Re: [agi] Instead of an AGI Textbook
Richard, Unfortunately I cannot bring myself to believe this will help anyone new to the area. The main reason is that this is only a miscellaneous list of topics, with nothing to indicate a comprehensive theory or a unifying structure. I do not ask for a complete unified theory, of course, but something more than just a collection of techniques is needed if this is to be a textbook. I have my own comprehensive theory and unifying structure for AGI... Pei has his... You have yours... Stan Franklin has his... Etc. These have been published with varying levels of detail in various places ... I'll be publishing more of mine this year, in the PLN book, and then in the OpenCog documentation and plans ... but many of the conceptual aspects of my approach were already mentioned in The Hidden Pattern My goal in Instead of an AGI Textbook is **not** to present anyone's unifying theory (not even my own) but rather to give pointers to **what information a student should learn, in order to digest the various unifying theories being proposed**. To put it another way: Aside from a strong undergrad background in CS and good programming skills, what would I like someone to know about in order for them to work on Novamente or OpenCog or some other vaguely similar AI project? Not everything in my suggested TOC is actually used in Novamente or OpenCog... but even the stuff that isn't, is interesting to know about if you're going to work on these things, just to have a general awareness of the various approaches that have been taken to these problems... A second reason for being skeptical is that there is virtually no cognitive psychology in this list - just a smattering of odd topics. Yes, that's a fair point -- that's a shortcoming of the draft TOC as I posted it. Please feel free to add some additional, relevant cog psych topics to the page ;-) -- 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
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 9:39 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Richard, Unfortunately I cannot bring myself to believe this will help anyone new to the area. The main reason is that this is only a miscellaneous list of topics, with nothing to indicate a comprehensive theory or a unifying structure. Actually it's not a haphazardly assembled miscellaneous list of topics ... it was assembled with a purpose and structure in mind... Specifically, I was thinking of OpenCog, and what it would be good for someone to know in order to have a relatively full grasp of the OpenCog design. As such, the topic list may contain stuff that is not relevant to your AGI design, and also may miss stuff that is critical to your AGI design... But the non textbook is NOT intended as a presentation of OpenCog or any other specific AGI theory or framework. Rather, it is indeed, largely, a grab bag of relevant prerequisite information ... along with some information on specific AGI approaches... One problem I've found is that the traditional undergrad CS or AI education does not actually give all the prerequisites for really grasping AGI theories ... often topics are touched in a particularly non-AGI-ish way ... for instance, neural nets are touched but complex dynamics in NN's are skipped ... Bayes nets are touched but issues involving combining probability with more complex logic operations are skipped ... neurons are discussed but theories of holistic brain function are skipped ... etc. The most AGI-relevant stuff always seems to get skipped for lack of time..! 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
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. That would be great -- however I may integrate your reading list into my TOC ... as I really think there is value in a structured and categorized reading list rather than just a list... I know every researcher will have their own foci, but I'm going to try to unify different researchers' suggestions into a single TOC with a sensible organization, because I would like to cut through the confusion faced by students starting out in this field of research... 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
Yeah, the AGIRI wiki has been there for years ... the hard thing is getting people to contribute to it (and I myself rarely find the time...) But if others don't chip in, I'll complete my little non-textbook myself sometime w/in the next month ... -- Ben On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:52 PM, Aki Iskandar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ok - that was silly of me. After visiting the link (which was after I sent the email), I noticed that is WAS a Wiki. My apologies. ~Aki On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 9:47 PM, Aki Iskandar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks Ben. AGI is a daunting field to say the least. Many scientific domains are involved in various degrees. I am very happy to see something like this, because knowing where to start is not so obvious for the beginner. I actually recently purchased Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach - but only because I did not know where else to start. I have the programming down - but, like most others, I don't know *what* to program. I really hope that others will contribute to your TOC. In fact, I am willing to put up and host an AGI Wiki if theis community would find it of use. I'd need a few weeks - because I don't have the time right now - but it is a worthwhile endeavor, and I'm happy to do it. ~Aki On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 6:46 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 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 -- Aki R. Iskandar [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Aki R. Iskandar [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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
I actually recently purchased Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach - but only because I did not know where else to start. It's a very good book ... if you view it as providing insight into various component technologies of potential use for AGI ... rather than as saying very much directly about AGI... I have the programming down - but, like most others, I don't know *what* to program. Well I hope to solve that problem in May -- via releasing the initial version of OpenCog, plus a load of wiki pages indicating stuff that, IMO, if implemented, tuned and tested would allow OpenCog to be turned into a powerful AGI system ;-) -- Ben 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
