Re: [agi] a fuzzy reasoning problem
Your inference trajectory assumes that cybersex and STD are probabilistically independent within sex but this is not the case. PLN would make this error using the independence-assumption-based term logic deduction rule; but in practice this rule is supposed to be overridden in cases of known dependencies. ben On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 10:04 AM, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Here is an example of a problematic inference: 1. Mary has cybersex with many different partners 2. Cybersex is a kind of sex 3. Therefore, Mary has many sex partners 4. Having many sex partners - high chance of getting STDs 5. Therefore, Mary has a high chance of STDs What's wrong with this argument? It seems that a general rule is involved in step 4, and that rule can be refined with some qualifications (ie, it does not apply to all kinds of sex). But the question is, how can an AGI detect that an exception to a general rule has occurred? Or, do we need to explicitly state the exceptions to every rule? Thanks for any comments! YKY --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome - Dr Samuel Johnson --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=108809214-a0d121 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] a fuzzy reasoning problem
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 11:10 AM, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 7/28/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Your inference trajectory assumes that cybersex and STD are probabilistically independent within sex but this is not the case. We only know that: P(sex | cybersex) = high P(STD | sex) = high If we're also given that P(STD | cybersex) = 0 then the question is moot -- it is already answered. It is a problem because we're not given the 3rd piece of information... Yes, if there is no other background knowledge that is relevant, then this error is unavoidable. If however indirect background knowledge is available, such as the fact that cyber- often refers to things occurring online, then a reasoning engine may be able to incorporate this to guess that P(STD | cybersex) is small, which will then (if it is a confident conclusion) override the erroneous independence-assumption-based inference you cite. PLN would make this error using the independence-assumption-based term logic deduction rule; but in practice this rule is supposed to be overridden in cases of known dependencies. Why don't PLN use Pei-Wang-style confidence? PLN uses confidence values within its truth values, with a different underlying semantics and math than NARS; but that doesn't help much with the above problem... There is a confidence-penalty used in PLN whenever an independence assumption is invoked, but it's not that severe of a penalty -- and nor should it be. When additional evidence is not available, making an independence assumption is appropriate, even though sometimes it will turn out to be wrong. Ben --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=108809214-a0d121 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] a fuzzy reasoning problem
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 12:14 PM, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 7/28/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: PLN uses confidence values within its truth values, with a different underlying semantics and math than NARS; but that doesn't help much with the above problem... There is a confidence-penalty used in PLN whenever an independence assumption is invoked, but it's not that severe of a penalty -- and nor should it be. When additional evidence is not available, making an independence assumption is appropriate, even though sometimes it will turn out to be wrong. Even if you assume independence, you'll have 2 distinct paths leading to contradicting conclusions. So you need some way to pick a winner. yes, in PLN we use a similar mechanism to NARS there, called the Rule of Choice I think Pei Wang's definition of confidence is good and can solve this example. I'll check out your book when it's out =) YKY --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome - Dr Samuel Johnson --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=108809214-a0d121 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] need some help with loopy Bayes net
YKY, PLN, like NARS, uses inference trails Although we have tried omitting them, and found interesting results: errors do propagate, but not boundlessly, and network truth values are still meaningful Loopy Bayes nets basically just live with the circularity and rely on math properties of the Bayes net propagation rules to remove the possibility of error. Nice stuff, but it only works under fairly special assumptions. Traditional Bayes nets just assume a hierarchical structure and ignore the conditional probs not in accordance w/ the hierarchy, getting at them only indirectly via the ones in the hierarchy. This is why structure learning is so important in Bayes nets. -- Ben On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 4:10 AM, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm considering nonmonotonic reasoning using Bayes net, and got stuck. There is an example on p483 of J Pearl's 1988 book PRIIS: Given: birds can fly penguins are birds penguins cannot fly The desiderata is to conclude that penguins are birds, but penguins cannot fly. Pearl translates the KB to: P(f | b) = high P(f | p) = low P(b | p) = high where high and low means arbitrarily close to 1 and 0, respectively. If you draw this on paper you'll see a triangular loop. Then Pearl continues to deduce: Conditioning P(f | p) on both b and ~b, P(f | p) = P(f | p,b) P(b | p) + P(f | p,~b) [1-P(b | p)] P(f | p,b) P(b | p) Thus P(f | p,b) P(f | p) / P(b | p) which is close to 0. Thus Pearl concludes that given penguin and bird, fly is not true. But I found something wrong here. It seems that the Bayes net is loopy and we can conclude that fly given penguin and bird can be either 0 or 1. (The loop is somewhat symmetric). Ben, do you have a similar problem dealing with nonmonotonicity using probabilistic networks? YKY --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome - Dr Samuel Johnson --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] WHAT SORT OF HARDWARE $33K AND $850K BUYS TODAY FOR USE IN AGI
But, we don't need to be able to predict the thoughts of an AGI system in detail, to be able to architect an AGI system that has thoughts... I agree that predicting the thoughts of an AGI system in detail is going to be pragmatically impossible ... but I don't agree that predicting **which** AGI designs can lead to the emergent properties corresponding to general intelligence, is pragmatically impossible to do in an analytical and rational way ... Similarly, I could engineer an artificial weather system displaying hurricanes, whirlpools, or whatever phenomena you ask me for -- based on my general understanding of the Navier-stokes equation. Even though I could not, then, predict the specific dynamics of those hurricanes, whirlpools, etc. We lack the equivalent of the Navier-stokes equation for thoughts. But we can still arrive at reasonable analytic understandings of appropriately constrained and formalised AGI designs, with the power to achieve general intelligence... ben g On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 1:55 AM, Terren Suydam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Ben, I don't think the flaw you have identified matters to the main thrust of Richard's argument - and if you haven't summarized Richard's position precisely, you have summarized mine. :-] You're saying the flaw in that position is that prediction of complex networks might merely be a matter of computational difficulty, rather than fundamentally intractability. But any formally defined complex system is going to be computable in principle. We can always predict such a system with infinite computing power. That doesn't make it tractable, or open to understanding, because obviously real understanding can't be dependent infinite computing power. The question of fundamental intractability comes down to the degree with which we can make predictions about the global level from the local. And let's hope there's progress to be made there because each discovery will make our lives easier, to those of us who would try to understand something like the brain or the body or even just the cell. Or even just folding proteins! But it seems pretty obvious to me anyway that we will never be able to predict the weather with any precision without doing an awful lot of computation. And what is our mind but the weather in our brains? Terren --- On Sun, 6/29/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [agi] WHAT SORT OF HARDWARE $33K AND $850K BUYS TODAY FOR USE IN AGI To: agi@v2.listbox.com Date: Sunday, June 29, 2008, 10:44 PM Richard, I think that it would be possible to formalize your complex systems argument mathematically, but I don't have time to do so right now. Or, then again . perhaps I am wrong: maybe you really *cannot* understand anything except math? It's not the case that I can only understand math -- however, I have a lot of respect for the power of math to clarify disagreements. Without math, arguments often proceed in a confused way because different people are defining terms differently,a and don't realize it. But, I agree math is not the only kind of rigor. I would be happy with a very careful, systematic exposition of your argument along the lines of Spinoza or the early Wittgenstein. Their arguments were not mathematical, but were very rigorous and precisely drawn -- not slippery. Perhaps you have no idea what the actual argument is, and that has been the problem all along? I notice that you avoided answering my request that you summarize your argument against the complex systems problem ... perhaps you are just confused about what the argument actually is, and have been confused right from the beginning? In a nutshell, it seems you are arguing that general intelligence is fundamentally founded on emergent properties of complex systems, and that it's not possible for us to figure out analytically how these emergent properties emerge from the lower-level structures and dynamics of the complex systems involved. Evolution, you suggest, figured out some complex systems that give rise to the appropriate emergent properties to produce general intelligence. But evolution did not do this figuring-out in an analytical way, rather via its own special sort of directed trial and error. You suggest that to create a generally intelligent system, we should create a software framework that makes it very easy to experiment with different sorts of complex systems, so that we can then figure out (via some combination of experiment, analysis, intuition, theory, etc.) how to create a complex system that gives rise to the emergent properties associated with general intelligence. I'm sure the above is not exactly how you'd phrase your argument -- and it doesn't capture all the nuances -- but I was trying to give a compact and approximate formulation. If you'd like to give
Re: [agi] WHAT SORT OF HARDWARE $33K AND $850K BUYS TODAY FOR USE IN AGI
I agree that all designed systems have limitations, but I also suggest that all evolved systems have limitations. This is just the no free lunch theorem -- in order to perform better than random search at certain optimization tasks, a system needs to have some biases built in, and these biases will cause it to work WORSE than random search on some other optimization tasks. No AGI based on finite resources will ever be **truly** general, be it an engineered or evolved systems Evolved systems are far from being beyond running into dead ends ... their adaptability is far from infinite ... the evolutionary process itself may be endlessly creative, but in that sense so may be the self-modifying process of an engineered AGI ... -- Ben G On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 3:17 AM, Terren Suydam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- On Mon, 6/30/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: but I don't agree that predicting **which** AGI designs can lead to the emergent properties corresponding to general intelligence, is pragmatically impossible to do in an analytical and rational way ... OK, I grant you that you may be able to do that. I believe that we can be extremely clever in this regard. An example of that is an implementation of a Turing Machine within the Game of Life: http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm What a beautiful construction. But it's completely contrived. What you're suggesting is equivalent, because your design is contrived by your own intelligence. [I understand that within the Novamente idea is room for non-deterministic (for practical purposes) behavior, so it doesn't suffer from the usual complexity-inspired criticisms of purely logical systems.] But whatever achievement you make, it's just one particular design that may prove effective in some set of domains. And there's the rub - the fact that your design is at least partially static will limit its applicability in some set of domains. I make this argument more completely here: http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/news/design-bad-or-why-artificial-intelligence-needs-artificial-life or http://tinyurl.com/3coavb If you design a robot, you limit its degrees of freedom. And there will be environments it cannot get around in. By contrast, if you have a design that is capable of changing itself (even if that means from generation to generation), then creative configurations can be discovered. The same basic idea works in the mental arena as well. If you specify the mental machinery, there will be environments it cannot get around in, so to speak. There will be important ways in which it is unable to adapt. You are limiting your design by your own intelligence, which though considerable, is no match for the creativity manifest in a single biological cell. Terren --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome - Dr Samuel Johnson --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] WHAT SORT OF HARDWARE $33K AND $850K BUYS TODAY FOR USE IN AGI
I wrote a book about the emergence of spontaneous creativity from underlying complex dynamics. It was published in 1997 with the title From Complexity to Creativity. Some of the material is dated but I still believe the basic ideas make sense. Some of the main ideas were reviewed in The Hidden Pattern (2006). I don't have time to review the ideas right now (I'm in an airport during a flight change doing a quick email check) but suffice to say that I did put a lot of thought and analysis into how spontaneous creativity emerges from complex cognitive systems. So have others. It is not a total mystery, as mysterious as the experience can seem subjectively. -- Ben G On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 1:32 PM, Terren Suydam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben, I agree, an evolved design has limits too, but the key difference between a contrived design and one that is allowed to evolve is that the evolved critter's intelligence is grounded in the context of its own 'experience', whereas the contrived one's intelligence is grounded in the experience of its creator, and subject to the limitations built into that conception of intelligence. For example, we really have no idea how we arrive at spontaneous insights (in the shower, for example). A chess master suddenly sees the game-winning move. We can be fairly certain that often, these insights are not the product of logical analysis. So if our conception of intelligence fails to explain these important aspects, our designs based on those conceptions will fail to exhibit them. An evolved intelligence, on the other hand, is not limited in this way, and has the potential to exhibit intelligence in ways we're not capable of comprehending. [btw, I'm using the scare quotes around the word experience as it applies to AGI because it's a controversial word and I hope to convey the basic idea about experience without getting into technical details about it. I can get into that, if anyone thinks it necessary, just didn't want to get bogged down.] Furthermore, there are deeper epistemological issues with the difference between design and self-organization that get into the notion of autonomy as well (i.e., designs lack autonomy to the degree they are specified), but I'll save that for when I feel like putting everyone to sleep :-] Terren PS. As an aside, I believe spontaneous insight is likely to be an example of self-organized criticality, which is a description of the behavior of earthquakes, avalanches, and the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution. Which is to say, a sudden insight is like an avalanche of mental transformations, triggered by some minor event but the result of a build-up of dynamic tension. Self-organized criticality is explained by the late Per Bak in _How Nature Works_, a short, excellent read and an brilliant example of scientific and mathematical progress in the realm of complexity. --- On Mon, 6/30/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I agree that all designed systems have limitations, but I also suggest that all evolved systems have limitations. This is just the no free lunch theorem -- in order to perform better than random search at certain optimization tasks, a system needs to have some biases built in, and these biases will cause it to work WORSE than random search on some other optimization tasks. No AGI based on finite resources will ever be **truly** general, be it an engineered or evolved systems Evolved systems are far from being beyond running into dead ends ... their adaptability is far from infinite ... the evolutionary process itself may be endlessly creative, but in that sense so may be the self-modifying process of an engineered AGI ... -- Ben G On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 3:17 AM, Terren Suydam [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- On Mon, 6/30/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: but I don't agree that predicting **which** AGI designs can lead to the emergent properties corresponding to general intelligence, is pragmatically impossible to do in an analytical and rational way ... OK, I grant you that you may be able to do that. I believe that we can be extremely clever in this regard. An example of that is an implementation of a Turing Machine within the Game of Life: http://rendell-attic.org/gol/tm.htm What a beautiful construction. But it's completely contrived. What you're suggesting is equivalent, because your design is contrived by your own intelligence. [I understand that within the Novamente idea is room for non-deterministic (for practical purposes) behavior, so it doesn't suffer from the usual complexity-inspired criticisms of purely logical systems.] But whatever achievement you make, it's just one particular design that may prove effective in some set of domains. And there's the rub - the fact that your design is at least partially static will limit its applicability in some set of domains. I
Re: [agi] WHAT SORT OF HARDWARE $33K AND $850K BUYS TODAY FOR USE IN AGI
The argument itself is extremely rigorous: on all the occasions on which someone has disputed the rigorousness of the argument, they have either addressed some other issue entirely or they have just waved their hands without showing any sign of understanding the argument, and then said ... it's not rigorous!. It is almost comical to go back over the various responses to the argument: not only do people go flying off in all sorts of bizarre directions, but they also get quite strenuous about it at the same time. Richard, if your argument is so rigorous, why don't you do this: present a brief, mathematical formalization of your argument, defining all terms precisely and carrying out all inference steps exactly, at the level of a textbook mathematical proof. I'll be on vacation for the next 2 weeks w/limited and infrequent email access, so I'll look out for this when I return. If you present your argument this way, then you can rest assured I will understand it, as I'm capable to understand math; then, our arguments can be more neatly directed ... toward the appropriateness of your formal definitions and assumptions... -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] WHAT SORT OF HARDWARE $33K AND $850K BUYS TODAY FOR USE IN AGI
Richard, I think that it would be possible to formalize your complex systems argument mathematically, but I don't have time to do so right now. Or, then again . perhaps I am wrong: maybe you really *cannot* understand anything except math? It's not the case that I can only understand math -- however, I have a lot of respect for the power of math to clarify disagreements. Without math, arguments often proceed in a confused way because different people are defining terms differently,a and don't realize it. But, I agree math is not the only kind of rigor. I would be happy with a very careful, systematic exposition of your argument along the lines of Spinoza or the early Wittgenstein. Their arguments were not mathematical, but were very rigorous and precisely drawn -- not slippery. Perhaps you have no idea what the actual argument is, and that has been the problem all along? I notice that you avoided answering my request that you summarize your argument against the complex systems problem ... perhaps you are just confused about what the argument actually is, and have been confused right from the beginning? In a nutshell, it seems you are arguing that general intelligence is fundamentally founded on emergent properties of complex systems, and that it's not possible for us to figure out analytically how these emergent properties emerge from the lower-level structures and dynamics of the complex systems involved. Evolution, you suggest, figured out some complex systems that give rise to the appropriate emergent properties to produce general intelligence. But evolution did not do this figuring-out in an analytical way, rather via its own special sort of directed trial and error. You suggest that to create a generally intelligent system, we should create a software framework that makes it very easy to experiment with different sorts of complex systems, so that we can then figure out (via some combination of experiment, analysis, intuition, theory, etc.) how to create a complex system that gives rise to the emergent properties associated with general intelligence. I'm sure the above is not exactly how you'd phrase your argument -- and it doesn't capture all the nuances -- but I was trying to give a compact and approximate formulation. If you'd like to give an alternative, equally compact formulation, that would be great. I think the flaw of your argument lies in your definition of complexity, and that this would be revealed if you formalized your argument more fully. I think you define complexity as a kind of fundamental irreducibility that the human brain does not possess, and that engineered AGI systems need not possess. I think that real systems display complexity which makes it **computationally difficult** to explain their emergent properties in terms of their lower-level structures and dynamics, but not as fundamentally intractable as you presume. But because you don't formalize your notion of complexity adequately, it's not possible to engage you in rational argumentation regarding the deep flaw at the center of your argument. However, I cannot prove rigorously that the brain is NOT complex in the overly strong sense you allude it is ... and nor can I prove rigorously that a design like Novamente Cognition Engine or OpenCog Prime will give rise to the emergent properties associated with general intelligence. So, in this sense, I don't have a rigorous refutation of your argument, and nor would I if you rigorously formalized your argument. However, I think a rigorous formulation of your argument would make it apparent to nearly everyone reading it that your definition of complexity is unreasonably strong. -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] WHAT SORT OF HARDWARE $33K AND $850K BUYS TODAY FOR USE IN AGI
On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ed Porter wrote: I do not claim the software architecture for AGI has been totally solved. But I believe that enough good AGI approaches exist (and I think Novamente is one) that when powerful hardware available to more people we will be able to relatively quickly get systems up and running that demonstrate the parts of the problems we have solved. And that will provide valuable insights and test beds for solving the parts of the problem that we have not yet solved. You are not getting my point. What you just said was EXACTLY what was said in 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973 ..2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 .. And every time it was said, the same justification for the claim was given: I just have this belief that it will work. It is not the case that the reason I believe Novamente/OpenCog can work for AGI is just a belief Nor, however, is the reason an argument that can be summarized in an email. I'm setting out on a 2-week vacation on Monday (June 30 - July 13), on which I'll be pretty much without email (in the wilds of Alaska ;-) ... so it's a bad time for me to get involved in deep discussions But I hope to release some docs on OpenCog Prime later this summer, which will disclose a bit more of my reasons for thinking the approach can succeed. Ed has seen much of this material before, but most others on this list have not... There is a broad range of qualities-of-justification, between a mere belief on the one hand, and a rigorous proof on the other. -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] WHAT SORT OF HARDWARE $33K AND $850K BUYS TODAY FOR USE IN AGI
Richard, So long as the general response to the complex systems problem is not This could be a serious issue, let's put our heads together to investigate it, but My gut feeling is that this is just not going to be a problem, or Quit rocking the boat!, you can bet that nobody really wants to ask any questions about whether the approaches are correct, they just want to be left alone to get on with their approaches. Both Ed Porter and myself have given serious thought to the complex systems problem as you call it, and have discussed it with you at length. I also read the only formal paper you sent me dealing with it (albeit somewhat indirectly) and also your various online discourses on the topic. Ed and I don't agree with you on the topic, but not because of lack of thinking or attention. Your argument FOR the existence of a complex systems problem with Novamente or OpenCog, is not any more rigorous than our argument AGAINST it. Similarly, I have no rigorous argument that Novamente and OpenCog won't fail because of the lack of a soul. I can't prove this formally -- and even if I did, those who believe a soul is necessary for AI could always dispute the mathematical assumptions of my proof. And those who do claim a soul is necessary, have no rigorous arguments in their favor, except ones based transparently on assumptions I reject... And so it goes... Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Pearls Before Swine...
