite make it, and 4) Therefore we need to adopt a "Precautionary Principle" and treat the problem as if irreducibility really is significant. Whether you like it or not - whether you've got too much invested in the contrary point of view to admit it, or not - this is a perfectly valid and coherent argument, and your attempt to try to push it into some lesser realm of a "conjectural assertion" is profoundly insulting. Richard Loosemore - This
RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
The particular NL parser paper in question, Collins's "Convolution Kernels for Natural Language" (http://l2r.cs.uiuc.edu/~danr/Teaching/CS598-05/Papers/Collins-kernels.pdf) is actually saying something quite important that extends way beyond parsers and is highly applicable to AGI in general. It is actually showing that you can do something roughly equivalent to growing neural gas (GNG) in a space with something approaching 500,000 dimensions, but you can do it without normally having to deal with more than a few of those dimensions at one time. GNG is an algorithm I learned about from reading Peter Voss that allows one to learn how to efficiently represent a distribution in a relatively high dimensional space in a totally unsupervised manner. But there really seem to be no reason why there should be any limit to the dimensionality of the space in which the Collin's algorithm works, because it does not use an explicit vector representation, nor, if I recollect correctly, a Euclidian distance metric, but rather a similarity metric which is generally much more appropriate for matching in very high dimensional spaces. But what he is growing are not just points representing where data has occurred in a high dimensional space, but sets of points that define hyperplanes for defining the boundaries between classes. My recollection is that this system learns automatically from both labeled data (instances of correct parse trees) and randomly generated deviations from those instances. His particular algorithm matches tree structures, but with modification it would seem to be extendable to matching arbitrary nets. Other versions of it could be made to operate, like GNG, in an unsupervised manner. If you stop and think about what this is saying and generalize from it, it provides an important possible component in an AGI tool kit. What it shows is not limited to parsing, but it would seem possibly applicable to virtually any hierarchical or networked representation, including nets of semantic web RDF triples, and semantic nets, and predicate logic expressions. At first glance it appears it would even be applicable to kinkier net matching algorithms, such as an Augmented transition network (ATN) matching. So if one reads this paper with a mind to not only what it specifically shows, but to what how what it shows could be expanded, this paper says something very important. That is, that one can represent, learn, and classify things in very high dimensional spaces -- such as 10^1 dimensional spaces -- and do it efficiently provided the part of the space being represented is sufficiently sparsely connected. I had already assumed this, before reading this paper, but the paper was valuable to me because it provided a mathematically rigorous support for my prior models, and helped me better understand the mathematical foundations of my own prior intuitive thinking. It means that systems like Novemente can deal in very high dimensional spaces relatively efficiently. It does not mean that all processes that can be performed in such spaces will be computationally cheap (for example, combinatorial searches), but it means that many of them, such as GNG like recording of experience, and simple indexed based matching can scale relatively well in a sparsely connected world. That is important, for those with the vision to understand. Ed Porter -Original Message- From: Benjamin Goertzel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 8:59 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research] > Thus: building a NL parser, no matter how good it is, is of no use > whatsoever unless it can be shown to emerge from (or at least fit with) > a learning mechanism that allows the system itself to generate its own > understanding (or, at least, acquisition) of grammar IN THE CONTEXT OF A > MECHANISM THAT ALSO ACCOMPLISHES REAL UNDERSTANDING. When that larger > issue is dealt with, a NL parser will arise naturally, and any previous > work on non-developmental, hand-built parsers will be completely > discarded. You were trumpeting the importance of work that I know will > be thrown away later, and in the mean time will be of no help in > resolving the important issues. Richard, you discount the possibility that said NL parser will play a key role in the adaptive emergence of a system that can generate its own linguistic understanding. I.e., you discount the possibility that, with the right learning mechanism and instructional environment, hand-coded rules may serve as part of the initial seed for a learning process that will eventually generate knowledge obsoleting these initial hand-coded rules. It's fine that you discount this possibility -- I just want to point out that in doing so, you are making a bold and unsupported theoretical hypothesis, rather than stating an obvious or demonstrated fact. Vaguely similarly, the "grammar" of child lang
Re: [agi] None of you seem to be able ...
Richard, Well, I'm really sorry to have offended you so much, but you seem to be a mighty easy guy to offend! I know I can be pretty offensive at times; but this time, I wasn't even trying ;-) > The argument I presented was not a "conjectural assertion", it made the > following coherent case: > >1) There is a high prima facie *risk* that intelligence involves a > significant amount of irreducibility (some of the most crucial > characteristics of a complete intelligence would, in any other system, > cause the behavior to show a global-local disconnect), and The above statement contains two fuzzy terms -- "high" and "significant" ... You have provided no evidence for any particular quantification of these terms... your evidence is qualitative/intuitive, so far as I can tell... Your quantification of these terms seems to me a conjectural assertion unsupported by evidence. >2) Because of the unique and unusual nature of complexity there is > only a vanishingly small chance that we will be able to find a way to > assess the exact degree of risk involved, and > >3) (A corollary of (2)) If the problem were real, but we were to > ignore this risk and simply continue with an "engineering" approach > (pretending that complexity is insignificant), The engineering approach does not pretend that complexity is insignificant. It just denies that the complexity of intelligent systems leads to the sort of irreducibility you suggest it does. Some complex systems can be reverse-engineered in their general principles even if not in detail. And that is all one would need to do in order to create a brain emulation (not that this is what I'm trying to do) --- assuming one's goal was not to exactly emulate some specific human brain based on observing the behaviors it generates, but merely to emulate the brainlike character of the system... > then the *only* evidence > we would ever get that irreducibility was preventing us from building a > complete intelligence would be the fact that we would simply run around > in circles all the time, wondering why, when we put large systems > together, they didn't quite make it, and No. Experimenting with AI systems could lead to evidence that would support the irreducibility hypothesis more directly than that. I doubt they will but it's possible. For instance, we might discover that creating more and more intelligent systems inevitably presents more and more complex parameter-tuning problems, so that parameter-tuning appears to be the bottleneck. This would suggest that some kind of highly expensive evolutionary or ensemble approach as you're suggesting might be necessary. >4) Therefore we need to adopt a "Precautionary Principle" and treat > the problem as if irreducibility really is significant. > > > Whether you like it or not - whether you've got too much invested in the > contrary point of view to admit it, or not - this is a perfectly valid > and coherent argument, and your attempt to try to push it into some > lesser realm of a "conjectural assertion" is profoundly insulting. The form of the argument is coherent and valid; but the premises involve fuzzy quantifiers whose values you are apparently setting by intuition, and whose specific values sensitively impact the truth value of the conclusion. -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72135696-ff196d
Re: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
Benjamin Goertzel wrote: Thus: building a NL parser, no matter how good it is, is of no use whatsoever unless it can be shown to emerge from (or at least fit with) a learning mechanism that allows the system itself to generate its own understanding (or, at least, acquisition) of grammar IN THE CONTEXT OF A MECHANISM THAT ALSO ACCOMPLISHES REAL UNDERSTANDING. When that larger issue is dealt with, a NL parser will arise naturally, and any previous work on non-developmental, hand-built parsers will be completely discarded. You were trumpeting the importance of work that I know will be thrown away later, and in the mean time will be of no help in resolving the important issues. Richard, you discount the possibility that said NL parser will play a key role in the adaptive emergence of a system that can generate its own linguistic understanding. I.e., you discount the possibility that, with the right learning mechanism and instructional environment, hand-coded rules may serve as part of the initial seed for a learning process that will eventually generate knowledge obsoleting these initial hand-coded rules. It's fine that you discount this possibility -- I just want to point out that in doing so, you are making a bold and unsupported theoretical hypothesis, rather than stating an obvious or demonstrated fact. Vaguely similarly, the "grammar" of child language is largely thrown away in adulthood, yet it was useful as scaffolding in leading to the emergence of adult language. The problem is that this discussion has drifted away from the original context in which I made the remarks. I do *not* discount the possibility that an ordinary NL parser may play a role in the future. What I was attacking was the idea that a NL parser that does a wonderful job today (but which is built on a formalism that ignores all the issues involved in getting an adaptive language-understanding system working) is IPSO FACTO going to be a valuable step in the direction of a full adaptive system. It was the linkage that I dismissed. It was the idea that BECAUSE the NL parser did such a great job, therefore it has a very high probability of being a great step on the road to a full adaptive (etc) language understanding system. If the NL parser completely ignores those larger issues I am justified in saying that it is a complete crap shoot whether or not this particular parser is going to be of use in future, more complete theories of language. But that is not the same thing as making a blanket dismissal of all parsers, saying they cannot be of any use as (as you point out) seed material in the design of a complete system. I was objecting to Ed's pushing this particular NL parser in my face and insisting that I should respect it as a substantial step towards full AGI . and my objection was that I find models like that all show and no deep substance precisely because they ignore the larger issues and go for the short-term gratification of a parser that works really well. So I was not taking the position you thought I was. Richard Loosemore - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72135004-3fc959
RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
--- Ed Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >MATT MAHONEY=> My design would use most of the Internet (10^9 P2P > nodes). > ED PORTER=> That's ambitious. Easier said than done unless you have a > Google, Microsoft, or mass popular movement backing you. It would take some free software that people find useful. The Internet has been transformed before. Remember when there were no web browsers and no search engines? You can probably think of transformations that would make the Internet more useful. Centralized search is limited to a few big players that can keep a copy of the Internet on their servers. Google is certainly useful, but imagine if it searched a space 1000 times larger and if posts were instantly added to its index, without having to wait days for its spider to find them. Imagine your post going to persistent queries posted days earlier. Imagine your queries being answered by real human beings in addition to other peers. I probably won't be the one writing this program, but where there is a need, I expect it will happen. > In a message passing network, the critical parameter is the ratio of > messages > out to messages in. The ratio cannot exceed 1 on average. > ED PORTER=> Thanks for the info. By "unmaintainable" what do you mean? > > I don't understand why more messages coming in than going out creates a > problem, unless most of what nodes do is relay message, which is not what > they do in my system. I meant the other way, which would flood the network with duplicate messages. But I believe the network would be stable against this, even in the face of spammers and malicious nodes, because most nodes would be configured to ignore duplicates and any messages that it deemed irrelevant. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72132605-fe415f
Re: [agi] None of you seem to be able ...