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 11:07 PM, Aki Iskandar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks Ben. That is really exciting stuff / news. I'm loking forward to OpenCog. BTW - is OpenCog mainly in C++ (like Novamente) ? Or is it translations (to Java, or other languages) of concepts so that others can code and add to it more readily and quickly? yes, the OpenCog core system is C++ , though there are some peripheral code libraries (e.g. the RelEx natural language preprocessor) which are in Java... 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
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 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 -- Aki R. Iskandar [EMAIL PROTECTED] agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD
[agi] Microsoft Launches Singularity
http://www.codeplex.com/singularity --- 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] Seeking student programmers for summer 2008: OpenCog meets Google Summer of Code
Hi all, Sorry for the short notice, but I was out of town last week with limited email access... The Singularity Institute for AI was accepted as a mentoring organization for Google's 2008 Summer of Code project, with a focus on the OpenCog open-source AGI project (www.opencog.org). See http://code.google.com/soc/2008/siai/about.html What this means is that programmers who want to spend Summer 2008 working on open-source AI code within the OpenCog framework, and get paid $5000 by Google for this, can submit proposals for OpenCog projects, within the GSOC website. Student programmers have the interval btw March 24 and March 31 to submit proposals, then accepted proposals will be announced on the GSOC website on April 11. If you have a particular proposal idea you'd like to discuss, best option is to post it on the OpenCog Google Group mailing list (find info on opencog.org). Some proposal ideas are found here http://opencog.org/wiki/Ideas but we're quite open to other suggestions as well, in the freewheeling spirit of GSOC... Thanks 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]
If the test is defined to refer ONLY to conversations about a sufficiently narrow domain of objects in a toy virtual world ... and they encode enough knowledge ... then maybe they could brute-force past the test... after all there is not that much to say about a desk, a table, a lamp and a box ... or whatever the set of objects in the toy world may be... This is the danger of toy test environments, be they in virtual worlds or physical robotics... ben g On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Unless the details of that modified Turing Test are somehow profoundly flawed, then, yes... ben On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 12:28 PM, Eric B. Ramsay [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So Ben, based on what you are saying, you fully expect them to fail their Turing test? Eric B. Ramsay Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I know Selmer and his group pretty well... It is well done stuff, but it is purely hard-coded-knowledge-based logical inference -- there is no real learning there... It's not so hard to get impressive-looking functionality in toy demo tasks, by hard- coding rules and using a decent logic engine Others have failed at this, so his achievement is worthwhile and means his logic engine and formalism are better than most ... but still ... IMO, this is not a very likely path to AGI ... -- Ben On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Ed Porter wrote: Here is an article about RPI's attempt to pass a slightly modified version of the turning test using supercomputers to power their Rascals AI algorithm. http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206903246pri ntable=true The one thing I didn't understand was that they said their Rascals AI algorithm used a theorem proving architectures. I would assume that that would mean it as based on binary logic, and thus would not be sufficiently flexible to model many human thought processes, which are almost certainly more neural net-like, and thus much more probabilistic. Does anybody have any opinions on that. Ed Porter --- 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 | 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 -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Recap/Summary/Thesis Statement
An attractor is a set of states that are repeated given enough time. If agents are killed and not replaced, you can't return to the current state. False. There are certainly attractors that disappear, first seen by Ruelle, Takens, 1971 its called a blue sky catastrophe http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Blue-sky_catastrophe Relatedly, you should look at Mikhail Zak's work on terminal attractors, which occurred in the context of neural nets as I recall These are attractors which a system zooms into for a while, then after a period of staying in them, it zooms out of them They occur when the differential equation generating the dynamical system displaying the attractor involves functions with points of nondifferentiability. Of course, you may be specifically NOT looking for this kind of attractor, in your Friendly AI theory ;-) -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Re: Your mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I tried to fix the problem, let me know if it worked... ben On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben, Can we boot alien off the list? I'm getting awfully tired of his auto-reply emailing me directly *every* time I post. It is my contention that this is UnFriendly behavior (wasting my resources without furthering any true goal of his) and should not be accepted. Mark - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2008 11:56 AM Subject: Re: Your mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thank you for contacting Alienshift. We will respond to your Mail in due time. Please feel free to send positive thoughts in return back to the Universe. [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] 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Some thoughts of an AGI designer
The three most common of these assumptions are: 1) That it will have the same motivations as humans, but with a tendency toward the worst that we show. 2) That it will have some kind of Gotta Optimize My Utility Function motivation. 3) That it will have an intrinsic urge to increase the power of its own computational machinery. There are other assumptions, but these seem to be the big three. And IMO, the truth is likely to be more complex... For instance, a Novamente-based AGI will have an explicit utility function, but only a percentage of the system's activity will be directly oriented toward fulfilling this utility function Some of the system's activity will be spontaneous ... i.e. only implicitly goal-oriented .. and as such may involve some imitation of human motivation, and plenty of radically non-human stuff... 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] What should we do to be prepared?