Steve, Those of us w/ experience in the field have heard the objections you and Tintner are making hundreds or thousands of times before. We have already processed the arguments you're making and found them wanting. And we have already gotten tired of arguing those same points, back in our undergrad or grad school days (or analogous time periods for those who didn't get PhD's...). The points you guys are making are not as original as you seem to think. And the reason we don't take time to argue against them in detail is that it's boring and we're busy. These points have already been extensively argued by others in the published literature over the past few decades; but I also don't want to take the time to dig up citations for you I'm not saying that I have an argument in favor of my approach, that would convince a skeptic. I know I don't. The only argument that will convince a skeptic is to complete a functional human-level AGI. And even that won't be enough for some skeptics. (Maybe a fully rigorous formal theory of how to create an AGI with a certain intelligence level given specific resource constraints would convince some skeptics, but not many I suppose -- discussions would devolve into quibbles over the definition of intelligence, and other particular mathematical assumptions of the sort that any formal analysis must make.) OK. Back to work on the OpenCog Prime documentation, which IMO is a better use of my time than endlessly repeating the arguments from philosophy-of-mind and cog-sci class on an email list ;-) Sorry if my tone seems obnoxious, but I didn't find your description of those of us working on actual AI systems as having a herd mentality very appealing. The truth is, one of the big problems in the field is that nearly everyone working on a concrete AI system has **their own** particular idea of how to do it, and wants to proceed independently rather than compromising with others on various design points. It's hardly a herd mentality -- the different systems out there vary wildly in many respects. -- Ben G On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 3:28 PM, Steve Richfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mike Tintner, et al, After failing to get ANY response to what I thought was an important point (Paradigm Shifting regarding Consciousness) I went back through my AGI inbox to see what other postings by others weren't getting any responses. Mike Tintner was way ahead of me in no-response postings. A quick scan showed that these also tended to address high-level issues that challenge the contemporary herd mentality. In short, most people on this list appear to be interested only in HOW to straight-line program an AGI (with the implicit assumption that we operate anything at all like we appear to operate), but not in WHAT to program, and most especially not in any apparent insurmountable barriers to successful open-ended capabilities, where attention would seem to be crucial to ultimate success. Anyone who has been in high-tech for a few years KNOWS that success can come only after you fully understand what you must overcome to succeed. Hence, based on my own past personal experiences and present observations here, present efforts here would seem to be doomed to fail - for personal if not for technological reasons. Normally I would simply dismiss this as rookie error, but I know that at least some of the people on this list have been around as long as I have been, and hence they certainly should know better since they have doubtless seen many other exuberant rookies fall into similar swamps of programming complex systems without adequate analysis. Hey you guys with some gray hair and/or bald spots, WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU THINKING? Steve Richfield agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Pearls Before Swine...
The truth is, one of the big problems in the field is that nearly everyone working on a concrete AI system has **their own** particular idea of how to do it, and wants to proceed independently rather than compromising with others on various design points. It's hardly a herd mentality -- the different systems out there vary wildly in many respects. -- Ben G To analogize to another field, in his book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, Lee Smolin identifies three current approaches to quantum gravity: 1-- string theory 2-- loop quantum gravity 3-- miscellaneous mathematical approaches based on various odd formalisms and ideas I think that AGI, right now, could also be analyzed as having four main approaches 1-- logic-based ... including a host of different logic formalisms 2-- neural net/ brain simulation based ... including some biologically quasi-realistic systems and some systems that are more formal and abstract 3-- integrative ... which itself is a very broad category with a lot of heterogeneity ... including e.g. systems composed of wholly distinct black boxes versus systems that have intricate real-time feedbacks between different components' innards 4-- miscellaneous ... evolutionary learning, etc. etc. It's hardly a herd, it's more of a chaos ;-p -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Pearls Before Swine...
While the details vary widely, Mike and I were addressing the very concept of writing code to perform functions (e.g. thinking) that apparently develop on their own as emergent properties, and in the process foreclosing on many opportunities, e.g. developing in variant ways to address problems in new paradigms. Direct programming would seem to lead to lesser rather than greater intelligence. Am I correct that this is indeed a central thread in all of the different systems that you had in mind? Different AGI systems rely on emergence to varying extents ... No one knows which brain functions rely on emergence to which extents ... we're still puzzling this out even in relatively well-understood brain regions like visual cortex. (Feedforward connections in visual cortex are sorta well understood, but feedback connections, which is where emergence might play in, are very poorly understood as yet.) For instance, the presence of a hierarchy of progressively more abstract feature detectors in visual cortex clearly does NOT emerge in a strong sense... it may emerge during fetal and early-childhood neural self-organization, but in a way that is carefully genetically preprogrammed. But, the neural structures that carry out object-recognition may well emerge as a result of complex nonlinear dynamics involving learning in both the feedback and feedforward connections... so my point is, the brain is a mix of wired-in and emergent stuff, and we don't know where the boundary lies... as with vision, similarly e.g. for language understanding. Read Jackendoff's book Jackendoff, Ray (2002). Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. and the multi-author book mitpress.mit.edu/book-home.tcl?isbn=0262050528 for thoughtful treatments of the subtle relations btw programmed-in and learned aspects of human intelligence ... much of the discussion pertains implicitly to emergence too, though they don't use that word much ... because emergence is key to learning... In the Novamente design we've made some particular choices about what to build in versus what to allow to emerge. But, for sure, the notion of emergence from complex self-organizing dynamics has been a key part of our thinking in making the design... Neural net AGI approaches tend to leave more to emerge, whereas logic based approaches tend to leave less... but that's just a broad generalization In short there is a huge spectrum of choices in the AGi field regarding what to build in versus what to allow to emerge ... not a herd mentality at all... -- Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Pearls Before Swine...
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome - Dr Samuel Johnson -- Ben G On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 7:41 AM, Jim Bromer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Original Message From: Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] My approach is: first you look at the problem of crossing domains in its own terms - work out an ideal way to solve it - which will probably be close to the way the mind does solve it - then think about how to implement your solution technically... -- Instead of talking about what you would do, do it. I mean, work out your ideal way to solve the questions of the mind and share it with us after you've have found some interesting results. Jim Bromer agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Ideological Interactions Need to be Studied
Regarding how much of the complexity of real neurons we would need to put into a computational neural net model in order to make a model displaying a realistic emulation of neural behavior -- the truth is we JUST DON'T KNOW Izhikevich for instance http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/izhikevich/human_brain_simulation/Blue_Brain.htm gets more detailed than standard formal neural net models, but is it detailed enough? We really don't know. I like his work for its use of nonlinear dynamics and emergence though. Until we understand the brain better, we can only speculate about what level of detail is needed... This is part of the reason why I'm not working on a closely brain-based AGI approach... I find neuroscience important and fascinating, and I try to keep up with the most relevant parts of the field, but I don't think it's mature enough to really usefully guide AGI development yet. -- Ben G On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 6:15 AM, Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 2:03 AM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: No, this is not a variant of the analog is fundamentally different from digital category. Each of the things that I mentioned could be implemented digitally -- however, they are entirely new classes of things to consider and require a lot more data and processing. I find it very interesting that you can't even answer a straight yes-or-no question without resorting to obscuring BS and inventing strawmen. Are you actually claiming that neurotransmitter levels are irrelevant or are you implementing them? Are you claiming that leakage along the axons and dendrites is irrelevant or are you modeling it? Mark, I think the point is that there should be a simple model that produces the same capabilities as a neuron (or brain). Most of these biological particulars are important for biological brain, but it should be possible to engineer them away on computational substrate when we have a high-level model of what they are actually for. -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome - Dr Samuel Johnson --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Ideological Interactions Need to be Studied
But enough of that, let's get to the meat of it: Are you arguing that the function that is a neuron is not an elementary operator for whatever computational model describes the brain? We don't know which function that describes a neuron we need to use -- are Izhikevich's nonlinear dynamics models of ion channels good enough, or do we need to go deeper? Also we don't know about the importance of extracellular charge diffusion... computation/memory happening in the glial network ... etc. ... phenomena which suggest that the neuron-functions are not the only elementary operators at play in brain dynamics... Lots of fun stuff still to be learned ;-) ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] OpenCog's logic compared to FOL?
One thing I don't get, YKY, is why you think you are going to take textbook methods that have already been shown to fail, and somehow make them work. Can't you see that many others have tried to use FOL and ILP already, and they've run into intractable combinatorial explosion problems? Some may argue that my approach isn't radical **enough** (and in spite of my innate inclination toward radicalism, I'm trying hard in my AGI work to be no more radical than is really needed, out of a desire to save time/ effort by reusing others' insights wherever possible) ... but at least I'm introducing a host of clearly novel technical ideas. What you seem to be suggesting is just to implement material from textbooks on a large knowledge base. Why do you think you're gonna make it work? Because you're gonna build a bigger KB than Cyc has built w/ their 20 years of effort and tens to hundreds of million of dollars of US gov't funding??? -- Ben G On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 3:46 PM, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Ben, Note that I did not pick FOL as my starting point because I wanted to go against you, or be a troublemaker. I chose it because that's what the textbooks I read were using. There is nothing personal here. It's just like Chinese being my first language because I was born in China. I don't speak bad English just to sound different. I think the differences in our approaches are equally superficial. I don't think there is a compelling reason why your formalism is superior (or inferior, for that matter). You have domain-specific heuristics; I'm planning to have domain-specific heuristics too. The question really boils down to whether we should collaborate or not. And if we want meaningful collaboration, everyone must exert a little effort to make it happen. It cannot be one-way. YKY --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] OpenCog's logic compared to FOL?
Also, YKY, I can't help but note that your currently approach seems extremely similar to Texai (which seems quite similar to Cyc to me), more so than to OpenCog Prime (my proposal for a Novamente-like system built on OpenCog, not yet fully documented but I'm actively working on the docs now). I wonder why you don't join Stephen Reed on the texai project? Is it because you don't like the open-source nature of his project? ben On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 3:58 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: One thing I don't get, YKY, is why you think you are going to take textbook methods that have already been shown to fail, and somehow make them work. Can't you see that many others have tried to use FOL and ILP already, and they've run into intractable combinatorial explosion problems? Some may argue that my approach isn't radical **enough** (and in spite of my innate inclination toward radicalism, I'm trying hard in my AGI work to be no more radical than is really needed, out of a desire to save time/ effort by reusing others' insights wherever possible) ... but at least I'm introducing a host of clearly novel technical ideas. What you seem to be suggesting is just to implement material from textbooks on a large knowledge base. Why do you think you're gonna make it work? Because you're gonna build a bigger KB than Cyc has built w/ their 20 years of effort and tens to hundreds of million of dollars of US gov't funding??? -- Ben G On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 3:46 PM, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Ben, Note that I did not pick FOL as my starting point because I wanted to go against you, or be a troublemaker. I chose it because that's what the textbooks I read were using. There is nothing personal here. It's just like Chinese being my first language because I was born in China. I don't speak bad English just to sound different. I think the differences in our approaches are equally superficial. I don't think there is a compelling reason why your formalism is superior (or inferior, for that matter). You have domain-specific heuristics; I'm planning to have domain-specific heuristics too. The question really boils down to whether we should collaborate or not. And if we want meaningful collaboration, everyone must exert a little effort to make it happen. It cannot be one-way. YKY --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] OpenCog's logic compared to FOL?
As we have discussed a while back on the OpenCog mail list, I would like to see a RDF interface to some level of the OpenCog Atom Table. I think that would suit both YKY and myself. Our discussion went so far as to consider ways to assign URI's to appropriate atoms. Yes, I still think that's a good idea and I'm fairly sure it will happen this year... probably not too long after the code is considered really ready for release... ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] OpenCog's logic compared to FOL?