Benjamin Goertzel wrote: On Dec 4, 2007 8:38 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Benjamin Goertzel wrote: [snip] And neither you nor anyone else has ever made a cogent argument that emulating the brain is the ONLY route to creating powerful AGI. The closest thing to such an argument that I've seen was given by Eric Baum in his book "What Is Thought?", and I note that Eric has backed away somewhat from that position lately. This is a pretty outrageous statement to make, given that you know full well that I have done exactly that. You may not agree with the argument, but that is not the same as asserting that the argument does not exist. Unless you were meaning "emulating the brain" in the sense of emulating it ONLY at the low level of neural wiring, which I do not advocate. I don't find your nor Eric's nor anyone else's argument that brain-emulation is the "golden path" very strongly convincing... However, I found Eric's argument by reference to the compressed nature of the genome, more convincing than your argument via the hypothesis of irreducible emergent complexity... Sorry if my choice of words was not adequately politic. I find your argument interesting, but it's certainly just as speculative as the various AGI theories you dismiss It basically rests on a big assumption, which is that the complexity of human intelligence is analytically irreducible within pragmatic computational constraints. In this sense it's less an argument than a conjectural assertion, albeit an admirably bold one. Ben, This is even worse. The argument I presented was not a "conjectural assertion", it made the following coherent case: 1) There is a high prima facie *risk* that intelligence involves a significant amount of irreducibility (some of the most crucial characteristics of a complete intelligence would, in any other system, cause the behavior to show a global-local disconnect), and 2) Because of the unique and unusual nature of complexity there is only a vanishingly small chance that we will be able to find a way to assess the exact degree of risk involved, and 3) (A corollary of (2)) If the problem were real, but we were to ignore this risk and simply continue with an "engineering" approach (pretending that complexity is insignificant), then the *only* evidence we would ever get that irreducibility was preventing us from building a complete intelligence would be the fact that we would simply run around in circles all the time, wondering why, when we put large systems together, they didn't quite make it, and 4) Therefore we need to adopt a "Precautionary Principle" and treat the problem as if irreducibility really is significant. Whether you like it or not - whether you've got too much invested in the contrary point of view to admit it, or not - this is a perfectly valid and coherent argument, and your attempt to try to push it into some lesser realm of a "conjectural assertion" is profoundly insulting. Richard Loosemore - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72132038-3654d5
Re: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
> Thus: building a NL parser, no matter how good it is, is of no use > whatsoever unless it can be shown to emerge from (or at least fit with) > a learning mechanism that allows the system itself to generate its own > understanding (or, at least, acquisition) of grammar IN THE CONTEXT OF A > MECHANISM THAT ALSO ACCOMPLISHES REAL UNDERSTANDING. When that larger > issue is dealt with, a NL parser will arise naturally, and any previous > work on non-developmental, hand-built parsers will be completely > discarded. You were trumpeting the importance of work that I know will > be thrown away later, and in the mean time will be of no help in > resolving the important issues. Richard, you discount the possibility that said NL parser will play a key role in the adaptive emergence of a system that can generate its own linguistic understanding. I.e., you discount the possibility that, with the right learning mechanism and instructional environment, hand-coded rules may serve as part of the initial seed for a learning process that will eventually generate knowledge obsoleting these initial hand-coded rules. It's fine that you discount this possibility -- I just want to point out that in doing so, you are making a bold and unsupported theoretical hypothesis, rather than stating an obvious or demonstrated fact. Vaguely similarly, the "grammar" of child language is largely thrown away in adulthood, yet it was useful as scaffolding in leading to the emergence of adult language. -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72129171-2bf67a
Re: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
Ed Porter wrote: Richard, It is not clear how valuable your 25 years of hard won learning is if it causes you to dismiss valuable scientific work that seems to have eclipsed the importance of anything I or you have published as "trivial exercises in public relations" without giving any reason whatsoever for the particular dismissal. I welcome criticism in this forum provided it is well reasoned and without venom. But to dismiss a list of examples I give to support an argument as "trivial exercises in public relations" without any justification other than the fact that in general a certain numbers of published papers are inaccurate and/or overblown, is every bit as dishonest as calling someone a liar with regard to a particular statement based on nothing more than the knowledge some people are liars. In my past exchanges with you, sometimes your responses have been helpful. But I have noticed that although you are very quick to question me (and others), if I question you, rather than respond directly to my arguments you often don't respond to them at all -- such as your recent refusal to justify your allegation that my whole framework, presumably for understanding AGI, was wrong (a pretty insulting statement which should not be flung around without some justification). Or if you do respond to challenges, you often dismiss them as invalid without any substantial evidence, or you substantially change the subject, such as by focusing on one small part of my argument that I have not yet fully supported, while refusing to acknowledge the major support I have shown for the major thrust of my argument. When you argue like that there really is no purpose in continuing the conversation. What's the point. Under those circumstance your not dealing with someone who is likely to tell you anything of worth. Rather you are only likely to hear lame defensive arguments from somebody who is either incapable of properly defending or unwilling to properly defend their arguments, and, thus, is unlikely to communicate anything of value in the exchange. Your 25 years of experience doesn't mean squat about how much you truly understand AGI unless you are capable of being more intellectually honest, both with yourself and with others -- and unless you are capable of actually reasonably defending your understandings, head-on, against reasoned questioning and countering evidence. To dismiss counter evidence cited against your arguments as "trivial exercises in public relations" without any specific justification is not a reasonable defense, and the fact that you so often result to such intellectually dishonest tactics to defend your stated understandings relating to AGI really does call into question the quality of those understandings. In summary, don't go around attacking other people's statements unless you are willing to defend those attacks in an intellectually honest manner. I confess, I would rather that I had not so quickly dismissed those researchers you mentioned - mostly because my motivation at the time was to dismiss the exaggerated value that *you* placed on these results. But let me explain the reason why I still feel that it was valid to dismiss them. They are examples of a category of research that addresses issues that are completely compromised by the lack of solutions to other issues. Thus: building a NL parser, no matter how good it is, is of no use whatsoever unless it can be shown to emerge from (or at least fit with) a learning mechanism that allows the system itself to generate its own understanding (or, at least, acquisition) of grammar IN THE CONTEXT OF A MECHANISM THAT ALSO ACCOMPLISHES REAL UNDERSTANDING. When that larger issue is dealt with, a NL parser will arise naturally, and any previous work on non-developmental, hand-built parsers will be completely discarded. You were trumpeting the importance of work that I know will be thrown away later, and in the mean time will be of no help in resolving the important issues. Now, I am harsh about these researchers not because they in particular were irresponsible, but because they are part of a tradition in which everyone is looking for cheap results that superficially appear good to peer reviewers, so they can get things published, so they can get more research grants, so they can get higher salaries. There is an appallingly high incidence of research that is carried out because it fits the ideal paper-publication template, not because the work itself addresses important issues. This is a kind of low-level academic corruption, and I will continue to call it what it is, even if you don't have the slightest idea that this corruption exists. It was towards *that* issue that my criticism was directed. I would have been perfectly happy to explain this to you before, but instead of appreciating where I was coming from, you launched into a tirade about my dishonesty and stupidity in rejecting pap