Agree... I have not followed this discussion in detail, but if you have a concrete proposal written up somewhere in a reasonably compact format, I'll read it and comment -- Ben G On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 1:48 PM, Tim Freeman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hmm. Bummer. No new feedback. I wonder if a) I'm still in Well duh land, b) I'm so totally off the mark that I'm not even worth replying to, or c) I hope being given enough rope to hang myself. :-) I'll read the paper if you post a URL to the finished version, and I somehow get the URL. I don't want to sort out the pieces from the stream of AGI emails, and I don't want to try to provide feedback on part of a paper. -- Tim Freeman http://www.fungible.com [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] 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Brief report on AGI-08
on AGI. Society, including the society of scientists, is starting to wake up to the notion that, given modern technology and science, human-level AGI is no longer a pipe dream but a potential near-term reality. w00t! Of course there is a long way to go in terms of getting this kind of work taken as seriously as it should be, but at least things seem to be going in the right direction. -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] AGI-08 in the news...
http://www.memphisdailynews.com/Editorial/StoryLead.aspx?id=101671 --- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
Sure, AGI needs to handle NL in an open-ended way. But the question is whether the internal knowledge representation of the AGI needs to allow ambiguities, or should we use an ambiguity-free representation. It seems that the latter choice is better. Otherwise, the knowledge stored in episodic memory would be open to interpretations and may need to errors in recall, and similar problems. Rather, I think the right goal is to create an AGI that, in each context, can be as ambiguous as it wants/needs to be in its representation of a given piece of information. Ambiguity allows compactness, and can be very valuable in this regard. Guidance on this issue is provided by the Lojban language. Lojban allows extremely precise expression, but also allows ambiguity as desired. What one finds when speaking Lojban is that sometimes one chooses ambiguity because it lets one make ones utterances shorter. I think the same thing holds in terms of an AGI's memory. An AGI with finite memory resources must sometimes choose to represent relatively unimportant information ambiguously rather than precisely so as to conserve memory. For instance, storing the information A is associated with B is highly ambiguous, but takes little memory. Storing logical information regarding the precise relationship between A and B may take one or more orders of magnitude more information. -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] AGI Metaphysics and spatial biases.