First of all, the *tractability* of your algorithm depends on heuristics that you design, which are separable from the underlying probabilistic logic calculus. In your mind, these 2 things may be mixed up. Indefinite probabilities DO NOT imply faster inference. Domain-specific heuristics do that. Not all heuristics for inference control are narrowly domain-specific Some may be generally applicable across very broad sets of domains, say across all domains satisfying certain broad mathematical properties such as similar theorems tend to have similar proofs. So, I agree that indefinite probabilities themselves don't imply faster inference. However, we have some heuristics for (relatively) fast inference control that we believe will apply across any domains satisfying certain broad mathematical properties ... and that won't work with traditional representations of uncertainty Secondly, I have no problem at all, with using your indefinite probability approach. It's a laudable achievement what you've accomplished. Thirdly, probabilistic logics -- of *any* flavor -- should [approximately] subsume binary logic if they are sound. So there is no reason why your logic is so different that it cannot be expressed in FOL. Yes of course it can be expressed in FOL ... it can be expressed in Morse Code too, but I don't see a point to it ;-) ... it could also be realized via a mechanical contraption made of TinkerToys ... like Danny Hillis's http://www.ohgizmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/tinkertoycomputer_1.jpg ;-) But are you saying that the same cannot be achieved using FOL? If you attach indefinite probabilities to FOL propositions, and create indefinite probability formulas corresponding to standard FOL rules, you will have a subset of PLN But you'll have a hard time applying Bayes rule to FOL propositions without being willing to assign probabilities to terms ... and you'll have a hard time applying it to FOL variable expressions without doing something that equates to assigning probabilities to propositions w. unbound variables ... and like I said, I haven't seen any other adequate way of propagating pdf's through quantifiers than the one we use in PLN, though Halpern's book describes a lot of inadequate ways ;-) 4) most critically perhaps, using uncertain truth values within inference control to help pare down the combinatorial explosion Uncertain truth values DO NOT imply faster inference. In fact, they slow down inference wrt binary logic. If your inference algorithm is faster than resolution, and it's sound (so it subsumes binary logic), then you have found a faster FOL inference algorithm. But that's not true; what you're doing is domain-specific heuristics. As noted above, the truth is somewhere inbetween. You can find inference control heuristics that exploit general mathematical properties of domains -- so they don't apply to ALL domains, but nor are they specialized to any particular domain. Evolution is like this in fact -- it's no good at optimizing random fitness functions, but it's good at optimizing fitness functions satisfying certain mathematical properties, regardless of the specific domain they refer to I think one can do indefinite probability + FOL + domain-specific heuristics just as you can do indefinite probability + term logic + domain-specific heuristics but it may cost an amount of effort that you're unwilling to pay. well we do both in PLN ... PLN is not a pure term logic... This is a very sad situation... Oh ... I thought it was funny ... I suppose I'm glad I have a perverse sense of humour ;-D ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] OpenCog's logic compared to FOL?
You have done something new, but not so new as to be in a totally different dimension. YKY I have some ideas more like that too but I've postponed trying to sell them to others, for the moment ;-) ... it's hard enough to sell fairly basic stuff like PLN ... Look for some stuff on the applications of hypersets and division algebras to endowing AGIs with free will and reflective awareness, maybe in early 09 ... ;) -- Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] modus ponens
I mean this form http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_ponens i.e. A implies B A |- B Probabilistically, this means you have P(B|A) P(A) and want to infer from these P(B) under the most direct interpretation... ben On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 12:08 AM, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Modus ponens can be defined in a few ways. If you take the binary logic definition: A - B means ~A v B you can translate this into probabilities but the result is a mess. I have analysed this in detail but it's complicated. In short, this definition is incompatible with probability calculus. Instead I simply use A - B meaning P(B|A) = p where p is the probability. You can change p into an indefinite probability or interval. Is your modus ponens different from this? YKY --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] OpenCog's logic compared to FOL?
Propositions are not the only things that can have truth values...
I don't have time to carry out a detailed mathematical discussion of
this right now...
We're about to (this week) finalize the PLN book draft ... I'll send
you a pre-publication PDF early next week and then you can read it and
we can argue this stuff after that ;-)
ben
On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 1:01 AM, YKY (Yan King Yin)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Ben,
If we don't work out the correspondence (even approximately) between
FOL and term logic, this conversation would not be very fruitful. I
don't even know what you're doing with PLN. I suggest we try to work
it out here step by step. If your approach really makes sense to me,
you will gain another helper =) Also, this will be good for your
project's documentation.
I have some examples:
Eng: Some philosophers are wise
TL: +Philosopher+Wise
FOL: philosopher(X) - wise(X)
Eng: Romeo loves Juliet
TL: +-Romeo* + (Loves +-Juliet*)
FOL: loves(romeo, juliet)
Eng: Women often have long hair
TL: ?
FOL: woman(X) - long_hair(X)
I know your term logic is slightly different from Fred Sommers'. Can
you fill in the TL parts and also attach indefinite probabilities?
On 6/3/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
If you attach indefinite probabilities to FOL propositions, and create
indefinite probability formulas corresponding to standard FOL rules,
you will have a subset of PLN
But you'll have a hard time applying Bayes rule to FOL propositions
without being willing to assign probabilities to terms ... and you'll
have a hard time applying it to FOL variable expressions without doing
something that equates to assigning probabilities to propositions w.
unbound variables ... and like I said, I haven't seen any other
adequate way of propagating pdf's through quantifiers than the one we
use in PLN, though Halpern's book describes a lot of inadequate ways
;-)
Re assigning probabilties to terms...
Term in term logic is completely different from term in FOL. I
guess terms in term logic roughly correspond to predicates or
propositions in FOL. Terms in FOL seem to have no counterpart in term
logic..
Anyway there should be no confusion here. Propositions are the ONLY
things that can have truth values. This applies to term logic as well
(I just refreshed my memory of TL). When truth values go from { 0, 1
} to [ 0, 1 ], we get single-value probabilistic logic. All this has
a very solid and rigorous foundation, based on so-called model theory.
YKY
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agi
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--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they
will surely become worms.
-- Henry Miller
---
agi
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Re: [agi] OpenCog's logic compared to FOL?
I think it's fine that you use the term atom in your own way. The important thing is, whatever the objects that you attach probabilities to, that class of objects should correspond to *propositions* in FOL. From there it would be easier for me to understand your ideas. Well, no, we attach probabilities to terms as well as to relationships ... and to expressions with free as well as bound variables... You can map terms and free-variable expressions into propositions if you want to, though... for instance the term cat has probability P(cat) which you could interpret as P(x is a cat | x is in my experience base) and the free-variable expression eats(x, mouse) has probability P( eats(x,mouse) ) which can be interpreted as P( eats(x,mouse) is true | x is in my experience base) However these propositional representations are a bit awkward and are not the way to represent things for the PLN rules to be simply applied... it is nicer by far to leave the experiential semantics implicit... -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Uncertainty
I would imagine so, but I havent thought about the details I am traveling now but will think about this when I get home and can refresh my memory by rereading the appropriate sections of Probabilistic Robotics ... ben On 6/2/08, Bob Mottram [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2008/6/2 Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I think the PLN / indefinite probabilities approach is a complete and coherent solution to the problem. It is complex, true, but these are not simple issues... I was wondering whether indefinite probabilities could be used to represent a particle filter. --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] OpenCog's logic compared to FOL?
More likely though, is that your algorithm is incomplete wrt FOL, ie, there may be some things that FOL can infer but PLN can't. Either that, or your algorithm may be actually slower than FOL. FOL is not an algorithm, it:s a representational formalism... As　compared　to　standard　logical　theorem-proving　algorithms,　the　design intention　is　that　Novamente/OpenCogs　inference　algorithms　will　be vastly　more　efficient　on　the　average　case　for　those　inference　problems typically confronting an embodied social organism. Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] OpenCog's logic compared to FOL?
Here are some examples in FOL: Mary is female female(mary) Could be Inheritance Mary female or Evaluation female mary (the latter being equivalent to female(mary) ) but none of these has an uncertain truth value attached... This is a [production] rule: (not to be confused with an inference rule) A female child is called a daughter daughter(X) - child(X) female(X) where universal quantification is assumed. You could say ForAll $X ExtensionalImplication And Evaluation child ($X) Evaluation female ($X) Evaluation daughter($X) which is equivalent to the pred logic formulation you've given. But it will often be more useful to say Implication And Evaluation child ($X) Evaluation female ($X) Evaluation daughter($X which leaves the variable unbound, and which replaces the purely extensional implication with an Implication that is mixed extensional and intensional. And one will normally want to attach an uncertain TV like an indefinite probability to an expression like this, rather than leaving it with a crisp TV. The definition of IntensionalImplication A B is ExtensionalImplication Prop(A) Prop(B) where Prop(X) is the fuzzy set of properties of X The definition of Implication is a weighted average of extensional and intensional implication I guess that gives a flavor of the difference *** bonus question *** Can you give an example of something expressed in PLN that is very hard or impossible to express in FOL? FOL can express anything, as can combinatory logic and a load of other Turing-complete formalisms. However, expressing uncertainty is awkward and inefficient in FOL, as opposed to if one uses a specific mechanism like indefinite truth values. Similarly, expressing intensional relationships is awkward and inefficient in FOL as there is no built in notion of fuzzy sets of properties And there is no notion of assigning a truth value to a formula with unbound variables in FOL, but one can work around this by using variables that are universally bound to a context that is then itself variable (again, more complex and awkward) -- ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Live Forever Machines...
I'll respond to other points tomorrow or the day after (am currently on a biz trip through Asia), but just one thing now... You say With NO money, none of either of our efforts stands a chance. With some realistic investment money, scanning would at minimum be cheap insurance that you will be able to overcome ALL of your future problems. but I'm not sure this is true. Linux got a long way with no money, and eventually its freeware success brought investment from various sources. This is part of the inspiration underlying OpenCog Given a viable AGI design (which I have) and an initial, partial codebase (which we have, via opencog), and a population of enthusiastic and qualified OSS contributors, there's no reason that $$ is needed, though it can certainly accelerate things. The big challenge becomes keeping things going on the right course, in the relevant senses of right ben g --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] OpenCog's logic compared to FOL?
Do OpenCog atoms roughly correspond to logical atoms? Not really And what is the counterpart of (logic) propositions in OpenCog? ExtensionalImplication relations I guess... I suggest don't use non-standard terminology 'cause it's very confusing... So long as it's well-defined, I guess it's OK... The standard terminology leads in wrong conceptual directions alas... ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Uncertainty
I have briefly surveyed the research on uncertain reasoning, and found out that no one has a solution to the entire problem. Ben and Pei Wang may be working towards their solutions but a satisfactory one may be difficult to find. I think the PLN / indefinite probabilities approach is a complete and coherent solution to the problem. It is complex, true, but these are not simple issues... ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] news bit: Is this a unified theory of the brain? Do Bayesian statistics rule the brain?
This stuff is important, but has been around in the literature for years now... On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 6:59 AM, David Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/05/do_bayesian_statisti.html This week's New Scientist has a fascinating article on a possible 'grand theory' of the brain that suggests that virtually all brain functions can be modelled with Bayesian statistics. The link (above) is a blog copy of the article in New Scientist. -dave agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Live Forever Machines...
if there is to be any substantial investment into AGI efforts, it would seem reasonable to expect to see the first money going into a scanning UV fluorescence microscope. *Hence, if YOU are looking for money for AGI development, then you should also be looking for money to develop a scanning UV fluorescence microscope, as it will insure that you can figure out EVERYTHING needed to make an AGI. Otherwise, all you need is just one puzzle that you can't see how to solve, and your entire effort ends up in the bit bucket. Your prospective investors are probably focuesd on just such problems as you read this. This would not only be cheap insurance, but should help your investor(s) see that you WILLsucceed, despite any unforeseen problems. * ** Not only is AGI stymied by the lack of this device, but so is neuroscience, cancer research, and a number of other biological fields. Of course, it hasn't occurred to biologists that this device is practical to make because they can't see their way past the computer problems - that many of the people here on this forum could handle, even with a hangover. Steve Richfield --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
mark, What I'd rather do instead is see if we can get a .NET parallel track started over the next few months, see if we can get everything ported, and see the relative productivity between the two paths. That would provide a provably true answer to the debate. Well, it's an open-source project, so to each his own... However, at this point, folks working on OpenCog stuff under the -- GSoC -- SIAI -- Novamente organizations are going to be working on the current, actually existing C++ implementation IMO, the vast majority of work in this sort of project has to do with fiddling with the AI algorithms to make them work right, rather than nuts-and-bolts engineering, so I'm not sure the choice of language is going to make that much difference ... except that with C++ it's obviously more possible to make the code efficient where it needs to be. (Features like template metaprogramming are great but of course one can live without them.) And in the current phase, killer efficiency is not going to make much difference either, while we're still working out algorithm details. The potential for killer efficiency will come into play a little later once the main issue is scaling rather than algorithm refinement. I would much rather see work go into working out the various algorithmic details that are left pending by the OpenCog Prime documentation (not yet released by me, alas... and spending time on these emails doesn't help...) than on reimplementing the same code in multiple programming languages. But as an open-source project there is the opportunity for multiple forks and directions. In the event that a C# fork does get off the ground, it would be nice if things were worked out so that C++ MindAgents could act on the C# core. Ultimately the deeper code goes in the MindAgents not in the core system anyway, in the OpenCog design. If the same MindAgents could be used in both cores then having two cores would not impede development much, and might even accelerate it if it allows developers to do more work in their preferred languages and development environments. -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Re: Mark Waser arguing that OpenCog should be recoded in .Net ;-p
Mark,
If it were possible to make both C# and C+ versions of the core
(AtomTable and scheduler), and have both C# and C++ MindAgents run on
both, then we would have a favorable situation in terms of allowing
everyone to use their own fave languages and development environments.
-- Ben G
On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 7:18 AM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
While all the language wars continue, I'd like to re-emphasize my original
point (directly copied from the original e-mail) -- One of the things that
I've been tempted to argue for a while is an entirely alternate underlying
software architecture for OpenCog -- people can then develop in the
architecture that is most convenient and then we could have people
cross-port between the two.
Seriously people, I'm not asking anyone to move away from what *you* are
familiar with if you don't want to. I'm saying that maybe we should
deliberately attempt to open this up so that we get *more* contributions and
viewpoints -- at the admitted cost of needing better documentation and
control -- which is really necessary anyways. My belief is that seeing
what happens will cause a migration -- but I'm not invested in that belief
and would be happy and see huge benefits either way.
Mark
P.S. Thank you for the forward Ben.
- Original Message -
From: Ben Goertzel
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 8:29 PM
Subject: Mark Waser arguing that OpenCog should be recoded in .Net ;-p
This email thread on the AGI list really seems more appropriate for the
OpenCog list... so I'm forwarding it here...
-- Ben G
--
From: Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, May 25, 2008 at 4:23 PM
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Yeah, I'll certainly grant you that. The unfortunate problem is that people
coming in late don't see the prior arguments and then engage in behavior
that they believe is similar but entirely without the scientific rigor that
you normally follow but don't always visibly display.
Also, on the other hand, for certain classes of issues where you are less of
an expert -- like in large-scale systems architecture (both software and
conceptual), a number of your previously posted arguments are *I believe* at
best questionable if not outright wrong. The fact that these assumptions
aren't open for inspection at a convenient location is problematical if many
other things are built on top of them and then they turn out to be wrong.
We need to start to gather the best of these assumptions and debates in one
place (probably a wiki) because long-term e-mail looping is not efficient.
I've had this as a low priority thought for the AGI-Network but I think that
I'm going to escalate it's priority substantially and see if I can't come up
with a conceptual design for such a wiki (with scaled and isolated
privileges) over the next couple of weeks.
One of the things that I've been tempted to argue for a while is an entirely
alternate underlying software architecture for OpenCog -- people can then
develop in the architecture that is most convenient and then we could have
people cross-port between the two. I strongly contend that the current
architecture does not take advantage of a large part of the newest advances
and infrastructures of the past half-decade. I think that if people saw
what could be done with far less time and code utilizing already existing
functionality and better tools that C++ would be a dead issue.
--
From: Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, May 25, 2008 at 4:26 PM
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Somehow I doubt that this list will be the place where the endless
OS/language
wars plaguing the IT community are finally solved ;-p
Certainly there are plenty of folks with equal software engineering
experience
to you, advocating the Linux/C++ route (taken in the current OpenCog
version)
rather than the .Net/C# route that I believe you advocate...
-- Ben G
--
From: Lukasz Stafiniak [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, May 25, 2008 at 5:24 PM
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
No, I believe he advocates OCaml vs. F# ;-)
(sorry for leaving-out Haskell and others)
--
From: Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, May 25, 2008 at 5:59 PM
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Cool. An *argument from authority* without even having an authority. Show
me those plenty of folks and their reasons for advocating Linux/C++.