Re: [agi] "How to tepresent things" problem
Dennis Gorelik wrote: Richard, 3) A way to represent things - and in particular, uncertainty - without getting buried up to the eyeballs in (e.g.) temporal logics that nobody believes in. Conceptually the way of representing things is described very well. It's Neural Network -- set of nodes (concepts), when every node can be connected with the set of other nodes. Every connection has it's own weight. Some nodes are connected with external devices. For example, one node can be connected with one word in text dictionary (that is an external device). Do you see any problems with such architecture? Many, unfortunately. Too many to list all of them. A couple are: you need special extra mechanisms to handle the difference between generic nodes and instance nodes (in a basic neural net there is no distinction between these two, so the system cannot represent even the most basic of situations), and you need extra mechanisms to handle the dynamic creation/assignment of new nodes, because new things are being experienced all the time. These extra mechanisms are so important that is arguable that the behavior of the system is dominated by *them*, not by the mere fact that the design started out as a neural net. Having said that, I believe in neural nets as a good conceptual starting point. It is just that you need to figure out all that machinery - and no one has, so there is a "representation" problem in my previous list of problems. Richard Loosemore - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72127217-41d988
Re: [agi] None of you seem to be able ...
On Dec 4, 2007 8:38 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Benjamin Goertzel wrote: > [snip] > > And neither you nor anyone else has ever made a cogent argument that > > emulating the brain is the ONLY route to creating powerful AGI. The closest > > thing to such an argument that I've seen > > was given by Eric Baum in his book "What Is > > Thought?", and I note that Eric has backed away somewhat from that > > position lately. > > This is a pretty outrageous statement to make, given that you know full > well that I have done exactly that. > > You may not agree with the argument, but that is not the same as > asserting that the argument does not exist. > > Unless you were meaning "emulating the brain" in the sense of emulating > it ONLY at the low level of neural wiring, which I do not advocate. I don't find your nor Eric's nor anyone else's argument that brain-emulation is the "golden path" very strongly convincing... However, I found Eric's argument by reference to the compressed nature of the genome, more convincing than your argument via the hypothesis of irreducible emergent complexity... Sorry if my choice of words was not adequately politic. I find your argument interesting, but it's certainly just as speculative as the various AGI theories you dismiss It basically rests on a big assumption, which is that the complexity of human intelligence is analytically irreducible within pragmatic computational constraints. In this sense it's less an argument than a conjectural assertion, albeit an admirably bold one. -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72126612-7f96e4
RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
>MATT MAHONEY=> My design would use most of the Internet (10^9 P2P nodes). ED PORTER=> That's ambitious. Easier said than done unless you have a Google, Microsoft, or mass popular movement backing you. >> ED PORTER=> I mean, what would motivate the average American, or even the average computer geek turn over part of his computer to it?... >MATT MAHONEY=> The value is the ability to post messages that can be found by search, without having to create a website. Information has negative value; people will trade CPU resources for the ability to advertise. ED PORTER=>It sounds theoretically possible. But actually making it happen in a world with so much competition for mind and machine share might be quite difficult. Again it is something that would probably require a major force of the type I listed above to make it happen. >> ED PORTER=> Are you saying that as a system becomes bigger it naturally becomes unstable, or what? >MATT MAHONEY=> When a system's Lyapunov exponent (or its discrete approximation) becomes positive, it becomes unmaintainable. This is solved by reducing its interconnectivity. For example, in software we use scope, data abstraction, packages, protocols, etc. to reduce the degree to which one part of the program can affect another. This allows us to build larger programs. In a message passing network, the critical parameter is the ratio of messages out to messages in. The ratio cannot exceed 1 on average. ED PORTER=> Thanks for the info. By "unmaintainable" what do you mean? I don't understand why more messages coming in than going out creates a problem, unless most of what nodes do is relay message, which is not what they do in my system. The unruly chaotic side of AGI is not something I have thought much about. I have tried to design my system to largely avoid it. So this is something I don't know much about, although I have thought about net congestion a fair amount which can be very dynamic, and that sounds like it is a related to what you are talking about. I have tried to design my system as a largly asynchronous messaging system so most processes are relatively loosely linked, as browsers and servers generally are on the internet. As such, the major type of instability I have worried about is that of network traffic congestion, such as if all of a sudden many nodes want to talk to the same node, both for computer nodes and pattern nodes. I WOULD BE INTERESTED IN ANY THOUGHTS ON THE OTHER TYPES OF DYNAMIC INSTABILITIES A HIERARCHICAL MEMORY SYSTEM -- WITH PROBABILISTIC INDEX-BASED SPREADING ACTIVATION -- MIGHT HAVE. Matt, it sounds as if OpenCog ever tries to build a large P2P network "you the man". Ed Porter -Original Message- From: Matt Mahoney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 7:42 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research] --- Ed Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Matt, > > IN my Mon 12/3/2007 8:17 PM post to John Rose from which your are probably > quoting below I discussed the bandwidth issues. I am assuming nodes > directly talk to each other, which is probably overly optimistic, but still > are limited by the fact that each node can only receive somewhere roughly > around 100 128 byte messages a second. Unless you have a really big P2P > system, that just isn't going to give you much bandwidth. If you had 100 > million P2P nodes it would. Thus, a key issue is how many participants is > an AGI-at-Home P2P system going to get. My design would use most of the Internet (10^9 P2P nodes). Messages would be natural language text strings, making no distinction between documents, queries, and responses. Each message would have a header indicating the ID and time stamp of the originator and any intermediate nodes through which the message was routed. A message could also have attached files. Each node would have a cache of messages and its own policy on which messages it decides to keep or discard. The goal of the network is to route messages to other nodes that store messages with matching terms. To route an incoming message x, it matches terms in x to terms in stored messages and sends copies to nodes that appear in those headers, appending its own ID and time stamp to the header of the outgoing copies. It also keeps a copy, so that the receiving nodes knows that they know it has a copy of x (at least temporarily). The network acts as a distributed database with a distributed search function. If X posts a document x and Y posts a query y with matching terms, then the network acts to route x to Y and y to X. > I mean, what would motivate the average American, or even the average > computer geek turn over part of his computer to it? It might not be an easy > sell for more than several hundred or several thousand people, at least > until it could do something cool, like index their videos for them, be a > funny chat
Re: [agi] None of you seem to be able ...