Using informal words, how would you describe the metaphysics or biases currently encoded into the Novamente system? /Robert Wensman This is a good question, and unfortunately I don't have a systematic answer. Biases are encoded in many different aspects of the design, e.g. -- the knowledge representation -- the heuristics within the inference rules (e.g. for temporal and spatial inference) -- the set of predicates and procedures provided as primitives for automated program learning -- various specializations in the architecture (e.g. the use of specialized SpaceServer and TimeServer objects to allow efficient indexing of entities by space and time) and we haven't made an effort to go through and systematize the conceptual biases implicit in the detailed design of all the different parts of the system, although there are plenty of important biases there sorry for the unsatisfying answer but it would take me a couple days of analysis to give you a real answer, and other priorities beckon... -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Solomonoff Induction Question
I am not so sure that humans use uncomputable models in any useful sense, when doing calculus. Rather, it seems that in practice we use computable subsets of an in-principle-uncomputable theory... Oddly enough, one can make statements *about* uncomputability and uncomputable entities, using only computable operations within a formal system... For instance, one can prove that even if x is an uncomputable real number x - x = 0 But that doesn't mean one has to be able to hold *any* uncomputable number x in one's brain... thus is the power of abstraction, and I don't see why AGIs can't have it just like humans do... Ben On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 4:37 PM, Abram Demski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm an undergrad who's been lurking here for about a year. It seems to me that many people on this list take Solomonoff Induction to be the ideal learning technique (for unrestricted computational resources). I'm wondering what justification there is for the restriction to turing-machine models of the universe that Solomonoff Induction uses. Restricting an AI to computable models will obviously make it more realistically manageable. However, Solomonoff induction needs infinite computational resources, so this clearly isn't a justification. My concern is that humans make models of the world that are not computable; in particular, I'm thinking of the way physicists use differential equations. Even if physics itself is computable, the fact that humans use incomputable models of it remains. Solomonoff Induction itself is an incomputable model of intelligence, so an AI that used Solomonoff Induction (even if we could get the infinite computational resources needed) could never understand its own learning algorithm. This is an odd position for a supposedly universal model of intelligence IMHO. My thinking is that a more-universal theoretical prior would be a prior over logically definable models, some of which will be incomputable. Any thoughts? 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Solomonoff Induction Question
This is a general theorem about *strings* in this formal system, but no such string with uncomputable real number can ever be written, so saying that it's a theorem about uncomputable real numbers is an empty set theory (it's a true statement, but it's true in a trivial falsehood, therefore Mars is inhabited by little green men kind of formal sense). Well, but NO uncomputable number can be written, so which theorems about uncomputable numbers are NOT empty in the sense you mean? 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
Hi, I think Ben's text mining approach has one big flaw: it can only reason about existing knowledge, but cannot generate new ideas using words / concepts. Text mining is not an AGI approach, it's merely a possible way of getting knowledge into an AGI. Whether the AGI can generate new ideas is independent of whether it gets knowledge via text mining or via some other means... I want to stress that AGI needs to be able to think at the WORD/CONCEPT level. In order to do this, we need some rules that *rewrite* sentences made up of words, such that the AGI can reason from one sentence to another. Such rewrite rules are very numerous and can be very complex -- for example rules for auxillary words and prepositions, etc. I'm not even sure that such rules can be expressed in FOL easily -- let alone learn them! This seems off somehow -- I don't think reasoning should be implemented on the level of linguistic surface forms. The embodiment approach provides an environment for learning qualitative physics, but it's still different from the common sense domain where knowledge is often verbally expressed. I don't get your point... Most of common sense is about the world in which we live, as embodied social organisms... Embodiment buys you a lot more than qualitative physics. It buys you richly shared social experience, among other things. In fact, it's not the environment that matters, it's the knowledge representation (whether it's expressive enough) and the learning algorithm (how sophisticated it is). I think that all three of these things matter a lot, along with the overall cognitive 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