Times have changed. Other alternatives have advanced tremendously. You are
out of date and using and touting obsolete software and development
methods. I *don't* believe that you can find an expert who has remained
current on technology who will back your point.
{NOTE: It's also always interesting to see someone say that the argument is
OS/language vs. framework/language (don't you know enough to compare apples
to apples?)]
More importantly, I don't believe that I've ever explicitly endorsed C#.
What I've always pushed is the .NET framework
Re: [agi] More Info Please
On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 8:33 PM, J. Andrew Rogers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Replying to myself, I'll let Mark have the last word since, after all, it is *his* project and not mine. :-) I assume that last sentence was sarcastic ;-) Of course, while Mark is a valued participant in OpenCog, it's not *his* personal project ... and the initial OpenCog system is C++, mainly tested in a Unix environment ... FWIW, my impression about the ubiquity of Unix servers in Silicon Valley agrees w/yours. This is obviously because Silicon Valley is currently obsessed with Web apps, and Unix is generally recognized as a better platform for the large-scale deployment of Web apps. And no, I don't feel like spending my whole evening looking up copious statistics to support this assertion. However, I'll quote just one simple stat: About 90% of the Internet relies on Unix operating systems running Apache, the world's most widely used Web server. from http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/a/unix_win.htm I spent 10 minutes looking for data regarding developer productivity on Linux vs. Windows, but mostly just found bullshit about M$ vs. IBM, concerning fatally flawed, mock-scientific studies funded by Microsoft ;-p http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/46828.htm (note that this study, while conducted by M$ in an extremely dishonest way, is also really about IBM WebSphere rather than about Linux C++ programming, so it's not directly pertinent to this discussion anyway. Except to highlight the difficulties of doing this sort of comparison in a meaningful way.) OK ... enough of that ... back to doing useful work ;-) -- Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
My own view is that our state of knowledge about AGI is far too weak for us to make detailed plans about how to **ensure** AGI safety, at this point What we can do is conduct experiments designed to gather data about AGI goal systems and AGI dynamics, which can lead us to more robust AGI theories, which can lead us to detailed plans about how to ensure AGI safety (or, pessimistically, detailed knowledge as to why this is not possible) However, it must of course be our intuition that guides these experiments. My intuition tells me that a system with probabilistic-logic-based goal-achievement at its core is much more likely to ultimately lead to a safe AI than a system with neural net dynamics at its core. But vague statements like the one in the previous sentence are of limited use; their main use is in leading to more precise formulations and experiments... -- Ben G On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 6:26 AM, Panu Horsmalahti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What is your approach on ensuring AGI safety/Friendliness on this project? agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 10:42 AM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My own view is that our state of knowledge about AGI is far too weak for us to make detailed plans about how to **ensure** AGI safety, at this point I disagree strenuously. If our arguments will apply to *all* intelligences (/intelligent architectures) -- like Omohundro attempts to do -- instead of just certain AGI subsets, then I believe that our lack of knowledge about particular subsets is irrelevant. yes, but I don't think these general arguments are going to tell us all that much about particular AGI systems ... they can go only so far, and not far enough... I believe that there is a location in the state space of intelligence that is a viable attractor that equates to Friendliness and morality. I think that a far more effective solution to the Friendliness problem would be to ensure that we place an entity in that attractor rather than attempt to control it's behavior via it's architecture. Ah, so you're OK with beliefs but not intuitions ??? '-) I hope such an attractor exists but I'm not as certain as you seem to be What we can do is conduct experiments designed to gather data about AGI goal systems and AGI dynamics, which can lead us to more robust AGI theories, which can lead us to detailed plans about how to ensure AGI safety (or, pessimistically, detailed knowledge as to why this is not possible) I think that this is all spurious pseudo-scientific BS. I think that the state space is way too large to be thoroughly explored from first principles. Start with human friendliness and move out and you stand a chance. Trying to compete with billions of years of evolution and it's parallel search over an unimaginably large number of entities by re-inventing the wheel is just plain silly. I disagree. Obviously you could make the same argument about airplanes. Experiments with different shaped wings helped us to refine the relevant specializations of fluid dynamics theory, which now let us calculate a bunch more relevant stuff from first principles than we could before these experiments and this theory were done. But we still can't solve the Navier-Stokes Equation in general in any useful way. However, it must of course be our intuition that guides these experiments. My intuition tells Intuition is not science. Intuition is just hardened opinion. Intuition has been scientifically proven to *frequently* be a bad guide where morality and ethics are concerned (don't you read the papers I post to the list?). Why don't we use real science? Something has got to guide the choice of which experiments to do. In a field without any solid theory yet, how do you choose which experiments to run, except via intuition [or replace some related word if you don't like that one] I would scientifically/logically argue that your intuition is correct because it is more possible to analyze, evaluate, and *redirect* a goal-achievement architecture than a system with inscrutable neural net dynamics at its core. Your intuition wasn't particularly helpful because it gave no reasoning or basis for your belief. My statement was more worthwhile because it gave reasons that can be further analyzed, refined, and/or disproved. I have reasoning and basis for that intuition but I omitted it due to not having time to write a longer email. Also I though the reasoning and basis were obvious. Note however that NN dynamics are not totally inscrutable, e.g. folks have analyzed the innards of backprop neural nets using PCA and other statistical methods. And of course a huge logic system with billions of propositions continually combining via inference may be pretty damn inscrutable. So the point is not irrefutable by any means, which is why I called it an intuitive argument rather than a rigorous one. -- Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Please, if you're going to argue something -- please take the time to argue it and don't pretend that you can't magically solve it all with your guesses (I mean, intuition). time for mailing list posts is scarce for me these days, so sometimes I post a conclusion w/out the supporting arguments ... but the arguments are usually already there in prior publications ;-) ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Mark, For OpenCog we had to make a definite choice and we made one. Sorry you don't agree w/ it. I agree that you had to make a choice and made the one that seemed right to various reason. The above comment is rude and snarky however -- particularly since it seems to come *because* you can't justify your choice. I would expect better of you. = = = = = = = Let's try this again. Get your experts together and create a short list of why C++ on Linux (and any infrastructure there that isn't immediately available under .Net) is better than the combination of all the .Net languages and all the infrastructure available there that isn't immediately available under Linux. No resorting to pseudo-democracies of experts, how about real reasons that YOU will stand behind and be willing to defend. This would be a reasonable exercise, but I simply don't have time to deal with it right now. I'm about to leave on a 2.5 weeks business / research-collaboration trip to Asia, and en route I hope to make some progress on mutating Novamente docs into OpenCog docs. No time to burn on these arguments at the moment. However, it might be worthwhile to create a page on the OpenCog wiki focused on this issue, if others are also interested in it. There could be a section on the page arguing the potential advantages of .Net for OpenCog; a section on the page arguing the intended advantages of the current approach; and other sections written by folks advocating other approaches (e.g. LISP-centric, whatever...). Perhaps if you create this page and get it started w/ your own arguments, others will contribute theirs and we can advance the debate that way. -- Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] More Info Please
Peter has some technical info on his overall (adaptive neural net) based approach to AI, on his company website, which is based on a paper he wrote in the AGI volume Cassio and I edited for Springer (written 2002, published 2006). However, he has kept his specific commercial product direction tightly under wraps. I believe Peter's ideas are interesting but I have my doubts that his approach is really AGI-capable. However, I don't feel comfortable going into great deal on my reasons, because Peter seems to value secrecy regarding his approach... I've had a mild amount of insider info regarding the approach (e.g. due to visiting his site a few years ago, etc.) and don't want to blab stuff on this list that he'd want me to keep secret... Ben On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 5:40 PM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... on this: http://www.adaptiveai.com/news/index.htm Towards Commercialization It's been a while. We've been busy. A good kind of busy. At the end of March we completed an important milestone: a demo system consolidating our prior 10 months' work. This was followed by my annual pilgrimage to our investors in Australia. The upshot of all this is that we now have some additional seed funding to launch our commercialization phase late this year. On the technical side we still have a lot of hard work ahead of us. Fortunately we have a very strong and highly motivated team, so that over the next 6 months we expect to make as much additional progress as we have over the past 12. Our next technical milestone is around early October by which time we'll want our 'proto AGI' to be pretty much ready to start earning a living. By the end of 2008 we should be ready to actively pursue commercialization in addition to our ongoing RD efforts. At that time we'll be looking for a high-powered CEO to head up our business division which we expect to grow to many hundreds of employees over a few years. Early in 2009 we plan to raise capital for this commercial venture, and if things go according to plan we'll have a team of around 50 by the middle of the year. Well, exciting future plans, but now back to work. Peter --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Symbol Grounding [WAS Re: [agi] AGI-08 videos]
Richard wrote: Then, when we came back from the break, Ben Goertzel announced that the roundtable on symbol grounding was cancelled, to make room for some other discussion on a topic like the future of AGI, or some such. I was outraged by this. The subsequent discussion was a pathetic waste of time, during which we just listened to a bunch of people making vacuous speculations and jokes about artificial intelligence. In the end, I decided that the reason this happened was that when the workshop was being planned, the title was chosen in ignorance. That, in fact, Ben never even intended to talk about the real issue of grounding symbols, but just needed a plausible-sounding theme-buzzword, and so he just intended the workshop to be about a meaningless concept like connecting AGI systems to the real world. No, that is not the case. What happened, as I recall, was that the conference schedule was running late, and one of the speakers from the session on symbol grounding had cancelled anyway, so it seemed apropos to skip from that session to the next one -- since **something** had to be cancelled to make the schedule fit That conference was a small workshop and was pretty loosely organized, I decided to let the discussion and content flow according to the general interests of the participants. As it happened the participants as a whole were not gripped by the symbol grounding theme and gravitated to other topics, which was OK with me. Unfortunately to Richard this seemed to have been his main interest. Feedback on AGI-06 overall was overwhelmingly positive; in fact Richard's is the only significantly negative report I've seen. AGI-08 was more formally structured, as will be AGI-09; but these are larger conferences, which require more structure to run at all smoothly. -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] jamming with OpenCog / Novamente
Predicate logic vs term logic won't be an issue for OpenCog, as the AtomTable knowledge representation supports both (and many other) formalisms. I don't **think** the sentential KB will be a problem because i believe each of your sentences will be representable as an Implication or Equivalence relationship in the AtomTable. If you give me a specific example of a sentence in your representation, I will tell you how it could most straightforwardly be represented in the AtomTable using the PLN-friendly node and link types. thanks Ben On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 11:40 AM, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm wondering if it's possible to plug in my learning algorithm to OpenCog / Novamente? The main incompatibilities stem from: 1. predicate logic vs term logic 2. graphical KB vs sentential KB If there is a way to somehow bridge these gaps, it may be possible YKY --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI-08 videos
Hi, Somebody could write an excellent paper about the potential pitfalls of such an approach (detail, fidelity, deep causality issues behind appearance, function, and inter-object + inter-feature relationships, and so on). If nobody else is working in detail on publishing such an analysis perhaps I will study those issues for some months and try to write something for AGI-09 about it. If you'd like to collaborate on such a paper, I'd be interested. I have thought for a while of writing a paper with a title or theme of What Must a World Be for an AGI to Develop In it? ... the goal being to guesstimate a requirements spec for virtual worlds for AGI ... or, more plausibly, different requirements specs according to different AI paradigms To me there are 3 relevant paradigms here 1) Perception and action centric, which leads to the conclusion that virtual worlds will only be good enough for AGI when they're very close to the richness of the real physical world 2) Socialization, logic and language centric, which leads to the conclusion that current virtual worlds are likely good enough 3) Integrative, which leads to the conclusion that current virtual worlds probably are NOT good enough, but that some relatively moderate improvements to them could make them so The sorts of improvements I'm thinking of are stuff like -- replace animation based skeleton control with Player/Gazebo style servomechanism based control -- make more objects decomposed of parts in a meaningful way ... including enabling stuff like slicing a cake in various ways with a knife, ripping a page out of a book, etc. -- give the AI more detailed feedback regarding interaction of parts of its body w/ the external world, and also some internal body feelings related to things in the world -- simplified, not necessarily realistic fluid mechanics [this one is a nicety, not a necessity, but it would certainly help with understanding a lot of NLP metaphors] ... having a world consisting of things only in one state of matter is somewhat conceptually limiting... -- Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI-08 videos
Loosemore wrote:
I hear people enthusing about systems that are filled with holes that were
discovered decades ago, but still no fix. I read vague speculations and the
use of buzzwords ('Theory of Mind'!?). I see papers discussing narrow AI
projects.
I suppose there was all that at AGI-08 ... but there was also a lot
more than that ...
There was more genuine dialogue among folks with different (deeply thought)
perspectives on AGI theory and design, than I've seen in any gathering
(online or F2F) before. This is worth a lot, and I expect this sort
of interaction
to intensify over the next few years...
I'm sorry that sharing insights with others whose perspectives are
different from
your own, is so uninteresting to you, Richard. You are among the most
ardent and extreme dogmatists I have encountered in the AGI field. I think
your perspective is interesting but your degree of confidence in your
correctness and everyone else's wrongness often strikes me as irrational,
given the level of ignorance we all have about this area of study...
ben
---
agi
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Re: [agi] AGI-08 videos
Richard wrote: My god, Mark: I had to listen to people having a general discussion of grounding (the supposed them of that workshop) without a single person showing the slightest sign that they had more than an amateur's perspective on what that concept actually means. I guess you are talking about AGi-06 While that was a successful workshop -- whose perceived success by the vast majority of participants led to the convening of the even more succesful AGI-08 -- it didn't really do a good job of sticking to the initially intended theme of symbol grounding. I agree that not much of interest about symbol grounding came out of AGI-06 ... what came out of it was more a theme of the convergence of various independently originating AGI architectures. But to me it's a good rather than bad thing when a dialogue among peers leads to unexpected conclusions and directions... I have a right to be disgusted with the current state of this field. The state of **achievement** in the AGI field is pretty poor to date, but it's not as though YOU have achieved anything particularly notable, either... ;-p I think there are a lot of folks in the field with a pretty deep understanding of the nature of the AGI problem. Different folks understand different aspects better, of course. There are of course also well-known researchers whose approaches I find dramatically wrong-headed... While I ... similarly to you and many others in this field that seems to be populated mainly by narcissistic egomaniacs ;-) ... tend to think I have a better understanding of AGI than other researchers, I still believe other researchers have deep insights into various aspects of AGI that I can learn something from. Building a mind is a big problem, and I think we can grapple w/ it better as a community than as individuals I think the NM/OpenCog design can work, but there are many details to be worked out, and I hope events like the AGI conferences can help build a community focused on working them out together ... as well as working out the details of other AGI designs at the same time ... While I do bet that NM or OpenCog will get there first, I don't mainly view this as an AGI race of one researcher against another, rather as a race by the whole AGI community to get to the goal of a beneficial AGi before someone creates a rotten AGi or something else nasty happens on the planet... -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Interesting approach to controlling animated characters...
Now this looks like a fairly AGI-friendly approach to controlling animated characters ... unfortunately it's closed-source and proprietary though... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphoria_%28software%29 ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Interesting approach to controlling animated characters...
They are using equational models to simulate the muscles and bones inside the body... On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 12:05 PM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So what are the principles that enable animated characters and materials here to react/move in individual continually different ways, where previous characters reacted typically and consistently? Ben Now this looks like a fairly AGI-friendly approach to controlling animated characters ... unfortunately it's closed-source and proprietary though... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphoria_%28software%29 ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 269.23.7/1409 - Release Date: 5/1/2008 8:39 AM --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Interesting approach to controlling animated characters...
Actually, it seems their technique is tailor-made for imitative learning If you gathered data about how people move in a certain context, using motion capture, then you could use their GA/NN stuff to induce a program that would generate data similar to the motion-captured data. This would then be more generalizable than using the raw motion-capture data -- Ben On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Lukasz Stafiniak [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: IMHO, Euphoria shows that pure GA approaches are lame. More details here: http://aigamedev.com/editorial/naturalmotion-euphoria On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 5:39 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now this looks like a fairly AGI-friendly approach to controlling animated characters ... unfortunately it's closed-source and proprietary though... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphoria_%28software%29 ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] How general can be and should be AGI?