Benjamin Goertzel wrote: [snip] And neither you nor anyone else has ever made a cogent argument that emulating the brain is the ONLY route to creating powerful AGI. The closest thing to such an argument that I've seen was given by Eric Baum in his book "What Is Thought?", and I note that Eric has backed away somewhat from that position lately. This is a pretty outrageous statement to make, given that you know full well that I have done exactly that. You may not agree with the argument, but that is not the same as asserting that the argument does not exist. Unless you were meaning "emulating the brain" in the sense of emulating it ONLY at the low level of neural wiring, which I do not advocate. Richard Loosemore - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72125338-4c83ae
Re: [agi] Solution to "Grounding" problem
Dennis Gorelik wrote: Richard, 1) Grounding Problem (the *real* one, not the cheap substitute that everyone usually thinks of as the symbol grounding problem). Could you describe, what *real* grounding problem is? It would be nice to consider an example. Say, we are trying to build AGI for the purpose of running intelligent chat-bot. What would be the grounding problem in this case? I'll do my best. The grounding problem has to do with exactly who is doing the interpreting of the AGI's internal symbols. If the system is built in such a way that it builds its own symbols as part of the process of using them, then by definition it is grounded because it was the one that made the symbols. But if we write down a bunch of symbols - deciding the format in which the symbols are represented, and stuff at least some of them with content - then there is a very big question about whether the mechanisms that browse on those symbols will actually be *using* them as if their meaning was the same as the meaning we originally intended. Meaning, you see, is implicit in the way the symbols are used, so there is no particular reason why the way the symbols are actually used by the system should match up with the originally intended meaning that we impose when we look at the symbols. The way this most often manifests itself is when the AI system delivers results in natural language that are simply an expression of our imposed meanings. Main difficulty: this entire problem is extremely subtle, and most people simply don't get what the problem is, so they think it is about connecting the AGI to its environment in some way. It takes a fair bit of effort to get you head around the real problem (I have only sketched a pale shadow of it in this post, for example). Hope that makes enough sense. Richard Loosemore - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72122415-b8477a
Re: [agi] None of you seem to be able ...
> More generally, I don't perceive any readiness to recognize that the brain > has the answers to all the many unsolved problems of AGI - Obviously the brain contains answers to many of the unsolved problems of AGI (not all -- e.g. not the problem of how to create a stable goal system under recursive self-improvement). However, current neuroscience does NOT contain these answers. And neither you nor anyone else has ever made a cogent argument that emulating the brain is the ONLY route to creating powerful AGI. The closest thing to such an argument that I've seen was given by Eric Baum in his book "What Is Thought?", and I note that Eric has backed away somewhat from that position lately. > I think it > should be obvious that AGI isn't going to happen - and none of the unsolved > problems are going to be solved - without major creative leaps. Just look > even at the ipod & iphone - major new technology never happens without such > leaps. The above sentence is rather hilarious to me. If the Ipod and Iphone are your measure for "creative leaps" then there have been loads and loads of major creative leaps in AGI and narrow-AI research. Anyway it seems to me that you're not just looking for creative leaps, you're looking for creative leaps that match your personal intuition. Perhaps the real problem is that your personal intuition about intelligence is largely off-base ;-) As an example of a creative leap (that is speculative and may be wrong, but is certainly creative), check out my hypothesis of emergent social-psychological intelligence as related to mirror neurons and octonion algebras: http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2007/mirrorself.pdf I happen to think the real subtlety of intelligence happens on the emergent level, and not on the level of the particulars of the system that gives rise to the emergent phenomena. That paper conjectures some example phenomena that I believe occur on the emergent level of intelligent systems. Loosemore agrees with me on the importance of emergence, but he feels there is a fundamental irreducibility that makes it pragmatically impossible to figure out via science, math and intuition which concrete structures/dynamics will give rise to the right emergent structures, without doing a massive body of simulation experiments. I think he overstates the degree of irreducibility. -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72114408-ae9503
RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
--- Ed Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Matt, > > IN my Mon 12/3/2007 8:17 PM post to John Rose from which your are probably > quoting below I discussed the bandwidth issues. I am assuming nodes > directly talk to each other, which is probably overly optimistic, but still > are limited by the fact that each node can only receive somewhere roughly > around 100 128 byte messages a second. Unless you have a really big P2P > system, that just isn't going to give you much bandwidth. If you had 100 > million P2P nodes it would. Thus, a key issue is how many participants is > an AGI-at-Home P2P system going to get. My design would use most of the Internet (10^9 P2P nodes). Messages would be natural language text strings, making no distinction between documents, queries, and responses. Each message would have a header indicating the ID and time stamp of the originator and any intermediate nodes through which the message was routed. A message could also have attached files. Each node would have a cache of messages and its own policy on which messages it decides to keep or discard. The goal of the network is to route messages to other nodes that store messages with matching terms. To route an incoming message x, it matches terms in x to terms in stored messages and sends copies to nodes that appear in those headers, appending its own ID and time stamp to the header of the outgoing copies. It also keeps a copy, so that the receiving nodes knows that they know it has a copy of x (at least temporarily). The network acts as a distributed database with a distributed search function. If X posts a document x and Y posts a query y with matching terms, then the network acts to route x to Y and y to X. > I mean, what would motivate the average American, or even the average > computer geek turn over part of his computer to it? It might not be an easy > sell for more than several hundred or several thousand people, at least > until it could do something cool, like index their videos for them, be a > funny chat bot, or something like that. The value is the ability to post messages that can be found by search, without having to create a website. Information has negative value; people will trade CPU resources for the ability to advertise. > In addition to my last email, I don't understand what your were saying below > about complexity. Are you saying that as a system becomes bigger it > naturally becomes unstable, or what? When a system's Lyapunov exponent (or its discrete approximation) becomes positive, it becomes unmaintainable. This is solved by reducing its interconnectivity. For example, in software we use scope, data abstraction, packages, protocols, etc. to reduce the degree to which one part of the program can affect another. This allows us to build larger programs. In a message passing network, the critical parameter is the ratio of messages out to messages in. The ratio cannot exceed 1 on average. Each node can have its own independent policy of prioritizing messages, but will probably send messages at a nearly constant maximum rate regardless of the input rate. This reaches equilibrium at a ratio of 1, but it would also allow rare but "important" messages to propagate to a large number of nodes. All critically balanced complex systems are subject to rare but significant events, for example software (state changes and failures), evolution (population explosions, plagues, and mass extinctions), and gene regulatory networks (cell differentiation). -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72111983-b0ec39
Re: [agi] None of you seem to be able ...
Dennis: MT:none of you seem able to face this to my mind obvious truth. Who do you mean under "you" in this context? Do you think that everyone here agrees with Matt on everyting? Quite the opposite is true -- almost every AI researcher has his own unique set of believes. I'm delighted to be corrected, if wrong. My hypothesis was that in processing ideas - especially in searching for analogies - the brain will search through v. few examples in any given moment, all or almost all of them relevant, where computers will search blindly through vast numbers. (I'm just reading a neuroeconomics book which puts the ratio of computer communication speed to that of the brain at 30 million to one). It seems to me that the brain's principles of search are fundamentally different to those of computers. My impression is that "none of you are able to face" that particular truth - correct me . More generally, I don't perceive any readiness to recognize that the brain has the answers to all the many unsolved problems of AGI - answers which mostly if not entirely involve *very different kinds* of computation. I believe, for example, that the brain extensively uses direct shape-matching/ mappings to compare - and only some new form of analog computation will be able to handle that. I don't see anyone who's prepared for that kind of creative leap - for revolutionary new kinds of hardware and software. In general, everyone seems to be starting from the materials that exist, and praying to God that minor adaptations will work. (You too, no?) Even Richard who just possibly may agree with me on the importance of emulating the brain, opines that the brain uses massive parallel computation above - because, I would argue, that's what fits his materials - that's what he *wants* not knows to be true. I've argued about this with Ed - I think it should be obvious that AGI isn't going to happen - and none of the unsolved problems are going to be solved - without major creative leaps. Just look even at the ipod & iphone - major new technology never happens without such leaps. Whom do you see as a creative "high-jumper" here - even in their philosophy? - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72098704-c6974e
Re: [agi] None of you seem to be able ...