I'm not talking about inference control here -- I assume that inference control is done in a proper way, and there will still be a problem. You seem to assume that all knowledge = what is explicitly stated in online texts. So you deny that there is a large body of implicit knowledge other than inference control rules (which are few in comparison). I think that if your AGI doesn't have the implicit knowledge, it'd only be able to perform simple inferences about statistical events -- for example, calculating the probability of (lung cancer | smoking). For instance, suppose you ask an AI if chocolate makes a person more alert. It might read one article saying that coffee makes people more alert, and another article saying that chocolate contains theobromine, and another article saying that theobromine is related to caffeine, and another article saying that coffee contains caffeine ... and then put the pieces together to answer YES This kind of reasoning may sound simple but getting it to work systematically on the large scale based on text mining has not been done... And it does seem w/in the grasp of current tech without any breakthroughs... The kind of reasoning I'm interested in is more sophisticated. For example, I may ask the AGI to open a file and print the 100th line (in Java or C++, say). The AGI should be able to use a loop to read and discard the first 99 lines. We need a step like: read 99 lines - use a loop but such a step must be based on even simpler *concepts* of repetition and using loops. What I'm saying is that your AGI does NOT have such rules and would be incapable of thinking about such things. Being incapable of thinking about such things is way too strong a statement -- that has to do with the AI's learning/reasoning algorithms rather than about the knowledge it has. I think there would be a viable path to AGI via 1) Filling a KB up w/ commensense knowledge via text mining and simple inference, as I described above 2) Building an NL conversation system utilizing the KB created in 1 3) Teaching the AGI the implicit knowledge you suggest via conversing with it As noted I prefer to introduce embodiment into the mix, though, for a variety of reasons... 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] reasoning knowledge
d) you keep repeating the illusion that evolution did NOT achieve the airplane and other machines - oh yes, it did - your central illusion here is that machines are independent species. They're not. They are EXTENSIONS of human beings, and don't work without human beings attached. Manifestly evolution has taken several stages to perfect tool/machine-using species - of whom we are only the latest version - I refer you to my good colleague, the tool-using-and-creating Caledonian crow. That is purely rhetorical gamesmanship... By that interpretation of achieved by evolution then any AGI that we create will also be achieved by evolution, due to being created by humans that were achieved by evolution, right? So, by this definition, the concept of achieved by evolution makes no useful distinctions among AGI designs... And: a wheel does work without a human attached, btw .. 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] reasoning knowledge
Well, what I and embodied cognitive science are trying to formulate properly, both philosophically and scientifically, is why: a) common sense consciousness is the brain-AND-body thinking on several levels simultaneously about any given subject... I don't buy that my body plays a significant role in thinking about, for instance, mathematics. I bet that my brain in a vat could think about math just as well or better than my embodied brain. Of course my brain is what it is because of evolving to be embodied, but that's a different statement. b) with the *largest* part of that thinking being body thinking - i.e. your body working out *in-the-body* how the actions under consideration can be enacted (although this is inseparable from, and dependent on, the brain's levels of thinking) What evidence do you have that this is the largest part ... it does not feel at all that way to me, as a subjectively-experiencing human; and I know of no evidence in this regard. The largest bulk of brain matter does not equate to the largest part of thinking, in any useful sense... I suspect that, in myself at any rate, the vast majority of my brain dynamics are driven by the small percentage of my brain that deal with abstract cognition. An attractor spanning the whole brain can nonetheless be triggered/controlled by dynamics in a small region. c) if an agent doesn't have a body that can think about how it can move (and have emotions), then it almost certainly can't understand how other bodies move (and have emotions) - and therefore can't acquire a more-than-it's-all-Greek/Chinese/probabilistic-logic-to-me understanding of physics, biology, psychology, sociology etc. etc. - of both the formal/cultural and informal/personal kinds. I agree about psychology and sociology, but not about physics and biology. -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
It could be done with a simple chain of word associations mined from a text corpus: alert - coffee - caffeine - theobromine - chocolate. That approach yields way, way, way too much noise. Try it. But that is not the problem. The problem is that the reasoning would be faulty, even with a more sophisticated analysis. By a similar analysis you could reason: - coffee makes you alert. - coffee contains water. - water (H20) is related to hydrogen sulfide (H2S). - rotten eggs produce hydrogen sulfide. - therefore rotten eggs make you alert. There is a produce predicate in here which throws off the chain of reasoning wildly. And, nearly every food contains water, so the application of Bayes rule within this inference chain of yours will yield a conclusion with essentially zero confidence. Since fewer foods contain caffeine or theobromine, the inference trail I suggested will not have this problem. In short, I claim your similar analysis is only similar at a very crude level of analysis, and is not similar when you look at the actual probabilistic inference steps involved. Long chains of logical reasoning are not very useful outside of mathematics. But the inference chain I gave as an example is NOT very long. The problem is actually that outside of math, chains of inference (long or short) require contextualization... I think there would be a viable path to AGI via 1) Filling a KB up w/ commensense knowledge via text mining and simple inference, as I described above 2) Building an NL conversation system utilizing the KB created in 1 3) Teaching the AGI the implicit knowledge you suggest via conversing with it I think adding common sense knowledge before language is the wrong approach. It didn't work for Cyc. I agree it's not the best approach. I