On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 3:54 AM, Dr. Matthias Heger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben Goertzel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote 26. April 2008 19:54 Yes, truly general AI is only possible in the case of infinite processing power, which is likely not physically realizable. How much generality can be achieved with how much Processing power, is not yet known -- math hasn't advanced that far yet. My point is not only that 'general intelligence without any limits' would need infinite resources of time and memory. This is trivial of course. What I wanted to say is that any intelligence has to be narrow in a sense if it wants be powerful and useful. There must always be strong assumptions of the world deep in any algorithm of useful intelligence. This is a consequence of the No Free Lunch theorem, essentially, isn't it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization With infinite resources you use exhaustive search (like AIXI or the Godel Machine) ... with finite resources you can't afford it, so you need to use (explicitly or implicitly) search that is guided by some inductive biases. See Eric Baum's book What Is Thought? for much discussion on genetically encoded inductive bias and its role in AI. -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Richard's four criteria and the Novamente Pet Brain
Richard, Question: How many systems do you know of in which the system elements are governed by a mechanism that has all four of these, AND where the system as a whole has a large-scale behavior that has been shown (by any method of showing except detailed simulation of the system) to arise from the behaviors of the elements of the system? I would like an example of any case of a complex system in which there are large numbers of individual elements where each element has (a) memory for recent events, (b) adaptation and development of its character over long periods of time, where that adaptation is sensitive to influences from other elements, (c) an identity, so that what one element does to another will depend crucially on which element it is, and (d) nonlinearity in the mechanisms that determine how the elements relate and adapt. I don't really understand your definition of identity in the above, could you clarify, preferably with examples? Show me any non-trivial system, whatsoever, in which there is general agreement that all four of these characteristics are present in the interacting elements, and where someone figured out ahead of time what the overall behavior of the system was going to be, given only knowledge of the element mechanisms, and without simulating the whole system and looking at the simulation. There does not have to be a mathematical proof, just some derivation that allows me to see an example of someone predicting the behavior from the mechanisms. I'm not sure what you mean by predicting the behavior. With the Pet Brain, which does seem to fulfill the criteria you mention above (pending my new confusion about your meaning of identity) (with the Atoms in the Novamente AtomTable as the elements in your description), one cannot predict the precise course of development of the system ... we can't predict what any one pet will do in response to it's environment ... but we do understand what sorts of behaviors the pets are capable of... based on general understanding of how the system and its dynamics work... ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Richard's four criteria and the Novamente Pet Brain
No: I am specifically asking for some system other than an AGI system, because I am looking for an external example of someone overcoming the complex systems problem. The specific criteria you've described would seem to apply mainly to living systems ... and we just don't have that much knowledge of the internals of these yet, due to data-collection issues... Certainly, the failure of the Biosphere experiment is evidence in your favor. There, the scientists failed to predict basic high-level properties of a pretty simple closed ecosystem, based on their knowledge of the parts. However, it was not an engineered ecosystem, and their knowledge of the parts was quite limited compared to our knowledge of the parts of a software system. In short, my contention is that engineering something, even if it's a complex system, places one in a fundamentally different position than if one is studying a natural system, simply because one does not understand the makeup of the natural system that well, due to limitations in our current measuring instruments. Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Richard's four criteria and the Novamente Pet Brain
On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 5:51 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Engineering in the real world is nearly always a mixture of rigor and intuition. Just like analysis of complex biological systems is. AIEe! NO! You are clearly not an engineer because a true engineer just wouldn't say this. Engineering should *NEVER* involve intuition. Engineering does not require exact answers as long as you have error bars but the second that you revert to intuition and guesses, it is *NOT* engineering anymore. Well, we may be using the word intuition differently. I'll give a very simple example of intuition, based on the only engineering paper I ever published, which was a civil engineering paper. What we did was use statistics to predict how likely it was (based on several physical measurements) that the soil under a house was going to settle over the next few decades (causing the house to sink irregularly). This formula we derived is now used to determine where to build houses in the outskirts of Las Vegas, and what kind of foundation to use for the houses. Not too interesting, but rigorous. However, one wouldn't bother to use this formula if the soil was too different in composition from the soil around Vegas. So in reality the civil engineer uses some intuition to decide whether the soil is close enough to the right kind of soil, to use our formula. Now this *could* be made more rigorous, too ... in principle ... but in practice it isn't. And so, maybe some houses fall down ;-) But not many do. The combination of rigorous formulas applying to restrictive cases, together with intuition telling you where to apply what formulas, works OK. Anyway this is a total digression, and I'm done w/ recreational emailing for the day! ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Richard's four criteria and the Novamente Pet Brain
I don't agree with Mark Waser that we can engineer the complexity out of intelligence. I agree with Richard Loosemore that intelligent systems are intrinsically complex systems in the Santa Fe Institute type sense However, I don't agree with Richard as to the *extent* of the complexity problem. I think he overestimates how hard it will be to roughly estimate the behavior of AGI systems based on their designs and measurement of their components. I think it will be easier to do this with AGI systems than with natural systems, not because we can engineer the complexity out of the systems, but because we (as the designers) understand the systems better, and can measure the systems more thoroughly... -- Ben G On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 5:44 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To the best of my knowledge, nobody has *ever* used intuitive understanding to second-guess the stability of an artificial complex system in which those four factors were all present in the elements in a tightly coupled way. Um, aren;t those exactly the rocks that BioMind foundered on? So that is all we have as a reply to the complex systems problem: engineers saying that they think they can just use intuitive understanding to get around it. Again, not this engineer . . . . I say that we should engineer the complexity out of it. Rots of ruck, as Rastro would say. We don't need no stinkin' luck . . . . we;ve got foresight, planning, and engineering --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: **SPAM** Re: [agi] Richard's four criteria and the Novamente Pet Brain
Rules of thumb are not intuition ... but applying them requires intuition... unlike applying rigorous methods... However even the most rigorous science requires rules of thumb (hence intuition) to do the problem set-up before the calculations start... ben On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 6:56 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Engineering should *NEVER* involve intuition. Engineering does not require exact answers as long as you have error bars but the second that you revert to intuition and guesses, it is *NOT* engineering anymore. Well, we may be using the word intuition differently. Given your examples, we are. I'll give a very simple example of intuition, based on the only Not too interesting, but rigorous. Yeah. Generally if it's rigorous, it's not considered intuition. However, one wouldn't bother to use this formula if the soil was too different in composition from the soil around Vegas. So in reality the civil engineer uses some intuition to decide whether the soil is close enough to the right kind of soil, to use our formula. Now this *could* be made more rigorous, too ... in principle ... but in practice it isn't. I would have phrased this as The civil engineer uses some simple rules of thumb . . . . which tend to be pretty well established and where they do and do not apply also tend to be pretty well established to. I've never really heard the word intuition used to describe this. And so, maybe some houses fall down ;-) But not many do. The combination of rigorous formulas applying to restrictive cases, together with intuition telling you where to apply what formulas, works OK. Yeah, you seem to be using the word intuition where I use the words rules of thumb. An interesting distinction and one that we probably should both remember . . . . --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: **SPAM** Re: [agi] Richard's four criteria and the Novamente Pet Brain
I said and repeat that we can engineer the complexity out of intelligence in the Richard Loosemore sense. I did not say and do not believe that we can engineer the complexity out of intelligence in the Santa Fe Institute sense. OK, gotcha... Yeah... IMO, complexity in the sense you ascribe to Richard was never there in intelligence in the first place ;-) ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Richard's four criteria and the Novamente Pet Brain
Actually, I have to clarify that my knowledge of this totally digressive topic is about 12 years obsolete. Maybe it's all done differently now... However, one wouldn't bother to use this formula if the soil was too different in composition from the soil around Vegas. So in reality the civil engineer uses some intuition to decide whether the soil is close enough to the right kind of soil, to use our formula. Now this *could* be made more rigorous, too ... in principle ... but in practice it isn't. And so, maybe some houses fall down ;-) But not many do. The combination of rigorous formulas applying to restrictive cases, together with intuition telling you where to apply what formulas, works OK. Anyway this is a total digression, and I'm done w/ recreational emailing for the day! ben -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] How general can be and should be AGI?
On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Dr. Matthias Heger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In my opinion you can apply Gödel's theorem to prove that 100% AGI is not possible in this world if you apply it not to a hypothetical machine or human being but to the whole universe which can be assumed to be a closed system. Please consult the works of Marcus Hutter (Universal AI) and Juergen Schmidhuber (Godel Machine). These thoughts are not new. Yes, truly general AI is only possible in the case of infinite processing power, which is likely not physically realizable. How much generality can be achieved with how much processing power, is not yet known -- math hasn't advanced that far yet. Humans are not totally general, yet are much more general than any of the AI systems yet built -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Richard's four criteria and the Novamente Pet Brain
Richard, I've been too busy to participate in this thread, but, now I'll chip in a single comment, anyways... regarding the intersection btw your thoughts and Novamente's current work... You cited the following 4 criteria, - Memory. Does the mechanism use stored information about what it was doing fifteen minutes ago, when it is making a decision about what to do now? An hour ago? A million years ago? Whatever: if it remembers, then it has memory. - Development. Does the mechanism change its character in some way over time? Does it adapt? - Identity. Do individuals of a certain type have their own unique identities, so that the result of an interaction depends on more than the type of the object, but also the particular individuals involved? - Nonlinearity. Are the functions describing the behavior deeply nonlinear? These four characteristics are enough. Go take a look at a natural system in physics, or an engineering system, and find one in which the components of the system interact with memory, development, identity and nonlinearity. You will not find any that are understood. Someone else replied: I am quite sure there have been many AI system that have had all four of these features and that have worked pretty much as planned and whose behavior is reasonably well understood Actually, the Novamente Pet Brain system that we're now experimenting with, for controlling virtual dogs and other animals, in virtual worlds, does include nontrivial -- memory -- adaptation/development -- identity -- nonlinearity Each pet has its own memory (procedural, episodic and declarative) and develops new behaviors, skills and biases over time; each pet has its own personality and identity; and there is plenty of nonlinearity in multiple aspects and levels. Yet, this is really a pretty simplistic AI system (though built in an architecture with grander ambitions and potential), and we certainly DO understand the system's behavior to a reasonable level -- though we can't predict exactly what any one pet will do in any given situation; we just have to run the system and see. I agree that the above four features, combined, do lead to a lot of complexity in the complex systems sense. However, I don't agree that this complexity is so severe as to render implausible an intuitive understanding, from first principles, of the system's qualitative large-scale behavior based on the details of its construction. It's true we haven't done the math to predict the system's qualitative large-scale behavior rigorously; but as system designers and parameter tuners, we can tell how to tweak the system to get it to generally act in certain ways. And it really seems to me that the same sort of situation will hold when we go beyond virtual pets to more generally intelligent virtual agents based on the same architecture. -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] THE NEWEST REVELATIONS ABOUT RICHARD'S COMPLEXITY THEORIES---Mark's defense of falsehood
I believe the monsters in the video game Black White also fulfilled Richard's criteria ... On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Russell Wallace [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK. Name these systems and their successes. PROVE Richard's statement incorrect. I'm not seeing anyone responsible doing that. I don't know if I count as someone responsible :) but I named two (TD-Gammon and spam filtering); I can name some more if you like. --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] THE NEWEST REVELATIONS ABOUT RICHARD'S COMPLEXITY THEORIES---Mark's defense of falsehood
They are monsters that learn new behaviors via imitation, and that are controlled internally by adaptive neural nets using a form of Hebbian learning. Nothing that awesome but they do seem to fulfill Richard's criteria. My friend Jason Hutchens, whose chat bots won the Loebner prize at least once, wrote some of their AI code. Novamente's Pet Brain is more sophisticated already... ben g On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 2:30 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben, Could you elucidate on this further (or provide references). Is it worth getting Black White if you're not a big gaming person? - Original Message - From: Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2008 2:14 PM Subject: **SPAM** Re: [agi] THE NEWEST REVELATIONS ABOUT RICHARD'S COMPLEXITY THEORIES---Mark's defense of falsehood I believe the monsters in the video game Black White also fulfilled Richard's criteria ... On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Russell Wallace [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK. Name these systems and their successes. PROVE Richard's statement incorrect. I'm not seeing anyone responsible doing that. I don't know if I count as someone responsible :) but I named two (TD-Gammon and spam filtering); I can name some more if you like. --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
WARNING -- LET'S KEEP THE LIST CIVIL PLEASE ... was Re: [agi] How general can be and should be AGI?
Ummm... just a little note of warning from the list owner. Tintner wrote: So I await your geometric solution to this problem - (a mere statement of principle will do) - with great interest. Well, actually no. Your answer is broadly predictable - you 1) won't have any idea here 2) will have nothing to say to the point and 3) be, as usual, all bark and no bite - all insults and no ideas. Waser wrote: Nice ad hominem. Asshole. Uh, no. Mark, you've been a really valuable contributor to this list for a long period of time. But, this sort of name-calling is just not apropos on this list. Don't do it anymore. Thanks Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Richard's four criteria and the Novamente Pet Brain
Richard, How does this relate to the original context in which I cited this list of four characteristics? It loks like your comments are completely outside the original context, so they don't add anything of relevance. I read the thread and I think my comments are relevant Let me bring you up to speed: 1) The mere presence of these four characteristics *somewhere* in a system has nothing whatever to do with the argument I presented (this was a distortion introduced by Ed Porter in one of his many fits of misunderstanding). Any fool could put together a non-complex system with, for example, four distinct modules that each possessed one of those four characteristics. So what? I was not talking about such trivial systems, I was talking about systems in which the elements of the system each interacted with the other elements in a way that included these four characteristics. This last sentence is just not very clearly posed. The four aspects mentioned were -- memory -- adaptation/development -- identity -- nonlinearity In the Pet Brain, -- memory is a dynamic process associated with a few coupled nonlinear dynamics acting on a certain data store -- adaptation/development is a process that involves a number of dynamics acting on memory -- the identity of a pet is associated with certain specified parameters, but also includes self-organizing patterns in the memory that are guided by these parameters and other processes -- nonlinearity pervades all major aspects of the system, and the system as a whole So when you point to the fact that somewhere in Novamente (in a single 'pet' brain) you can find all of these, it has no bearing on the argument I presented. I was principally referring to these characteristics appearing at the symbol level (and symbol-manipulation level), not the 'pet brain' level. You can find as much memory, identity, etc etc as you like, in other sundry parts of Novamente, but it won't make any difference to the place where I was pointing to it. I'm not sure how you're defining the term symbol. If you define it in the classical Peircean definition (symbol as contrasted to icon and index) then indeed the four aspects you mentioned do occur in the Pet Brain on the symbol level. 2) Even if you do come back to me and say that the symbols inside Novamente all contain all four characteristics, I can only say so what a second time ;-). The question I was asking when I laid down those four characteristics was How many physical systems do you know of in which the system elements are governed by a mechanism that has all four of these, AND where the system as a whole has a large-scale behavior that has been mathematically proven to arise from the behaviors of the elements of the system? The answer to that question (I'll save you the trouble) is 'zero'. But why do you place so much emphasis on mathematical proof? I don't think that mathematical proof is needed for creating an AGI system. (And I say this as a math PhD, who enjoys math more than pretty much any other pursuit...) Formal software verification is still a crude science, so that very few of the software programs we utilize have been (or could tractably be) proven to fulfill their specifications. We create software programs based on piecemeal rigorous justifications of fragments of the software, combined with intuitive understanding of the whole. Furthermore, as a mathematician I'm acutely aware of physicists' often low level of mathematical rigor. As a single example, Feynman integrals in particle physics were used by physicists for decades, to do real calculations predicting the outcomes of real experiments with great accuracy, before finally some mathematicians came along and provided them with a rigorous mathematical grounding. The inference to be made from that fact is that anyone who does put together a system like - like, e.g., the fearless Mr. B. Goertzel - is taking quite a bizarre and extraordinary position, if he says that he alone, of all people, is quite confident that his particular system, unlike all the others, is quite understandable. Understandable is a vague term. In complex systems it's typical that one can predict statistically properties of the whole system's behavior, yet can't predict the details. So a complete understanding is intractable but a partial, useful qualitative understanding is more feasible to come by. Also, I note there's a difference btw an engineered and a natural system, in terms of the degree of inspection one can achieve of the system's internal details. I strongly suspect that in 10-20 years neuroscientists will arrive at a decent qualitative explanation of how the lower-level mechanisms of the brain generate the higher-level patterns of human mind. The reason we haven't yet, is not that there is some insuperable complexity barrier, but rather that we lack the appropriate data. For an AGI
Re: [agi] Other AGI-like communities
On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 5:21 AM, Joshua Fox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To return to the old question of why AGI research seems so rare, Samsonovich et al. say (http://members.cox.net/alexei.v.samsonovich/samsonovich_workshop.pdf) 'In fact, there are several scientific communities pursuing the same or similar goals, each unified under their own unique slogan: machine / artificial consciousness, human-level intelligence, embodied cognition, situation awareness, artificial general intelligence, commonsense reasoning, qualitative reasoning, strong AI, biologically inspired cognitive architectures (BICA), computational consciousness, bootstrapped learning, etc. Many of these communities do not recognize each other.' I believe these various academic subcommunities ARE quite aware of each other And I would divide them into two categories 1) Those that are concerned with rather specialized approaches to intelligence, e.g. qualitative reasoning, commonsense reasoning etc. 2) Those that do not really constitute a coherent research community, e.g. BICA, human-level AI ... but rather merely constitute a few assorted workshops, journal special issues, etc. -- Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Other AGI-like communities
On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben/Joshua: How do you think the AI and AGI fields relate to the embodied grounded cognition movements in cog. sci? My impression is that the majority of people here (excluding you) still have only limited awareness of them - are still operating in total totally doomed defiance of their findings: My opinion is that the majority of people here are aware of these ideas, and consider them unproven speculations not agreeing with their own intuition ;-) Grounded cognition rejects traditional views that cognition is computation on amodal symbols in a modular system, independent of the brain's modal systems for perception, action, and introspection. Instead, grounded cognition proposes that modal simulations, bodily states, and situated action underlie cognition. Barsalou Grounded cognition here obviously means not just pointing at things, but that all traditional rational operations are, and have to be, supported by image-inative simulation in any form of general intelligence. I wouldn't agree with such a strong statement. I think the grounding of ratiocination in image-ination is characteristic of human intelligence, and must thus be characteristic of any highly human-like intelligent system ... but, I don't see any reason to believe it's the ONLY path. The minds we know or can imagine, almost surely constitute a teeny-tiny little backwater of the overall space of possible minds ;-) -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Open source (was Re: [agi] The Strange Loop of AGI Funding: now logically proved!)