--- Dennis Gorelik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > For example, I disagree with Matt's claim that AGI research needs > special hardware with massive computational capabilities. I don't claim you need special hardware. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72062645-1ca7c4
[agi] RE: A global approach to AI in virtual, artificial and real worlds
Ken, Wow. I was going to say, this is one of the most interesting posts I have read on the AGI list in a while, until I realized it wasn't on the AGI list. Too bad. I have copied this response and your original email (below) to the AGI list to share the inspiration. In the following I have copied certain parts of your post and followed them by questions or comments. >KEN LAWS=> And much of the advanced robotic planning software developed at NASA Ames is based on particle filters, a method of representing probability distributions as they pass through various nonlinear transformations. (It remains to be seen whether any of this software will find use in actual missions, but I'm betting it will be used in the next Mars rovers.) ED PORTER=> Probability particle filters sounds cool. I assume it means you only consider or transmit information about probability (or probabilistic implication) distributions or changes in such distributions that have over a certain concentration in a given portion of space/time to those locations in space/time. Is that correct? And what sort of non-linear transforms are you talking about? >KEN LAWS=> Artificial neural networks, like humans, have a remarkable ability to deal with noise inputs and under-constrained models, but the learning is very slow. That's why evolution has provided us with a priori brain structuring, instead of a tabula rasa mind. It makes the learning tractable. ED PORTER=> Other than the way sensory, homeostatic, body sensation, and other info is mapped into our brains, the cortico-basil-ganglia-thalamic feedback loop, the cortico-cerebellum-thalamic feedback loop, and the other pre-designed plug and play interface to the reptile brain (all of which establish a certain type of architecture and control structure), what are your talking about? I would be very interesting in knowing what type of constraint, other than these basic architectural constraints are involved. I just attended a lecture this weekend where a Harvard researcher on the unconscious mind said that one-day-old babies have been shown to be able to mimic a few basic facial expressions, such as sticking out their tongue and putting their mouth into a small circle, as when saying "who". This is hard to understand, because one would imaging that by this age a child fresh from the fog of the womb would not have had time to build up the visual patterns enabling them to recognize facial features, and further more would not have had time to map the correspondence between that blob of pink sticking out of the hole in somebody's face and the baby's own tongue, or own mouth. (I don't know how much evidence this study has.) I have not had anybody explain to me how such instinctual programming could be represented in advance of the learned, experientially derived patterns out of which most mind patterns are represented. The one exception is Sam Adam's explained in an off-stage discussion at the Singularity Conference, about how new-borns are designed to visually focus on the female areola because tests have shown their visual system is pre-wired to detect circular patterns.) >KEN LAWS=>For those who prefer fine-scale brain/mind modeling, look into the decades of theoretical and simulation work by the SOAR community, and by the APEX community, for human sensor/manipulator learning simulations. ED PORTER=> I haven't read about SOAR for ten years. It struck me as a generalized expert system (if-then rules), but one with a relatively enlightened goal structure and learning structure for an expert system. Has it grown into a real contender for human level AGI, and what sort of tasks its is currently actually capable of. Re APEX, I have never heard it. Have you any good URLs for summarizing the nature and capabilities of each. >KEN LAWS=> ... Early pattern recognition researchers had high hopes for statistical learning, but eventually realized that the magic is almost always in feature extraction rather than the statistical back end. Represent a problem well and it may be easy to solve; badly and you'll need more computing power than you can afford. .. ED PORTER=> I think most intelligent AGI models envision a system that has many representations which compete for existence based on usefulness. This is one way of addressing this problem. Another is to understand that for certain complex problems, such as the those of the type we who are trying to design AGI often face, part of the problem is creating the proper novel representation, and that can involve a lot of trial and error and exploration that hopefully tends to build up patterns representing partial or not quite right solutions that over time probabilistically increase the chance of synthesizing a better representation. The Novamente-OpenCog approach should be able to use both of these methods to find proper representations, although the system should be biased toward learning how to learn, whi
Re: [agi] Solution to "Grounding" problem
Dennis: >> 1) Grounding Problem (the *real* one, not the cheap substitute that everyone usually thinks of as the symbol grounding problem). Say, we are trying to build AGI for the purpose of running intelligent chat-bot. What would be the grounding problem in this case? Example: understanding: "Bush walks like a cowboy, doesn't he?" "Dennis Gorelik is v. handsome, no?" "You're getting v. emotional about this" - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=72028532-3f18a5
RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
> From: Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > But even with a current 32 bit PC with say 4G of Ram you should be able > to > build an AGI that would be a meaningful proof of concept. Lets say 3G > is > for representation, at say 60 bytes per atom (less than my usual 100 > bytes/atom because using 32bit pointers), that would allow you roughly > 50Million atoms. Over 1 million seconds (very roughly two weeks 24/7) > that > would allow an average of 50 atoms a second of representation. Of > course > your short term memory would record at a much higher frequency, and over > time more and more of your representation would go into models rather > than > episodic recording. But as this happened the vocabulary of patterns > would > grow and thus one atom, on average would be able to represent more. > But it seems to me such an AGI should be able to have meaningful world > knowledge about certain simple worlds, or certain simple subparts of the > world. For example, it should be able to have a pretty good model for > the > world of many early video games, such as pong and perhaps even pac-man > (Its > been so long since I've seen pac-man I don't know how complex it is, but > I > am assuming 50 million atoms, many of which, over time, would represent > complex patterns, would be able to catch most of the meaningful > generalizations of pac-man including its control mechanisms and the > results > they occur). Yes I can imagine this. But how much information would be in each 60 byte atom? Is it a pointer to a pattern stored on disk, or is it some sort of index, or is it a portion of a pattern, or is it a full pattern in a simple pacman type world? > Is I said in an earlier email, if we want AGI-at-Home to catch on it > would > be valuable to think of some sort of application that would either > inspire > through importance or entice by usefulness or amusement to cause people > let > it use a substantial part of their machine cycles. Well I can't elaborate publicly but I actually have this application running, still in pre-alpha mode... ahh.. but I have to sell this thing enabling me to buy R&D time to potentially convert it to a protoAGI...so no open source on that one :( BUT there are many other applications that could be the delivery mechanism. There are a number of ways to do it... one way was discussed earlier where you sell your PC resources. That is a good idea! > You mention an interest in intelligent indexing. Of course, > hierarchical > memory provides a fairly good from of intelligent indexing, in the sense > that it automatically promotes indexing through learned combinations of > indicies, and can be easily made to have probabilistic and importance > weights on its index links to more efficiency allocate index > activations. > > How does your intelligent indexing work? Well I can describe briefly, there are two basic types of virtual indexing, the actual disk based indexing I'm trying to still use a DBMS for that since they do it so well. First type is based on algebraic structure decomposition. I see everything as algebraic structure; an AGI computer can do the same, but way better. When everything is converted to algebraic structure things become very index friendly, in fact so friendly it looks like many things collapse or telescope down. The other type of indexing that I just started working on is CA based universal symbolistic generation/indexing. Algebraic structure is good for "skeltoidal" but you need some filler. CA's seem like they can do the trick. The thing with CA's is that they can be indexed based on uncalculated values. If a CA structure is so darn complex why waste the cycles calculating it? The CA's have infinite symbolistic properties that only a portion of them need be calculated (take up resources). Linking the algebraic structure indexing with CA indexing I'm trying to smooth out with group semiautomata, but a lot of magic still happens there :) So that's it without getting too into details. Very primitive still ... John > > -Original Message- > From: John G. Rose [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 2:17 PM > To: agi@v2.listbox.com > Subject: RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI > research] > > > From: Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > John, > > > > I am sure there is interesting stuff that can be done. It would be > > interesting just to see what sort of an agi could be made on a PC. > > Yes it would be interesting to see what could be done on a small cluster > of > modern server grade computers. I like to think about the newer Penryn > 45nm, > SSE4, quadcore quadproc servers with lots of FB DDR3 800mhz RAM running > 64 > bit OS (sorry I prefer coding in Windows) using standard gigabit > Ethernet > quad NICs, with solid state drives, and 15,000 RPM SAS for the slower > stuff, > and a take maybe 10 of these servers. There HAS to be enough resource > there > to get some small prototype going. > >
[agi] "How to tepresent things" problem
Richard, > 3) A way to represent things - and in particular, uncertainty - without > getting buried up to the eyeballs in (e.g.) temporal logics that nobody > believes in. Conceptually the way of representing things is described very well. It's Neural Network -- set of nodes (concepts), when every node can be connected with the set of other nodes. Every connection has it's own weight. Some nodes are connected with external devices. For example, one node can be connected with one word in text dictionary (that is an external device). Do you see any problems with such architecture? - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=71970053-638180
[agi] Solution to "Grounding" problem
Richard, > 1) Grounding Problem (the *real* one, not the cheap substitute that > everyone usually thinks of as the symbol grounding problem). Could you describe, what *real* grounding problem is? It would be nice to consider an example. Say, we are trying to build AGI for the purpose of running intelligent chat-bot. What would be the grounding problem in this case? - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=71959916-5302dd
[agi] None of you seem to be able ...