also think, though, that one unsuccessful attempt should not be taken to damn the whole approach. The failure of explicit knowledge encoding by humans, does not straightforwardly imply the failure of knowledge extraction via text mining (as approaches to AGI) Natural language evolves to the easiest form for humans to learn, because if a language feature is hard to learn, people will stop using it because they aren't understood. We would be wise to study language learning in humans and model the process. The fact is that children learn language in spite of a lack of common sense. Actually, they seem to acquire language and common sense together. But, wild children and apes learn common sense, but never learn language beyond the proto-language level. But I agree, study of human dev psych is one thing that has inclined me toward the embodied approach ... yet I still feel you dismiss the text-mining approach too glibly... -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
yet I still feel you dismiss the text-mining approach too glibly... No, but text mining requires a language model that learns while mining. You can't mine the text first. Agreed ... and this gets into subtle points. Which aspects of the language model need to be adapted while mining, and which can remain fixed? Answering this question the right way may make all the difference in terms of the viability of the approach... 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] reasoning knowledge
YKY, I'm with Pei on this one... Decades of trying to do procedure learning using logic have led only to some very brittle planners that are useful under very special and restrictive assumptions... Some of that work is useful but it doesn't seem to me to be pointing in an AGI direction. OTOH for instance evolutionary learning and NN's have been more successful at learning simple procedures for embodied action. Within NM we have done (and published) experiments using probabilistic logic for procedure learning, so I'm well aware it can be done. But I don't think it's a scalable approach. There appears to be a solid information-theoretic reason that the human brain represents and manipulates declarative, procedural and episodic knowledge separately. It's more complex, but I believe it's a better idea to have separate methods for representing and learning/adapting procedural vs declarative knowledge --- and then have routines for converting btw the two forms of knowledge. One advantage AGIs will have over humans is better methods for translating procedural to declarative knowledge, and vice versa. For us to translate knowing how to do X into knowing how we do X can be really difficult (I play piano improvisationally and by ear, and I have a hard time figuring out what the hell my fingers are doing, even though they do the same complex things repeatedly each time I play the same song..). This is not a trivial problem for AGIs either but it won't be as hard as for humans... -- Ben G On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 8:00 AM, Pei Wang [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 7:03 AM, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2/15/08, Pei Wang [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To me, the following two questions are independent of each other: *. What type of reasoning is needed for AI? The major answers are: (A): deduction only, (B) multiple types, including deduction, induction, abduction, analogy, etc. *. What type of knowledge should be reasoned upon? The major answers are: (1) declarative only, (2) declarative and procedural. All four combination of the two answers are possible. Cyc is mainly A1; you seem to suggest A2; in NARS it is B2. My current approach is B1. I'm wondering what is your argument for including procedural knowledge, in addition to declarative? You have mentioned the reason in the following: some important knowledge is procedural by nature. There is the idea of deductive planning which allows us to plan actions using a solely declarative KB. So procedural knowledge is not needed for acting. I haven't seen any no trivial result supporting this claim. Also, if you include procedural knowledge, things may be learned doubly in your KB. For example, you may learn some declarative knowledge about the concept of reverse and also procedural knowledge of how to reverse sequences. The knowledge about how to do ... can either be in procedural form, as programs, or in declarative, as descriptions of the programs. There is overlapping/redundancy information in the two, but very often both are needed, and the redundancy is tolerated. Even worse, in some cases you may only have procedural knowledge, without anything declarative. That'd be like the intelligence of a calculator, without true understanding of maths. Yes, but that is exactly the reason to directly reasoning on procedural knowledge, right? Pei YKY agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription --- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] reasoning knowledge
Knowing how to carry out inference can itself be procedural knowledge, in which case no explicit distinction between the two is required. -- Vladimir Nesov Representationally, the same formalisms can of course be used for both procedural and declarative knowledge. The slightly subtler point, however, is that it seems that **given finite space and time resources**, it's far better to use specialized reasoning/learning methods for handling knowledge that pertains to carrying out coordinated sets of action in space and time. Thus, procedure learning as a separate module from general inference. The brain works this way and, on this very general level, I think we'll do best to emulate the brain in our AGI designs (not necessarily in the specific representations/ algorithms the brain uses, but rather in the simple fact of the pragmatic declarative/ procedural distinction..) -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