Bob... ... and of course, OSS does not contradict paying programmers to write software. I have no plans to dissolve Novamente LLC, for example ;-p ... we're actually doing better than ever ... And, I note that SIAI is now paying 2 programmers (one full time, one 3/5 time) to work on OpenCog specifically ... And we will have a bunch of students getting paid by Google to code for OpenCog this summer, under the Google Summer of Code program... It is certainly true that a paid team of full-time programmers can address certain sorts of issues faster and more efficiently than a distributed team of part-timers. My idea is not to replace the former with the latter, but rather to make use of both, working toward closely overlapping goals... -- Ben G On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 7:49 AM, Bob Mottram [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Until a true AGI is developed I think it will remain necessary to pay programmers to write programs, at least some of the time. You can't always rely upon voluntary effort, especially when the problem you want to solve is fairly obscure. On 19/04/2008, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Translation: We all (me included) now accept as reasonable that in order to briefly earn a living wage, that we must develop radically new and useful technology and then just give it away. ... Steve Richfield The above is obviously a straw man statement ... but I think it **is** true these days that open-sourcing one's code is a viable way to get one's software vision realized, and is not necessarily contradictory with making a profit. This doesn't mean that OSS is the only path, nor that it's necessarily an easy thing to make work... -- Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The Strange Loop of AGI Funding: now logically proved!
On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 1:01 PM, Pei Wang [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: PREMISES: (1) AGI is one of the most complicated problem in the history of science, and therefore requires substantial funding for it to happen. Potentially, though, massively distributed, collaborative open-source software development could render your first premise false ... (2) Since all previous attempts failed, investors and funding agencies have enough reason to wait until a recognizable breakthrough to put their money in. (3) Since the people who have the money are usually not AGI researchers (so won't read papers and books), a breakthrough becomes recognizable to them only by impressive demos. (4) If the system is really general-purpose, then if it can give an impressive demo on one problem, it should be able to solve all kinds of problems to roughly the same level. (5) If a system already can solve all kinds of problems, then the research has mostly finished, and won't need funding anymore. CONCLUSION: AGI research will get funding when and only when the funding is no longer needed anymore. Q.E.D. :-( Pei --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The Strange Loop of AGI Funding: now logically proved!
Potentially, though, massively distributed, collaborative open-source software development could render your first premise false ... Though it is unlikely to do so, because collaborative open-source projects are best suited to situations in which the fundamental ideas behind the design has been solved. I believe I've solved the fundamental issues behind the Novamente/OpenCog design... Time and effort will tell if I'm right ;-) ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The Strange Loop of AGI Funding: now logically proved!
On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 5:35 PM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Pei: I don't really want a big gang at now (that will only waste the time of mine and the others), but a small-but-good gang, plus more time for myself --- which means less group debates, I guess. ;-) Alternatively, you could open your problems for group discussion think-tanking... I'm surprised that none of you systembuilders do this. That is essentially what I'm doing with OpenCog ... but it's a big job, just preparing stuff in terms of documentation and code and designs so that others have a prayer of understanding it ... ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] The Strange Loop of AGI Funding: now logically proved!
YKY, I believe I've solved the fundamental issues behind the Novamente/OpenCog design... It's hard to tell whether you have really solved the AGI problem, at this stage. ;) Understood... Also, your AGI framework has a lot of non-standard, home-brew stuff (especially the knowledge representation and logic). I bet there are some merits in your system, but is it really so compelling that everybody has to learn it and do it that way? I don't claim that the Novamente/OpenCog design is the **only** way ... but I do note that the different parts are carefully designed to interoperate together in subtle ways, so replacing any one component w/ some standard system won't work. For instance, replacing PLN with some more popular but more limited probabilistic logic framework, would break a lot of other stuff... Creating a standard / common framework is not easy. Right now I think we lack such a consensus. So the theorists are not working together. One thing that stuck out at the 2006 AGI Workshop and AGI-08 conference, was the commonality between several different approaches, for instance -- my Novamente approach -- Nick Cassimatis's Polyscheme system -- Stan Franklin's LIDA approach -- Sam Adams (IBM) Joshua Blue -- Alexei Samsonovich's BICA architecture Not that these are all the same design ... there are very real differences ... but there are also a lot of deep parallels. Novamente seems to be more fully fleshed out than these overall, but each of these guys has thought through specific aspects more deeply than I have. Also, John Laird (SOAR creator) is moving SOAR in a direction that's a lot closer to the Goertzel/Cassimatis/Franklin/Adams style system than his prior approaches ... All the above approaches are -- integrative, involving multiple separate components tightly bound together in a high-level cognitive architecture -- reliant to some extent on formal inference (along with subsymbolic methods) -- clearly testable/developable in a virtual worlds setting I would bet that with appropriate incentives all of the above researchers could be persuaded to collaborate on a common AI project -- without it degenerating into some kind of useless committee-think... Let's call these approaches LIVE, for short -- Logic-incorporating, Integrative, Virtually Embodied On the other hand, when you look at -- Pei Wang's approach, which is interesting but is fundamentally committed to a particular form of uncertain logic that no other AGI approach accepts -- Selmer Bringsjord's approach, which is founded on the notion that standard predicate logic alone is The Answer -- Hugo de Garis's approach which is based on brain emulation you're looking at interesting approaches that are not really compatible with the LIVE approach ... I'd say, you could not viably bring these guys into a collaborative AI project based on the LIVE approach... So, I do think more collaboration and co-thinking could occur than currently does ... but also that there are limits due to fundamentally different understandings OpenCog is general enough to support any approach falling within the LIVE category, and a number of other sorts of approaches as well (e.g. a variety of neural net based architectures). But it is not **completely** general and doesn't aim to me ... IMO, a completely general AGI development framework is just basically, say, C++ and Linux ;-) -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] An Open Letter to AGI Investors
We may well see a variety of proto-AGI applications in different domains, sorta midway between narrow-AI and human-level AGI, including stuff like -- maidbots -- AI financial traders that don't just execute machine learning algorithms, but grok context, adapt to regime changes, etc. -- NL question answering systems that grok context and piece together info from different sources -- artificial scientists capable of formulating nonobvious hypotheses and validating them via data analysis, including doing automated data preprocessing, etc. And not to forget, of course, smart virtual pets and avatars in games and virtual worlds ;-)) --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] An Open Letter to AGI Investors
Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] database access fast enough?
Hi Mark, This is, by the way, my primary complaint about Novamente -- far too much energy, mind-space, time, and effort has gone into optimizing and repeatedly upgrading the custom atom table that should have been built on top of existing tools instead of being built totally from scratch. Really, work on the AtomTable has been a small percentage of work on the Novamente Cognition Engine ... and, the code running the AtomTable is now pretty much the same as it was in 2001 (though it was tweaked to make it 64-bit compatible, back in 2004 ... and there has been ongoing bug-removal as well...). We wrote some new wrappers for the AtomTable last year (based on STL containers), but that didn't affect the internals, just the API. It's true that a highly-efficient, highly-customizable graph database could potentially serve the role of the AtomTable, within the NCE or OpenCog. But that observation is really not such a big deal. Potentially, one could just wrap someone else's graph DB behind the 2007 AtomTable API, and this change would be completely transparent to the AI processes using the AtomTable. However, I'm not convinced this would be a good idea. There are a lot of useful specialized indices in the AtomTable, and replicating all this in some other graph DB would wind up being a lot of work ... and we could use that time/effort on other stuff instead Using a relational DB rather than a graph DB is not appropriate for the NCE design, however. But we've been over this before... And, this is purely a software implementation issue rather than an AI issue, of course. The NCE and OpenCog designs require **some** graph or hypergraph DB which supports the manual and automated creation of complex customized indices ... and supports refined cognitive control over what lives on disk and what lives in RAM, rather than leaving this up to some non-intelligent automated process. Given these requirements, the choice of how to realize them in software is not THAT critical ... and what we have there now works -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] database access fast enough?
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 2:42 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Really, work on the AtomTable has been a small percentage of work on the Novamente Cognition Engine ... and, the code running the AtomTable is now pretty much the same as it was in 2001 (though it was tweaked to make it 64-bit compatible, back in 2004 ... and there has been ongoing bug-removal as well...). And . . . and . . . and . . . :-) It's far more than you're admitting to yourself.:-) That's simply not true, but I know of no way to convince you. The AtomTable work was full-time work for a two guys for a few months in 2001, and since then it's been occasional part-time tweaking by two people who have been full-time engaged on other projects. We wrote some new wrappers for the AtomTable last year (based on STL containers), but that didn't affect the internals, just the API. Which is what everything should have been designed around anyways -- so effectively, last year was a major breaking change that affected *all* the software written to the old API. Yes, but calls to the AT were already well-encapsulated within the code, so changing from the old API to the new has not been a big deal. Absolutely. That's what I'm pushing for. Could you please, please publish the 2007 AtomTable API? That's actually far, far more important than the code behind it. Please, please . . . . publish the spec today . . . . pretty please with a cherry on top? It'll be done as part of the initial OpenCog release, which will be pretty soon now ... I don't have a date yet though... However, I'm not convinced this would be a good idea. There are a lot of useful specialized indices in the AtomTable, and replicating all this in some other graph DB would wind up being a lot of work ... and we could use that time/effort on other stuff instead Which (pardon me, but . . . ) clearly shows that you're not a professional software engineer I'm not but many other members of the Novamente team are My contention is that you all should be *a lot* further along than you are. You have more talent than anyone else but are moving at a truly glacial pace. 90% of Novamente LLC's efforts historically have gone into various AI consulting projects that pay the bills. Now, about 60% is going into consulting projects, and 40% is going into the virtual pet brain project We have very rarely had funding to pay folks to work on AGI, so we've worked on it in bits and pieces here and there... Sad, but true... I understand that you believe that this is primarily due to other reasons but *I am telling you* that A LOT of it is also your own fault due to your own software development choices. You're wrong, but arguing the point over and over isn't getting us anywhere. Worse, fundamentally, currently, you're locking *everyone* into *your* implementation of the atom table. Well, that will not be the case in OpenCog. The OpenCog architecture will be such that other containers could be inserted if desired. Why not let someone else decide whether or not it is worth their time and effort to implement those specialized indices on another graph DB of their choice? If you would just open up the API and maybe accept some good enhancements (or, maybe even, if necessary, some changes) to it? Yes, that's going to happen within OpenCog. Using a relational DB rather than a graph DB is not appropriate for the NCE design, however. Incorrect. If the API is identical and the speed is identical, whether it is a relational db or a graph db *behind the scenes* is irrelevant. Design to your API -- *NOT* to the underlying technology. You keep making this mistake. The speed will not be identical for an important subset of queries, because of intrinsic limitations of the B-tree datastructures used inside RDB's. We discussed this before. Seriously -- I think that you're really going to be surprised at how fast OpenCog might take off if you'd just relax some control and concentrate on the specifications and the API rather than the implementation issues that you're currently wasting time on. I am optimistic about the development speedup we'll see from OpenCog, but not for the reason you cite. Rather, I think that by opening it up in an intelligent way, we're simply going to get a lot more people involved, contributing their code, their time, and their ideas. This will accelerate things considerably, if all goes well. I repeat that NO implementation time has been spent on the AtomTable internals for quite some time now. A few weeks was spent on the API last year, by one person. I'm not sure why you want to keep exaggerating the time put into that component, when after all you weren't involved in its development at all (and I didn't even know you when the bulk of that development was being done!!) I don't care if, in OpenCog, someone replaces the AtomTable internals with something
Re: [agi] Posting Strategies - A Gentle Reminder
These things of course require a balance. In many academic or corporate fora, radical innovation is frowned upon so profoundly (in spite of sometimes being praised and desired, on the surface, but in a confused and not fully sincere way), that it's continually necessary to remind people of the need to open their minds and consider the possibility that some of their assumptions are wrong. OTOH, in **this** forum, we have a lot of openness and open-mindedness, which is great ... but the downside is, people who THINK they have radical new insights but actually don't, tend to get a LOT of attention, often to the detriment of more interesting yet less radical on the surface discussions. I do find that most posters on this list seem to have put a lot of thought (as well as a lot of feeling) into their ideas and opinions. However, it's frustrating when people re-tread issues over and over in a way that demonstrates they've never taken the trouble to carefully study what's been done before. I think it can often be super-valuable to approach some issue afresh, without studying the literature first -- so as to get a brand-new view. But then, before venting one's ideas in a public forum, one should check one's ideas against the literature (in the idea-validation phase .. after the idea-generation phase) to see whether they're original, whether they're contradicted by well-thought-out arguments, etc. -- Ben G -- Ben On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Bob Mottram [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Good advice. There are of course sometimes people who are ahead of the field, but in conversation you'll usually find that the genuine inovators have a deep - bordering on obsessive - knowledge of the field that they're working in and are willing to demonstrate/test their claims to anyone even remotely interested. On 14/04/2008, Brad Paulsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear Fellow AGI List Members: Just thought I'd remind the good members of this list about some strategies for dealing with certain types of postings. Unfortunately, the field of AI/AGI is one of those areas where anybody with a pulse and a brain thinks they can design a program that thinks. Must be easy, right? I mean, I can do it so how hard can it be to put me in a can? Well, that's what some very smart people in the 1940's, '50's and into the 1960's thought. They were wrong. Most of them now admit it. So, on AI-related lists, we have to be very careful about the kinds of conversations on which we spend our valuable time. Here are some guidelines. I realize most people here know this stuff already. This is just a gentle reminder. If a posting makes grandiose claims, is dismissive of mainstream research, techniques, and institutions or the author claims to have special knowledge that has apparently been missed (or dismissed) by all of the brilliant scientific/technical minds who go to their jobs at major corporations and universities every day (and are paid for doing so), and also by every Nobel Laureate for the last 20 years, this posting should be ignored. DO NOT RESPOND to these types of postings: positively or negatively. The poster is, obviously, either irrational or one of the greatest minds of our time. In the former case, you know they're full of it, I know they're full of it, but they will NEVER admit that. You will never win an argument with an irrational individual. In the latter case, stop and ask yourself: Why is somebody that fantastically smart posting to this mailing list? He or she is, obviously, smarter than everyone here. Why does he/she need us to validate his or her accomplishments/knowledge by posting on this list? He or she should have better things to do and, besides, we probably wouldn't be able to understand (appreciate) his/her genius anyhow. The only way to deal with postings like this is to IGNORE THEM. Don't rise to the bait. Like a bad cold, they will be irritating for a while, but they will, eventually, go away. Cheers, Brad agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] How Bodies of Knowledge Grow
FWIW, I'll note that a heavy focus on metrics and testing has been part of every US government funded AI project in history ... and this focus has not gotten them very far, generally speaking ... -- Ben G On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: MW: I believe that I was also quite clear with my follow-on comment of a cart before the horse problem. Once we know how to acquire and store knowledge, then we can develop metrics for testing it -- but, for now, it's too early to go after the problem. as well. You're basically agreeing with what I said you said, which wasn't meant to be disparaging. You're putting testing, or metrics for testing, later, - and I imagine few AI-ers would disagree with you. I'm suggesting that won't work - and that a new cog. sci. synthesis is beginning - just beginning - to emerge here. I don't mind tantrums, but there might as well be some point to them. --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Big Dog