Mike, > Matt:: The whole point of using massive parallel computation is to do the > hard part of the problem. > The whole idea of massive parallel computation here, surely has to be wrong. > And yet none of you seem able to face this to my mind obvious truth. Who do you mean under "you" in this context? Do you think that everyone here agrees with Matt on everyting? :-) Quite the opposite is true -- almost every AI researcher has his own unique set of believes. Some believes are shared with one set of researchers -- other with another set. Some believes may be even unique. For example, I disagree with Matt's claim that AGI research needs special hardware with massive computational capabilities. However I agree with Matt on quite large set of other issues. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=71955617-a244b4
RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
John, As you say the hardware is just going to get better and better. In five years the PC's of most of the people on this list will probably have at least 8 cores and 16 gig of ram. But even with a current 32 bit PC with say 4G of Ram you should be able to build an AGI that would be a meaningful proof of concept. Lets say 3G is for representation, at say 60 bytes per atom (less than my usual 100 bytes/atom because using 32bit pointers), that would allow you roughly 50Million atoms. Over 1 million seconds (very roughly two weeks 24/7) that would allow an average of 50 atoms a second of representation. Of course your short term memory would record at a much higher frequency, and over time more and more of your representation would go into models rather than episodic recording. But as this happened the vocabulary of patterns would grow and thus one atom, on average would be able to represent more. But it seems to me such an AGI should be able to have meaningful world knowledge about certain simple worlds, or certain simple subparts of the world. For example, it should be able to have a pretty good model for the world of many early video games, such as pong and perhaps even pac-man (Its been so long since I've seen pac-man I don't know how complex it is, but I am assuming 50 million atoms, many of which, over time, would represent complex patterns, would be able to catch most of the meaningful generalizations of pac-man including its control mechanisms and the results they occur). Is I said in an earlier email, if we want AGI-at-Home to catch on it would be valuable to think of some sort of application that would either inspire through importance or entice by usefulness or amusement to cause people let it use a substantial part of their machine cycles. You mention an interest in intelligent indexing. Of course, hierarchical memory provides a fairly good from of intelligent indexing, in the sense that it automatically promotes indexing through learned combinations of indicies, and can be easily made to have probabilistic and importance weights on its index links to more efficiency allocate index activations. How does your intelligent indexing work? Ed Porter -Original Message- From: John G. Rose [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 2:17 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research] > From: Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > John, > > I am sure there is interesting stuff that can be done. It would be > interesting just to see what sort of an agi could be made on a PC. Yes it would be interesting to see what could be done on a small cluster of modern server grade computers. I like to think about the newer Penryn 45nm, SSE4, quadcore quadproc servers with lots of FB DDR3 800mhz RAM running 64 bit OS (sorry I prefer coding in Windows) using standard gigabit Ethernet quad NICs, with solid state drives, and 15,000 RPM SAS for the slower stuff, and a take maybe 10 of these servers. There HAS to be enough resource there to get some small prototype going. And look at next year's 8 core Nehalem procs coming out... Interserver messaging should make heavy use of IP multicasting. Then another messaging channel with the new USB 3.0... Supposedly USB 3.0 is 4.8 gigabits. > I would be interested in you Ideas for how to make a powerful AGI > without a > vast amount of interconnect. The major schemes I know about for > reducting > interconnect involve allocating what interconnect you have to the links > with > the highest probability or importance, varying those measures of > probability > and importance in a contest specific way, and being guided by prior > similar > experiences. Well I actually don't have the theory far enough to calculate interconnect metrics. But I try to minimize that through storage structure. What gets stored, how it gets stored, where it's stored, how systems are modeled, what a model is, what a system of models are, how systems of models are stored,.. don't store dupes, store diffs... mixing code and data, collapsing data into code, what is code and what is data? Basically a lot of intelligent indexing, like real intelligent indexing... I'm working on using CA's as universal symbolistic indexors and generators - IOW exploring a theory of uncalculated precalcs for computational complexity indexing using CA's in order to control uncertainty and manage complexity... Lots of addicting brain candy stuff... John - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=71938578-e534ed
RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
> From: Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > John, > > I am sure there is interesting stuff that can be done. It would be > interesting just to see what sort of an agi could be made on a PC. Yes it would be interesting to see what could be done on a small cluster of modern server grade computers. I like to think about the newer Penryn 45nm, SSE4, quadcore quadproc servers with lots of FB DDR3 800mhz RAM running 64 bit OS (sorry I prefer coding in Windows) using standard gigabit Ethernet quad NICs, with solid state drives, and 15,000 RPM SAS for the slower stuff, and a take maybe 10 of these servers. There HAS to be enough resource there to get some small prototype going. And look at next year's 8 core Nehalem procs coming out... Interserver messaging should make heavy use of IP multicasting. Then another messaging channel with the new USB 3.0... Supposedly USB 3.0 is 4.8 gigabits. > I would be interested in you Ideas for how to make a powerful AGI > without a > vast amount of interconnect. The major schemes I know about for > reducting > interconnect involve allocating what interconnect you have to the links > with > the highest probability or importance, varying those measures of > probability > and importance in a contest specific way, and being guided by prior > similar > experiences. Well I actually don't have the theory far enough to calculate interconnect metrics. But I try to minimize that through storage structure. What gets stored, how it gets stored, where it's stored, how systems are modeled, what a model is, what a system of models are, how systems of models are stored,.. don't store dupes, store diffs... mixing code and data, collapsing data into code, what is code and what is data? Basically a lot of intelligent indexing, like real intelligent indexing... I'm working on using CA's as universal symbolistic indexors and generators - IOW exploring a theory of uncalculated precalcs for computational complexity indexing using CA's in order to control uncertainty and manage complexity... Lots of addicting brain candy stuff... John - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=71921419-8e0002
RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
Richard, It is not clear how valuable your 25 years of hard won learning is if it causes you to dismiss valuable scientific work that seems to have eclipsed the importance of anything I or you have published as "trivial exercises in public relations" without giving any reason whatsoever for the particular dismissal. I welcome criticism in this forum provided it is well reasoned and without venom. But to dismiss a list of examples I give to support an argument as "trivial exercises in public relations" without any justification other than the fact that in general a certain numbers of published papers are inaccurate and/or overblown, is every bit as dishonest as calling someone a liar with regard to a particular statement based on nothing more than the knowledge some people are liars. In my past exchanges with you, sometimes your responses have been helpful. But I have noticed that although you are very quick to question me (and others), if I question you, rather than respond directly to my arguments you often don't respond to them at all -- such as your recent refusal to justify your allegation that my whole framework, presumably for understanding AGI, was wrong (a pretty insulting statement which should not be flung around without some justification). Or if you do respond to challenges, you often dismiss them as invalid without any substantial evidence, or you substantially change the subject, such as by focusing on one small part of my argument that I have not yet fully supported, while refusing to acknowledge the major support I have shown for the major thrust of my argument. When you argue like that there really is no purpose in continuing the conversation. What's the point. Under those circumstance your not dealing with someone who is likely to tell you anything of worth. Rather you are only likely to hear lame defensive arguments from somebody who is either incapable of properly defending or unwilling to properly defend their arguments, and, thus, is unlikely to communicate anything of value in the exchange. Your 25 years of experience doesn't mean squat about how much you truly understand AGI unless you are capable of being more intellectually honest, both with yourself and with others -- and unless you are capable of actually reasonably defending your understandings, head-on, against reasoned questioning and countering evidence. To dismiss counter evidence cited against your arguments as "trivial exercises in public relations" without any specific justification is not a reasonable defense, and the fact that you so often result to such intellectually dishonest tactics to defend your stated understandings relating to AGI really does call into question the quality of those understandings. In summary, don't go around attacking other people's statements unless you are willing to defend those attacks in an intellectually honest