Obviously, extracting knowledge from the Web using a simplistic SAT approach is infeasible However, I don't think it follows from this that extracting rich knowledge from the Web is infeasible It would require a complex system involving at least 1) An NLP engine that maps each sentence into a menu of probabilistically weighted logical interpretations of the sentence (including links into other sentences built using anaphor resolution heuristics). This involves a dozen conceptually distinct components and is not at all trivial to design, build or tune. 2) Use of probabilistic inference rules to create implication links between the different interpretations of the different sentences 3) Use of an optimization algorithm (which could be a clever use of SAT or SMT, or something else) to utilize the links formed in step 2, to select the right interpretation(s) for each sentence The job of the optimization algorithm is hard but not THAT hard because the choice of the interpretation of one sentence is only tightly linked to the choice of interpretation of a relatively small set of other sentences (ones that are closely related syntactically, semantically, or in terms of proximity in the same document, etc.). I don't know any way to tell how well this would work, except to try. My own approach, cast in these terms, would be to -- use virtual-world grounding to help with the probabilistic weighting in step 1 and the link building in step 2 -- use other heuristics besides SAT/SMT in step 3 ... but, using these techniques within NM/OpenCog is also a possibility down the road, I've been studying the possibility... -- Ben On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 6:56 AM, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2/25/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, There is no good overview of SMT so far as I know, just some technical papers... but SAT solvers are not that deep and are well reviewed in this book... http://www.sls-book.net/ But that's *propositional* satisfiability, the results may not extend to first-order SAT -- I've no idea. Secondly, the learning of an entire KB from text corpus is much, much harder than SAT. Even the learning of a single hypothesis from examples with background knowledge (ie the problem of inductive logic programming) is harder than SAT. Now you're talking about inducing the entire KB, and possibly involving theory revision -- this is VERY impractical. I guess I'd focus on learning simple rules, one at a time, from NL instructions. IMO this is one of the most feasible ways of acquiring the AGI KB. But it also involves the AGI itself in the acquisition process, not just a passive collection of facts like MindPixel... YKY 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
YKY I thought you were talking about the extraction of information that is explicitly stated in online text. Of course, inference is a separate process (though it may also play a role in direct information extraction). I don't think the rules of inference per se need to be learned. In our book on PLN we outline a complete set of probabilistic logic inference rules, for example. What needs to be learned via experience is how to appropriately bias inference control -- how to sensibly prune the inference tree. So, one needs an inference engine that can adaptively learn better and better inference control as it carries out inferences. We designed and partially implemented this feature in the NCE but never completed the work due to other priorities ... but I hope this can get done in NM or OpenCog sometime in late 2008.. -- Ben On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 3:02 PM, YKY (Yan King Yin) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2/26/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Obviously, extracting knowledge from the Web using a simplistic SAT approach is infeasible However, I don't think it follows from this that extracting rich knowledge from the Web is infeasible It would require a complex system involving at least 1) An NLP engine that maps each sentence into a menu of probabilistically weighted logical interpretations of the sentence (including links into other sentences built using anaphor resolution heuristics). This involves a dozen conceptually distinct components and is not at all trivial to design, build or tune. 2) Use of probabilistic inference rules to create implication links between the different interpretations of the different sentences 3) Use of an optimization algorithm (which could be a clever use of SAT or SMT, or something else) to utilize the links formed in step 2, to select the right interpretation(s) for each sentence Gosh, I think you've missed something of critical importance... The problem you stated above is about choosing the correct interpretation of a bunch of sentences. The problem we should tackle instead, is learning the rules that make up the KB. To see the difference, let's consider this example: Suppose I solve a problem (eg a programming exercise), and to illustrate my train of thoughts I clearly write down all the steps. So I have, in English, a bunch of sentences A,B,C,...,Z where Z is the final conclusion sentence. Now the AGI can translate sentences A-Z into logical form. You claim that this problem is hard because of multiple interpretations. But I think that's relatively unimportant compared to the real problem we face. So let's assume that we successfully -- correctly -- translate the NL sentences into logic. Now let's imagine that the AGI is doing the exercise, not me. Then it should have a train of inference that goes from A to B to C ... and so on... to Z. But, the AGI would NOT be able to make such a train of thoughts. All it has is just a bunch of *static* sentences from A-Z. What is missing? What would allow the AGI to actually conduct the inference from A-Z? The missing ingredient is a bunch of rules. These are the invisible glue that links the thoughts between the lines. This is the knowledge that I think should be learned, and would be very difficult to learn. You know what I'm talking about?? YKY 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] reasoning knowledge