Peruse the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Wwfeature=related Of course, they are only showing the best stuff. And I am sure there is plenty of work left to do. But from the variety of behaviors that are displayed, I would say that the problem of quadraped walking is surprisingly well solved. apparently it's way easier than biped locomotion... ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Unsupervised grammar mining from text [was GSoC: Learning Simple Grammars]
I looked through the ADIOS papers... It's interesting work, and it reminds me of a number of other things, including -- Borzenko's work, http://proto-mind.com/SAHIN.pdf -- Denis Yuret's work on mutual information based grammar learning, from the late 90's -- Robert Hecht-Nielsen's much-publicized work a couple years back, on automated language learning and generation -- Tony Smith's work on automated learning of function-word based grammars from text, done in his MS thesis from University of Calgary in the 90's Looking at these various things together, it does seem clear that one can extract a lot of syntactic structure from free text in an unsupervised manner. It is unclear whether one can get the full syntactic subtlety of everyday English though. Every researcher in this area seems to get to a certain stage (mining the simpler aspects of English syntax), and then never get any further. However, I have another complaint to make. Let's say you succeed with this, and make an English-language-syntax recognizer that works, say, as well as the link parser, by pure unsupervised learning. That is really cool but ... so what? Syntax parsing is already not the bottleneck for AGI, we already have decent parsers. The bottleneck is semantic understanding. Having a system that can generate random sentences is not very useful, nor is having a bulky inelegant automatically learned formal-grammar model of English. If one wants to hand-craft mapping rules taking syntax parses into logical relations, one is better off with a hand-crafted grammar than a messier learned one. If one wants to have the mapping from syntax into semantics be learned, then probably one is better off having syntax be learned in a coherent overall experiential-learning process -- i.e. as part of a system learning how to interact in a world -- rather than having syntax learned in an artificial, semantics-free manner via corpus-mining. In other words: suppose you could make ADIOS work for real ... how would that help along the path of AGI? -- Ben G On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 8:46 AM, Evgenii Philippov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 7:37 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For instance, I'll be curious whether ADIOS's automatically inferred grammars can deal with recursive phrase structure, with constructs like the person with whom I ate dinner, and so forth ADIOS papers have a lot of remarks like recusion is not implemented, but I think it IS able to deal with THIS kind of recusion... But this is TBD---I am not sure. e On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 7:57 AM, Evgenii Philippov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello folks, On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 11:06 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In general, I personally have lost interest in automated inference of grammars from text corpuses, though I did play with that in the 90's (and got bad results like everybody else). Uh oh! My current top-priority is playing with ADIOS algorithm for unsupervised grammar learning, which is based on extended Hidden Markov Models. Its results are plainly fantastic---it is able to create a working grammar not only for English, but also for many other languages, plus languages with spaces removed, plus DNA structure, protein structure, etc etc etc. Some results are described in Zach Solan's papers and the algorithm itself is described in his dissertation. http://www.tau.ac.il/~zsolan/papers/ZachSolanThesis.pdf http://adios.tau.ac.il/ And its grammars are completely comprehensible for a human. (See the homepage, papers and the thesis for diagrams.) Also, they can very easily be used for language generation, and Z Solan did a lot of experiments with this. It has no relation to Link Grammar though. Automated inference of grammar from language used in embodied situations interests me a lot ... and cheating via using hand-created NLP tools may be helpful too... But I sort of feel like automated inference of grammars from corpuses may be a HARDER problem than learning grammar based on embodied experience... which is hard enough... ADIOS solves this hard problem easily. Some or all modifications of ADIOS are memory-intensive though, I did not implement it completely yet. I am doing it in Java. Also, Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/ shows no evidence of substantial subsequent work of other people in the direction of ADIOS. OTOH we're talking about research here and nobody's intuition is perfect ... so what you're describing could potentially be a great GSOC project mentored by YOU not me .. I don't want to impose my own personal intuition and taste
[agi] Fwd: [DIV10] opportunity for graduate studies in evolution of human creativity
the attribute level because it reflects understanding at the conceptual level, such as analogical transfer (e.g. of the concept HANDLE from KNIFE to CUP), or the knowledge that two artifacts are complementary (e.g. MORTAR and PESTLE). The program then postulates 'lineages', i.e. patterns of relatedness, amongst the artifacts that takes into account both externally driven change (e.g. trade) and internally driven change (e.g. blending of different traditions) using as an initial data set decorated ceramics from Easter Island. The program has the potential to be used for other elements of culture (e.g. gestures or languages); indeed to reconstruct the cultural evolution of the various interacting facets of human worldviews. In sum, the proposed research advances a promising and innovative approach to the study of cultural evolution, with implications that extend across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. It tackles questions that lie at the foundation of who we are and what makes us distinctive. -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Logical Satisfiability...Get used to it.
it could contain inconsistencies, but you are going to have that problem with any inductive system.) If you are going to be using a rational-based AGI method, then you are going to want some theories that exhibit critical reasoning. These kinds of theories might turn out to be the keystone in developing more sophisticated models about the world and reevaluating less sophisticated models. Jim Bromer --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Novamente's next 15 minutes of fame...
We haven't launched anything public yet (and I'm not sure when we will) but the prototype experiment shown in that machinima was done in Second Life, yeah ... We have also experimented with other virtual worlds such as Multiverse... Ben G On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Rafael C.P. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is it running inside Second Life already or it's another enviroment? (sorry I don't know SL very well) On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 11:40 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Nothing has been publicly released yet, it's still at the research-prototype stage ... I'll announce when we have some kind of product release... ben On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 5:39 PM, Jim Bromer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It sounds interesting. Can anyone go and try it, or does it cost money or something. Is it set up already? Jim Bromer On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 6:54 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19726495.700-virtual-pets-can-learn-just-like-babies.html -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- = Rafael C.P. = agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Logical Satisfiability...Get used to it.
Thank you for your politeness and your insightful comments. I am going to quit this group because I have found that it is a pretty bad sign when the moderator mocks an individual for his religious beliefs. FWIW, I wasn't joking about your algorithm's putative divine inspiration in my role as moderator, but rather in my role as individual list participant ;-) Sorry that my sense of humor got on your nerves. I've had that effect on people before! Really though: if you're going to post messages in forums populated by scientific rationalists, claiming divine inspiration for your ideas, you really gotta expect **at minimum** some good-natured ribbing... ! -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Logical Satisfiability...Get used to it.
My judgment as list moderator: 1) Discussions of particular, speculative algorithms for solving SAT are not really germane for this list 2) Announcements of really groundbreaking new SAT algorithms would certainly be germane to the list 3) Discussions of issues specifically regarding the integration of SAT solvers into AGI architectures are highly relevant to this list 4) If you think some supernatural being placed an insight in your mind, you're probably better off NOT mentioning this when discussing the insight in a scientific forum, as it will just cause your idea to be taken way less seriously by a vast majority of scientific-minded people... -- Ben G, List Owner On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 4:41 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I agree with Richard and hereby formally request that Ben chime in. It is my contention that SAT is a relatively narrow form of Narrow AI and not general enough to be on an AGI list. This is not meant, in any way shape or form, to denigrate the work that you are doing. It is very important work. It's just that you're performing the equivalent of presenting a biology paper at a physics convention.:-) - Original Message - From: Jim Bromer To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Sunday, March 30, 2008 11:52 AM Subject: **SPAM** Re: [agi] Logical Satisfiability...Get used to it. On the contrary, Vladimir is completely correct in requesting that the discussion go elsewhere: this has no relevance to the AGI list, and there are other places where it would be pertinent. Richard Loosemore If Ben doesn't want me to continue, I will stop posting to this group. Otherwise please try to understand what I said about the relevance of SAT to AGI and try to address the specific issues that I mentioned. On the other hand, if you don't want to waste your time in this kind of discussion then do just that: Stay out of it. Jim Bromer Jim Bromer agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Logical Satisfiability...Get used to it.
On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 5:09 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 4) If you think some supernatural being placed an insight in your mind, you're probably better off NOT mentioning this when discussing the insight in a scientific forum, as it will just cause your idea to be taken way less seriously by a vast majority of scientific-minded people... Awesome answer! However, only *some* religions believe in supernatural beings and I, personally, have never seen any evidence supporting such a thing. I've got one in a jar in my basement ... but don't worry, I won't let him out till the time is right ;-) ... and so far, all his AI ideas have proved to be absolute bullshit, unfortunately ... though he's done a good job of helping me put hexes on my neighbors... Have you been having such experiences and been avoiding mentioning them because you're afraid for your reputation? Ben, I'm worried about you now.;-) --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Novamente's next 15 minutes of fame...
Nothing has been publicly released yet, it's still at the research-prototype stage ... I'll announce when we have some kind of product release... ben On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 5:39 PM, Jim Bromer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It sounds interesting. Can anyone go and try it, or does it cost money or something. Is it set up already? Jim Bromer On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 6:54 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19726495.700-virtual-pets-can-learn-just-like-babies.html -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Novamente's next 15 minutes of fame...
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19726495.700-virtual-pets-can-learn-just-like-babies.html -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Microsoft Launches Singularity
So if I tell you to handle an object, or a piece of business, like say removing a chair from the house - that word handle is open-ended and gives you vast freedom within certain parameters as to how to apply your hand(s) to that object. Your hands can be applied to move a given box, for example, in a vast if not infinite range of positions and trajectories. Such a general, open concept is of the essence of general intelligence, because it means that you are immediately ready to adapt to new kinds of situation - if your normal ways of handling boxes are blocked, you are ready to seek out or improvise some strange new contorted two-finger hand position to pick up the box - which also count as handling. (And you will have actually done a lot of this). So what is the meaning of handle? Well, to be precise, it doesn't have a/one meaning, and isn't meant to - it has a range of possible meanings/references, and you can choose which is most convenient in the circumstances. Actually I'd make a stronger statement than that. It's not just that we can CHOOSE the meanings of concepts from a fixed menu of possibilities ... we CREATE the meanings of concepts as we use them ... this is how and why concept-meanings continually change over time in individual minds and in cultures... This is parallel to how we create episodic memories as we re-live them, rather than retrieving them as if from a database... These creation processes do however seem to be realizable in digital computer systems, based on my theoretical understanding ... though none of us have done it yet, it's certainly loads of work given current software tools... Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Microsoft Launches Singularity
normal ways of handling boxes are blocked, you are ready to seek out or improvise some strange new contorted two-finger hand position to pick up the box - which also count as handling. (And you will have actually done a lot of this). So what is the meaning of handle? Well, to be precise, it doesn't have a/one meaning, and isn't meant to - it has a range of possible meanings/references, and you can choose which is most convenient in the circumstances. The same principles apply to just about every word in language and every unit of logic and mathematics. But - and correct me - I don't think anyone in AI/AGI is using language or any logico-mathematical systems in this general, open-ended way - the way they are actually meant to be used - and the very foundation of General Intelligence. Language and the other systems are always used by AGI in specific ways to have specific meanings. YKY, typically, wanted a language for his system which had precise meanings. Even Ben, I suspect, may only employ words in an open way, in that their meanings can be changed with experience - but at any given point their meanings will have to be specific. To be capable of generalising as the human brain does - and of true AGI - you have to have a brain that simultaneously processes on at least two if not three levels, with two/three different sign systems - including both general and particular ones. John: Charles: I don't think a General Intelligence could be built entirely out of narrow AI components, but it might well be a relatively trivial add- on. Just consider how much of human intelligence is demonstrably narrow AI (well, not artificial, but you know what I mean). Object recognition, e.g. Then start trying to guess how much of the part that we can't prove a classification for is likely to be a narrow intelligence component. In my estimation (without factual backing) less than 0.001 of our intelligence is General Intellignece, possibly much less. John: I agree that it may be 1%. Oh boy, does this strike me as absurd. Don't have time for the theory right now, but just had to vent. Percentage estimates strike me as a bit silly, but if you want to aim for one, why not look at both your paragraphs, word by word. Don't think might relatively etc. Now which of those words can only be applied to a single type of activity, rather than an open- ended set of activities? Which cannot be instantiated in an open-ended if not infinite set of ways? Which is not a very valuable if not key tool of a General Intelligence, that can adapt to solve problems across domains? Language IOW is the central (but not essential) instrument of human general intelligence - and I can't think offhand of a single world that is not a tool for generalising across domains, including Charles H. and John G.. In fact, every tool you guys use - logic, maths etc. - is similarly general and functions in similar ways. The above strikes me as a 99% failure to understand the nature of general intelligence. Mike you are 100% potentially right with a margin of error of 110%. LOL! Seriously Mike how do YOU indicate approximations? And how are you differentiating general and specific? And declaring relative absolutes and convenient infinitudes... I'm trying to understand your argument. John --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.519 / Virus Database: 269.22.1/1345 - Release Date: 3/26/2008 6:50 PM --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage. agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Instead of an AGI Textbook
Is there some kind of online software that lets a group of people update a Mind Map diagram collaboratively, in the manner of a Wiki page? This would seem critical if a Mind Map is to really be useful for the purpose you suggest... -- Ben On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 8:32 AM, Aki Iskandar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well ... I can take a shot at putting a diagram together. Making Mind Maps is one way I learn any kind of material I want. If the topics in the list(s) are descriptive enough, I can take a shot at putting such a diagram together. It'd be less work to correct it than to make one, right? Hey - whatever helps. For me, it's a win-win. It would help me, and it would help accomplish what you guys are trying to do. Let me know, ~Aki On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:40 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This kind of diagram would certainly be meaningful, but, it would be a lot of work to put together, even more so than a traditional TOC ... On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 11:02 PM, Aki Iskandar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Pei - What about having a tree like diagram that branches out into either: - the different paths / approaches to AGI (for instance: NARS, Novamente, and Richard's, etc.), with suggested readings at those leaves - area of study, with suggested readings at those leaves Or possibly, a Mind Map diagram that shows AGI in the middle, with the approaches stemming from it, and then either sub fields, or a reading list and / or collection of links (though the links may become outdated, dead). Point is, would a diagram help map the field - which caters to the differing approaches, and which helps those wanting to chart a course to their own learning/study ? Thanks, ~Aki On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 9:22 PM, Pei Wang [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben, It is a good start! Of course everyone else will disagree --- like what Richard did and I'm going to do. ;-) I'll try to find the time to provide my list --- at this moment, it will be more like a reading list than a textbook TOC. In the future, it will be integrated into the E-book I'm working on (http://nars.wang.googlepages.com/gti-summary). Compared to yours, mine will contain less math and algorithms, but more psychology and philosophy. I'd like to see what Richard and others want to propose. We shouldn't try to merge them into one wiki page, but several. Pei On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 7:46 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi all, A lot of students email me asking me what to read to get up to speed on AGI. So I started a wiki page called Instead of an AGI Textbook, http://www.agiri.org/wiki/Instead_of_an_AGI_Textbook#Computational_Linguistics Unfortunately I did not yet find time to do much but outline a table of contents there. So I'm hoping some of you can chip in and fill in some relevant hyperlinks on the pages I've created ;-) For those of you too lazy to click the above link, here is the introductory note I put on the wiki page: I've often lamented the fact that there is no advanced undergrad level textbook for AGI, analogous to what Russell and Norvig is for Narrow AI. Unfortunately, I don't have time to write such a textbook, and no one else with the requisite knowledge and ability seems to have the time and inclination either. So, instead of a textbook, I thought it would make sense to outline here what the table of contents of such a textbook might look like, and to fill in each section within each chapter in this TOC with a few links to available online resources dealing with the topic of the section. However, all I found time to do today (March 25, 2008) is make the TOC. Maybe later I will fill in the links on each section's page, or maybe by the time I get around it some other folks will have done it. While nowhere near as good as a textbook, I do think this can be a valuable resource for those wanting to get up to speed on AGI concepts and not knowing where to turn to get started. There are some available AGI bibliographies, but a structured bibliography like this can probably be more useful than an unstructured and heterogeneous one. Naturally my initial TOC represents some of my own biases, but I trust that by having others help edit it, these biases will ultimately come out in the wash. Just to be clear: the idea here is not to present solely AGI material. Rather the idea is to present material that I think students would do well to know, if they want to work on AGI. This includes some AGI, some narrow AI, some