manner. Ed Porter P.S. This is my last response in this thread. You can have the last say if you so wish. -Original Message- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 9:58 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research] Ed Porter wrote: > >> RICHARD LOOSEMORE=> You have no idea of the context in which I made > that sweeping dismissal. > If you have enough experience of research in this area you will know > that it is filled with bandwagons, hype and publicity-seeking. Trivial > models are presented as if they are fabulous achievements when, in fact, > they are just engineered to look very impressive but actually solve an > easy problem. Have you had experience of such models? Have you been > around long enough to have seen something promoted as a great > breakthrough even though it strikes you as just a trivial exercise in > public relations, and then watch history unfold as the "great > breakthrough" leads to absolutely nothing at all, and is then > quietly shelved by its creator? There is a constant ebb and flow of > exaggeration and retreat, exaggeration and retreat. You are familiar > with this process, yes? > > ED PORTER=> Richard, the fact that a certain percent of theories and > demonstrations are false and/or misleading does not give you the right to > dismiss any theory or demonstration that counters your position in an > argument as > > "trivial exercises in public relations, designed to look > really impressive, and filled with hype designed to attract funding, which > actually accomplish very little" > > without at least giving some supporting argument for your dismissal. > Otherwise you could deny any aspect of scientific, mathematical, or > technological knowledge, no matter how sound, that proved inconvenient to > whatever argument you were making. > > There are people who argue in that dishonest fashion, but it is questionable > how much time one should spend conversing with them. Do you wan
[agi] A question for J Storrs Hall re SIGMA's
Josh, A pen-pal - an AI/robotics guy - has been waxing enthusiastic about your book. For him: "the basic idea in his book is to devise what is essentially the "basic computational unit - BCU" [this is my term, btw] that can be extended indefinitely horizontally [in modules], and vertically [in hierarchical levels] to larger and larger systems, in order to be able to handle general AI problems. The problem is to get past the roadblock of scalability that all previous AI systems have hit. He calls his BCU thingie a SIGMA = sigma servo, which is an IAM [interpolating associative memory] and a controller. You can spawn these things as needed to handle larger problems. SIGMAs higher in the hierarchy will deal with higher-level abstractions by taking outputs from SIGMAs lower down. You can see the influence of object oriented programming here, and also parallels to real brain organization. He also mentions how the SIGMA would perform the "analogical quadrature" operation of Hofstadter's Copycat system, which I'm not familiar with. I'm not sure how well this scheme would work, but thought I'd mention it to you" If it's not too much trouble - which it may be - perhaps you could expand a little on SIGMA's, with an example or two, their importance as you see it, and any links for further reading? Many thanks - and comments from anyone else also gratefully received. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=71829167-e4dda4
Re: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
Ed Porter wrote: RICHARD LOOSEMORE=> You have no idea of the context in which I made that sweeping dismissal. If you have enough experience of research in this area you will know that it is filled with bandwagons, hype and publicity-seeking. Trivial models are presented as if they are fabulous achievements when, in fact, they are just engineered to look very impressive but actually solve an easy problem. Have you had experience of such models? Have you been around long enough to have seen something promoted as a great breakthrough even though it strikes you as just a trivial exercise in public relations, and then watch history unfold as the "great breakthrough" leads to absolutely nothing at all, and is then quietly shelved by its creator? There is a constant ebb and flow of exaggeration and retreat, exaggeration and retreat. You are familiar with this process, yes? ED PORTER=> Richard, the fact that a certain percent of theories and demonstrations are false and/or misleading does not give you the right to dismiss any theory or demonstration that counters your position in an argument as "trivial exercises in public relations, designed to look really impressive, and filled with hype designed to attract funding, which actually accomplish very little" without at least giving some supporting argument for your dismissal. Otherwise you could deny any aspect of scientific, mathematical, or technological knowledge, no matter how sound, that proved inconvenient to whatever argument you were making. There are people who argue in that dishonest fashion, but it is questionable how much time one should spend conversing with them. Do you want to be such a person? The fact that one of the pieces of evidence you so rudely dismissed is a highly functional program that has been used by many other researchers, shows the blindness with which you dismiss the arguments of others. Ed, You are misunderstanding this situation. You repeatedly make extremely strong statements about the subject matter of AGI, but you do not have enough knowledge of the issues to understand the replies you get. Now, there is nothing wrong with not understanding, but what happens next is quite intolerable: you argue back as if your opinion was just as valid as the hard-won knowledge that someone else took 25 years to acquire. Not only that, but you go on to sprinkle your comments with instructions to that person to "open their mind" as if the were somehow being closed-minded. AND not only that, but when I display some impatience with this behavior and decline to write a massive essay to explain stuff that you should be learning for yourself, you decide to fling out accusations such as that i am arguing in a "dishonest" manner, or that I am dismissing an argument or theory just because it counters my position. If you look at the broad sweep of my postings on these lists you will notice that I spend much more time than I should writing out explanations when people say that they find something I wrote confusing or incomplete. When someone starts behaving rudely, however, I lose patience. What you are experiencing now is lost patience, that is all. Richard Loosemore - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=71815518-2fa3ba
RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
John, I am sure there is interesting stuff that can be done. It would be interesting just to see what sort of an agi could be made on a PC. I would be interested in you Ideas for how to make a powerful AGI without a vast amount of interconnect. The major schemes I know about for reducting interconnect involve allocating what interconnect you have to the links with the highest probability or importance, varying those measures of probability and importance in a contest specific way, and being guided by prior similar experiences. Ed Porter -Original Message- From: John G. Rose [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2007 1:42 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research] Ed, Well it'd be nice having a supercomputer but P2P is a poor man's supercomputer and beggars can't be choosy. Honestly the type of AGI that I have been formulating in my mind has not been at all closely related to simulating neural activity through orchestrating partial and mass activations at low frequencies and I had been avoiding those contagious cog sci memes on purpose. But your expose on the subject is quite interesting and I wasn't that aware that that is how things have been being done. But getting more than a few thousand P2P nodes is difficult. Going from 10K to 20K nodes and up, getting more difficult to the point of being prohibitively expensive to being impossible or extremely lucky. There are ways to do it but according to your calculations the supercomputer mayt be more of a wise choice as going out and scrounging up funding for that would be easier. Still though (besides working on my group theory heavy design) exploring the crafting and chiseling of an activation model you are talking about to the P2P network could be fruitful. I feel that through a number of up front and unfortunately complicated design changes/adaptations that the activation orchestrations could be improved thus bringing down the message rate requirements, reducing activation requirements, depths and frequencies, through a sort of computational resource topology consumption, self-organizational design molding. You do indicate some dynamic resource adaption and things like "intelligent inference guiding schemes" in your description but it doesn't seem like it melts enough into the resource space. But having a design be less static risks excessive complications... A major problem though with P2P and the activation methodology is that there are so many variances in the latencies and availability that serious synchronicity/simultaneity issues would exist that even more messaging might be required. Since there are so many variables in public P2P, empirical data also would be necessary to get a gander on feasibility. I still feel strongly that the way to do AGI P2P (with public P2P as core not augmental) is to understand the grid, and build the AGI design based on that and what it will be in a few years, instead of taking a design and morphing it to the resource space. That said, there are finite designs that will work so the number of choices is few. John _ From: Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 6:17 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research] John, You raised some good points. The problem is that the total number of messages/sec that can be received is relatively small. It is not as if you are dealing with a multidimensional grid or toroidal net in which spreading tree activation can take advantage of the fact that the total parallel bandwidth for regional messaging can be much greater than the x-sectional bandwidth. In a system where each node is a server class node with multiple processors and 32 or 64Gbytes of ram, much of which is allocable to representation, sending messages to local indices on each machine could fairly efficiently activate all occurrences of something in a 32 to 64 TByte knowledge base with a max of 1K internode messages, if there was only 1K nodes. But in a PC based P2P system the ratio of nodes to representation space is high and the total number of 128 byte messages/sec than can be received is limited to about 100, so neither methods of trying to increase number of patterns than can be activated with the given interconnect of the network buy you as much. Human level context sensitivity arises because a large number of things that can depend on a large number of things in the current context are made aware of those dependencies. This takes a lot of messaging, and I don't see how a P2P system where each node can only receive about 100 relatively short messages a second is going to make this possible unless you had a hug
RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
>RICHARD LOOSEMORE=> You have no idea of the context in which I made that sweeping dismissal. If you have enough experience of research in this area you will know that it is filled with bandwagons, hype and publicity-seeking. Trivial models are presented as if they are fabulous achievements when, in fact, they are just engineered to look very impressive but actually solve an easy problem. Have you had experience of such models? Have you been around long enough to have seen something promoted as a great breakthrough even though it strikes you as just a trivial exercise in public relations, and then watch history unfold as the "great breakthrough" leads to absolutely nothing at all, and is then quietly shelved by its creator? There is a constant ebb and flow of exaggeration and retreat, exaggeration and retreat. You are familiar with this process, yes? ED PORTER=> Richard, the fact that a certain percent of theories and demonstrations are false and/or misleading does not give you the right to dismiss any theory or demonstration that counters your position in an argument as "trivial exercises in public relations, designed to look really impressive, and filled with hype designed to attract funding, which actually accomplish very little" without at least giving some supporting argument for your dismissal. Otherwise you could deny any aspect of scientific, mathematical, or technological knowledge, no matter how sound, that proved inconvenient to whatever argument you were making. There are people who argue in that dishonest fashion, but it is questionable how much time one should spend conversing with them. Do you want to be such a person? The fact that one of the pieces of evidence you so rudely dismissed is a highly functional program that has been used by many other researchers, shows the blindness with which you dismiss the arguments of others. >RICHARD LOOSEMORE=>This entire discussion baffles me. Does it matter at all to you that I have been working in this field for decades? Would you go up to someone at your local university and tell them how to do their job? Would you listen to what they had to say about issues that arise in their field of expertise, or would you consider your own opinion entirely equal to theirs, with only a tiny fraction of their experience? ED PORTER=> No mater how many years you have been studying something, if your argumentative and intellectual approach is to dismiss evidence contrary to your position on clearly false bases, as you did with you dismissal of my evidence with your above quoted insult, a serious question is raised as to whether you are worth listening to or conversing with. ED PORTER -Original Message- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 10:47 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research] Ed Porter wrote: > > >I'm sorry, but this is not addressing the actual > issues involved. > > You are implicitly assuming a certain framework for solving the problem > of representing knowledge ... and then all your discussion is about > whether or not it is feasible to implement that framework (to overcome > various issues to do with searches that have to be done within that > framework). > > But I am not challenging the implementation issues, I am challenging the > viability of the framework itself. > > > ED PORTER=> So what is wrong with my framework? What is wrong with a > system of recording patterns, and a method for developing compositions and > generalities from those patterns, in multiple hierarchical levels, and for > indicating the probabilities of certain patterns given certain other pattern > etc? > > I know it doesn't genuflect before the alter of complexity. But what is > wrong with the framework other than the fact that it is at a high level and > thus does not explain every little detail of how to actually make an AGI > work? > > > >> RICHARD LOOSEMORE=> These models you are talking about are trivial > exercises in public > relations, designed to look really impressive, and filled with hype > designed to attract funding, which actually accomplish very little. > > Please, Ed, don't do this to me. Please don't try to imply that I need > to open my mind any more. Th implication seems to be that I do not > understand the issues in enough depth, and need to do some more work to > understand you points. I can assure you this is not the case. > > > > ED PORTER=> Shastri's Shruiti is a major piece of work. Although it is > a highly simplified system, for its degree of simplification it is amazingly > powerful. It has been very helpful to my thinking about AGI. Please give > me some excuse for calling it "trivial exercise in public relations." I > certainly have not published anything as important. Have you? > > The same for Mike Col
RE: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research]
Bryan, The name grub sounds familiar. That is probably it. Ed -Original Message- From: Bryan Bishop [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 10:47 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research] On Thursday 29 November 2007, Ed Porter wrote: > Somebody (I think it was David Hart) told me there is a shareware > distributed web crawler already available, but I don't know the > details, such as how good or fast it is. http://grub.org/ Previous owner went by the name of 'kordless'. I found him on Slashdot. - Bryan - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=71801708-39700e
Re: [agi] "AGI" first mention on NPR!
Joshua Fox wrote: I actually thought that that was one of the more positive pieces I've found. Listeners may come out with a bad (mis-)impression, but NPR did nothing to abet that. Agreed. It is just that the baseline is so low that I suppose we feel gratified when they only miss the point and insert just a few bogeymen. Richard Loosemore - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=71799027-9fb069
Re: [agi] RE:P2P and/or communal AGI development [WAS Hacker intelligence level...]
On Dec 3, 2007 11:03 PM, Bryan Bishop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Monday 03 December 2007, Mike Dougherty wrote: > Another method of doing search agents, in the mean time, might be to > take neural tissue samples (or simple scanning of the brain) and try to > simulate a patch of neurons via computers so that when the simulated > neurons send good signals, the search agent knows that there has been a > good match that excites the neurons, and then tells the wetware human > what has been found. The problem that immediately comes to mind is that > neurons for such searching are probably somewhere deep in the > prefrontal cortex ... does anybody have any references to studies done > with fMRI on people forming Google queries? ...and a few dozen brains from which we can extract the useful parts? :) - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=71797586-08a419
Re: [agi] "AGI" first mention on NPR!
I actually thought that that was one of the more positive pieces I've found. Listeners may come out with a bad (mis-)impression, but NPR did nothing to abet that. Joshua 2007/12/3, Bob Mottram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Perhaps a good word of warning is that it will be really easy to > satirise/lampoon/misrepresent AGI and its proponents until such time > as one is actually created. > > > > > On 03/12/2007, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Yesterday I heard the phrase "Artificial General Intelligence" on the > > radio for the first time ever: > > > > http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16816185 > > > > > > Weekend Edition Sunday, December 2, 2007 · The idea of what Artificial > > Intelligence should be has evolved over the past 50 years — from solving > > puzzles and playing chess to emulating the abilities of a child: > > walking, recognizing objects. A recent conference brought together those > > who invent the future. > > > > A recent "Singularity Summit" brought together those who imagine — and > > invent — the future. > > > > > > > > Unfortunately, most of the report was filled with sound bites that were, > > to my mind, ridiculously naive extrapolations and speculations, like: > > > > Paul Saffo: "The optimistic scenario is they will treat us like > pets" > > > > most of which were calculated to horrify the audience. > > > > > > > > > > > > Richard Loosemore > > > > - > > This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email > > To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: > > http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; > > > > - > This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email > To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: > http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=71796167-f4551c
Re: [agi] RE:P2P and/or communal AGI development [WAS Hacker intelligence level...]
On Dec 3, 2007 7:19 PM, Ed Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Perhaps one aspect of the AGI-at-home project would be to develop a good > generalized architecture for wedding various classes of narrow AI and AGI in > such a learning environment. Yes, I think this is the key aspect, the meta-problem whose solution would enable piecemeal solutions to the other problems: Create an architecture within which procedural knowledge can flow like water, the way text does on the Web. It would also need to scale well across a slow, unreliable network the way the Web does; once that's in hand, P2P [EMAIL PROTECTED] follows fairly naturally. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=71759601-2c1ca5