Re: [agi] Instead of an AGI Textbook
Thanks Mark ... let's see how it evolves... I think the problem is not finding a publisher, but rather, finding the time to contribute and refine the content Maybe in a year or two there will be enough good content there that someone with appropriate time and inclination and skill can shape it into a textbook -- Ben On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 9:49 AM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Ben, I have a publisher who would love to publish the result of the wiki as a textbook if you are willing. Mark - Original Message - From: Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2008 7:46 PM Subject: [agi] Instead of an AGI Textbook Hi all, A lot of students email me asking me what to read to get up to speed on AGI. So I started a wiki page called Instead of an AGI Textbook, http://www.agiri.org/wiki/Instead_of_an_AGI_Textbook#Computational_Linguistics Unfortunately I did not yet find time to do much but outline a table of contents there. So I'm hoping some of you can chip in and fill in some relevant hyperlinks on the pages I've created ;-) For those of you too lazy to click the above link, here is the introductory note I put on the wiki page: I've often lamented the fact that there is no advanced undergrad level textbook for AGI, analogous to what Russell and Norvig is for Narrow AI. Unfortunately, I don't have time to write such a textbook, and no one else with the requisite knowledge and ability seems to have the time and inclination either. So, instead of a textbook, I thought it would make sense to outline here what the table of contents of such a textbook might look like, and to fill in each section within each chapter in this TOC with a few links to available online resources dealing with the topic of the section. However, all I found time to do today (March 25, 2008) is make the TOC. Maybe later I will fill in the links on each section's page, or maybe by the time I get around it some other folks will have done it. While nowhere near as good as a textbook, I do think this can be a valuable resource for those wanting to get up to speed on AGI concepts and not knowing where to turn to get started. There are some available AGI bibliographies, but a structured bibliography like this can probably be more useful than an unstructured and heterogeneous one. Naturally my initial TOC represents some of my own biases, but I trust that by having others help edit it, these biases will ultimately come out in the wash. Just to be clear: the idea here is not to present solely AGI material. Rather the idea is to present material that I think students would do well to know, if they want to work on AGI. This includes some AGI, some narrow AI, some psychology, some neuroscience, some mathematics, etc. *** -- Ben -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Instead of an AGI Textbook
Hi Stephen, Ben, Wikipedia has significant overlap with the topic list on the AGIRI Wiki. I propose for discussion the notion that the AGIRI Wiki be content-compatible with Wikipedia along two dimensions: license - authors agree to the GNU Free Documentation License I have no problem with that editorial standards - Wikipedia says that content should be sourced from one or more research papers or textbooks, not just from the personal knowledge of the author, or from some web page. Well, I think it is appropriate that a wiki covering an in-development research area should contain a mix of sourced and non-sourced contents, actually. In many cases it's the non-sourced content that will be the most valuable, because it represents practical knowledge and experience of AGI researchers and developers, which is too new or raw to have been put into the formal literature yet. I concede in advance that most AGIRI Wiki authors will find Wikipedia editorial standards burdensome, To me this is a pretty major point. The challenge with an AGI wiki right now is to get people to contribute quality content at all ... so I'm not psyched about, right now at the starting stage, making them jump through hoops in order to do so. but the benefit would be athat content from the AGIRI Wiki can be used to create new, or improve existing Wikipedia articles. That would be the case so long as the license is in place, it doesn't require everything to be sourced -- appropriate sourcing could always be introduced at the time of porting to Wikipedia. As the author of a load of academic papers, I'm well aware of how irritating and time-consuming it is to properly reference sources. If I have to do that for text I place on the AGIRI wiki, I'm not likely to contribute much to it, just like I don't currently contribute much to Wikipedia. I just don't have the time And if we can agree that on the easy-to-achieve license, content from Wikipedia, e.g. my article on Hierarchical control systems can easily be imported into the AGIRI Wiki. I don't see a problem with the license. Wikipedia is important to AGI, not only as an online encyclopedia that facilitates almost universal access to AGI related topics, but as a target for AI researchers that want to structure the text into a vast knowledge base. Somewhere down the road to self-improvement, an AGI will be reading Wikipedia. Along with the rest of the Web ... for sure ;-) -- Ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Instead of an AGI Textbook
Fair enough, Richard... Again I'll emphasize that the idea of the Instead of an AGI Textbook is not to teach any particular theory or design for AGI, but rather to convey background knowledge that is useful for folks who wish to come to grips with contemporary AGI theories and designs I have articulated my own coherent body of thought regarding AGI as well, but I consider it to best be presented at the research treatise or research paper rather than textbook level... -- Ben G On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 12:55 PM, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A propos of the several branches of discussion about AGI textbooks on this thread... Knowing what I do about the structure and content of the book I am writing, I cannot imagine it being merged as just a set of branch points from other works, like the one growing from Ben's TOC. What I am doing is a coherent body of thought in its own right, with a radically different underlying philosophy, so it really needs to be a standalone project. Richard Loosemore --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Fwd: [agi] Instead of an AGI Textbook
BTW I improved the hierarchical organization of the TOC a bit, to remove the impression that it's just a random grab-bag of topics... http://www.agiri.org/wiki/Instead_of_an_AGI_Textbook ben --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Instead_of_an_AGI_Textbook Challenge !!
OK... I just burned an hour inserting more links and content into http://www.agiri.org/wiki/Instead_of_an_AGI_Textbook I'm burnt out on it for a while, there's too much other stuff on my plate However, I have a challenge for y'all There are something like 400 people subscribed to this list... If 25 of you spend 30 minutes each, during the next week, adding relevant content to the non-textbook wiki page ... then at the end of the week we will have a pretty nice knowledge resource for newbies to AGI. And we will probably all learn something from following up each others' references ... And then I'll save a lot of time during the next year, because when someone emails me and asks me what they should read to get up to speed on the general thinking in the AGI field, I'll just point them to the non-textbook ;-) -- Ben -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Re: Instead_of_an_AGI_Textbook Challenge !!
Ah, one more note... Due to its location on the AGIRI wiki, the Instead_of_an_AGI_Textbook automatically links into the Mind Ontology http://www.agiri.org/wiki/Mind_Ontology that I created in a fit of mania one weekend a couple years ago. So, just remember that if you decide to add content to the non-textbook, rather than just links, you can link it into the Mind Ontology, expand the Mind Ontology, etc. The idea of the Mind Ontology was to create a unified common vocabulary for AGI thinkers/researchers... It didn't really work because almost no one paid attention, but it was a sort of fun weekend ;-) -- Ben On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 10:43 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK... I just burned an hour inserting more links and content into http://www.agiri.org/wiki/Instead_of_an_AGI_Textbook I'm burnt out on it for a while, there's too much other stuff on my plate However, I have a challenge for y'all There are something like 400 people subscribed to this list... If 25 of you spend 30 minutes each, during the next week, adding relevant content to the non-textbook wiki page ... then at the end of the week we will have a pretty nice knowledge resource for newbies to AGI. And we will probably all learn something from following up each others' references ... And then I'll save a lot of time during the next year, because when someone emails me and asks me what they should read to get up to speed on the general thinking in the AGI field, I'll just point them to the non-textbook ;-) -- Ben -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Microsoft Launches Singularity
Now, let me ask you a question: Do you believe that all AI / AGI researchers are toiling over all this for the challenge, or purely out of interest? I doubt that as well. Surely there are those elements as drivers - BUT SO IS MONEY. Aki, you don't seem to understand the psychology of the AGI researcher very well. Firstly, academic AGI researchers are not in it for the $$, and are unlikely to profit from their creations no matter how successful. Yes, spinoffs from academia to industry exist, but the point is that academic work is motivated by love of science and desire for STATUS more so than desire for money. Next, Singularitarian AGI researchers, even if in the business domain (like myself), value the creation of AGI far more than the obtaining of material profits. I am very interested in deriving $$ from incremental steps on the path to powerful AGI, because I think this is one of the better methods available for funding AGI RD work. But deriving $$ from human-level AGI really is not a big motivator of mine. To me, once human-level AGI is obtained, we have something of dramatically more interest than accumulation of any amount of wealth. Yes, I assume that if I succeed in creating a human-level AGI, then huge amounts of $$ for research will come my way, along with enough personal $$ to liberate me from needing to manage software development contracts or mop my own floor. That will be very nice. But that's just not the point. I'm envisioning a population of cockroaches constantly fighting over crumbs of food on the floor. Then a few of the cockroaches -- let's call them the Cockroach Robot Club -- decide to spend their lives focused on creating a superhuman robot which will incidentally allow cockroaches to upload into superhuman form with superhuman intelligence. And the other cockroaches insist that Cockroach Robot Club's motivation in doing this must be a desire to get more crumbs of food. After all, just **IMAGINE** how many crumbs of food you'll be able to get with that superhuman robot on your side!!! Buckets full of crumbs!!! ;-) -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Microsoft Launches Singularity
Hi Aki, Even as a pure scientist, you can accomplish more in research by producing wealth, than depending on gov't grants. I say gov't grants because private investment is probably years away from now. The topic of financing got a lot of attention at AGI 08. Well, if you're an AGI researcher and believe that government funding isn't going to push AGI forward ... and that unfunded or lightly-funded open-source initiatives like OpenCog won't work either ... then there are two approaches, right? 1) You can try to do like Jeff Hawkins, and make a pile of $$ doing something AGI-unrelated, and then use the ensuing $$ for AGI 2) You can try to make $$ from stuff that's along the incremental path to AGI I'm trying approach 2 but it has its pitfalls. Yet so of course does approach 1 -- Hawkins succeeded and so have others whom I know, but it's a tiny minority of those who have tried... being a great AGI researcher does not necessarily make you great at business, nor even at narrow-AI biz applications... There are no easy answers to the problem of being ahead of your time ... yet it's those of us who are willing to push ahead in spite of being out of synch with society's priorities, that ultimately shift society's priorities (and in this case, may shift way more than that...) -- Ben G --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Novamente study
Hi, The PLN book should be out by that date ... I'm currently putting in some final edits to the manuscript... Also, in April and May I'll be working on a lot of documentation regarding plans for OpenCog. While this doesn't include all Novamente's proprietary stuff, it will certainly tell you enough to give you a way better understanding of what Novamente, as well as OpenCog, is all about... -- Ben On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 1:28 PM, Derek Zahn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben, It seems to me that Novamente is widely considered the most promising and advanced AGI effort around (at least of the ones one can get any detailed technical information about), so I've been planning to put some significant effort into understanding it with a view toward deciding whether I think you're on the right track or not (with as little hand-waving, faith, or bigotry as possible in my conclusion). To do that properly, I am waiting for your book on Probabilistic Logic Networks to be published. Amazon says July 2008... is that date correct? Thanks! agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Instead of an AGI Textbook
Hi all, A lot of students email me asking me what to read to get up to speed on AGI. So I started a wiki page called Instead of an AGI Textbook, http://www.agiri.org/wiki/Instead_of_an_AGI_Textbook#Computational_Linguistics Unfortunately I did not yet find time to do much but outline a table of contents there. So I'm hoping some of you can chip in and fill in some relevant hyperlinks on the pages I've created ;-) For those of you too lazy to click the above link, here is the introductory note I put on the wiki page: I've often lamented the fact that there is no advanced undergrad level textbook for AGI, analogous to what Russell and Norvig is for Narrow AI. Unfortunately, I don't have time to write such a textbook, and no one else with the requisite knowledge and ability seems to have the time and inclination either. So, instead of a textbook, I thought it would make sense to outline here what the table of contents of such a textbook might look like, and to fill in each section within each chapter in this TOC with a few links to available online resources dealing with the topic of the section. However, all I found time to do today (March 25, 2008) is make the TOC. Maybe later I will fill in the links on each section's page, or maybe by the time I get around it some other folks will have done it. While nowhere near as good as a textbook, I do think this can be a valuable resource for those wanting to get up to speed on AGI concepts and not knowing where to turn to get started. There are some available AGI bibliographies, but a structured bibliography like this can probably be more useful than an unstructured and heterogeneous one. Naturally my initial TOC represents some of my own biases, but I trust that by having others help edit it, these biases will ultimately come out in the wash. Just to be clear: the idea here is not to present solely AGI material. Rather the idea is to present material that I think students would do well to know, if they want to work on AGI. This includes some AGI, some narrow AI, some psychology, some neuroscience, some mathematics, etc. *** -- Ben -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Java spreading activation library released
Hi Stephen, I think this approach makes sense. In Novamente/OpenCog, we don't use spreading activation, but we use an economic attention allocation mechanism that is similar in spirit (though subtly different in dynamics). The motivation is similar: You just can't use complex, abstract reasoning methods for everything, because they're too expensive. So this sort of simple heuristic approach is useful in many cases, as an augmentation to more precise methods. -- Ben On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 7:53 PM, Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: While programming my bootstrap English dialog system, I needed a spreading activation library for the purpose of enriching the discourse context with conceptually related terms. For example given that there is a human-habitable room that both speakers know of, then it is reasonable to assume that on the table has meaning on the piece of furniture in the room rather than the meaning subject to negotiation. This assumption can be deductively concluded by an inference engine given the room as a fact, and rules concluding the typical objects that are found in rooms. But performing theorem proving during utterance comprehension is not cognitively plausible, and would take too long for real-time performance. Suppose that offline deductive inference provides justifications (e.g. proof traces) to support learned links between rooms and tables, then spreading activation is a well known algorithm for searching semantic graphs for relevant linked nodes. A literature search provided much useful information regarding spreading activation, also known as marker passing, especially about natural language disambiguation, which is my topic of interest. Because there are no general purpose spreading activation Java libraries available, I wrote one and just released it on the Texai SourceForge project site. The download includes Javadoc, an overview document, source code, all required jars (Java libraries), unit tests and examples, and GraphViz illustrations of sample graphs. Performance is acceptable: 20,000 nodes can be activated in 24 ms with one thread on my 2.8 GHz CPU. Furthermore the code is multi-threaded and it gets about a 30% speed increase by using two CPU cores. Even if you are not interested in spreading activation, the Java code is a clear example of using a CyclicBarrier and CountdownLatch to control worker threads with a driver. A practice I recommend to you all is to improve Wikipedia articles on AI topics of interest. Therefore I elaborated the existing article on spreading activation to include the algorithm and its variations. Cheers. -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