Your piano example is a good one. What it illustrates, I suggest, is: your knowledge of, and thinking about, how to play the piano, and perform the many movements involved, is overwhelmingly imaginative and body knowledge/thinking (contained in images and the motor parts of the brain and body as distinct from any kind of symbols) The percentage of that knowledge that can be expressed in symbolic form - logical, mathematical, verbal etc- i.e. the details of those movements that can be named or measured - is only A TINY FRACTION of the total. Wrong... This knowledge CAN be expressed in logical, symbolic form... just as can the positions of all the particles in my brain ... but for these cases, the logical, symbolic representation is highly awkward and inefficient... Our cultural let alone your personal vocabulary (both linguistic and of any other symbolic form) for all the different finger movements you will perform, can only name a tiny percentage of the details involved. That is true, but in principle one could give a formal logical description of them, boiling things all the way down to logical atoms corresponding to the signals sent along the nerves to and from my fingers... Such imaginative and body knowledge (which takes both declarative, procedural and episodic forms) isn't, I suggest, - when considered as corpuses or corpora of knowledge - MEANT to be put into explicit, symbolic, verbal, logico-mathematical form. Correct It would be utterly impossible to name all the details of that knowledge. Infeasible, not impossible One imaginative picture : an infinity of words and other symbols. Any attempt to symbolise our imaginative/body knowledge as a whole, would simply overwhelm our brain, or indeed any brain. The concept of infinity is better handled in formal logic than anywhere else!!! The idea that an AGI can symbolically encode all the knowledge, and perform all the thinking, necessary to produce, say, a golf swing, let alone play a symphony, is a pure fantasy. Our system keeps that knowledge and thinking largely in the motor areas of the brain and body, because that's where it HAS to be. Again you seem to be playing with different meanings of the word symbolic. I don't think that formal logic is a suitably convenient language for describing motor movements or dealing with motor learning. But still, I strongly suspect one can produce software programs that do handle motor movement and learning effectively. They are symbolic at the level of the programming language, but not symbolic at the level of the deliberative, reflective component of the artificial mind doing the learning. A symbol is a symbol **to some system**. Just because a hunk of program code contains symbols to the programmer, doesn't mean it contains symbols to the mind it helps implement. Any more than a neuron being a symbol to a neuroscientist, implies that neuron is a symbol to the mind it helps implement. Anyway, I agree with you that formal logical rules and inference are not the end-all of AGI and are not the right tool for handling visual imagination or motor learning. But I do think they have an important role to play even so. -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] reasoning knowledge
No one in AGI is aiming for common sense consciousness, are they? The OpenCog and NM architectures are in principle supportive of this kind of multisensory integrative consciousness, but not a lot of thought has gone into exactly how to support it ... In one approach, one would want to have -- a large DB of embodied experiences (complete with the sensorial and action data from the experiences) -- a number of dimensional spaces, into which experiences are embedded (a spatiotemporal region corresponds to a point in a dimensional space). Each dimensional space would be organized according to a different principle, e.g. melody, rhythm, overall visual similarity, similarity of shape, similarity of color, etc. -- an internal simulation world in which concrete remembered experiences, blended experiences, or abstracted experiences could be enacted and internally simulated -- conceptual blending operations implemented on the dimensional spaces and directly in the internal sim world -- methods for measuring similarity, inheritance and other logical relationships in the dimensional spaces and the internal sim world -- methods for enacting learned procedures in the internal sim world, and learning new procedures based on simulating what they would do in the internal sim world This is all do-able according to mechanisms that exist in the OpenCog and NM designs, but it's an aspect we haven't focused on so far in NM... though we're moving in that direction due to our work w/ embodiment in simulation worlds... We have built a sketchy internal sim world for NM but haven't experimented with it much yet due to other priorities... -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] reasoning knowledge
You guys seem to think this - true common sense consciousness - can all be cracked in a year or two. I think there's probably a lot of good reasons - and therefore major creative problems - why it took a billion years of evolution to achieve. I'm not trying to emulate the brain. Evolution took billions of years to NOT achieve the airplane, helicopter or wheel ... 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
Hi, There is no good overview of SMT so far as I know, just some technical papers... but SAT solvers are not that deep and are well reviewed in this book... http://www.sls-book.net/ -- Ben On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 4:38 PM, Ed Porter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben or anyone, Do you know of an explanation or reference that is a for Dummies explanation of how SAT (or SMT) handles computations in spaces with and 100,000 variables and/or 10^300 states in practically computable time. I assume it is by focusing only on that part of the space through which relevant and/or relatively short inferences paths pass, or something like that. Ed Porter -Original Message- From: Ben Goertzel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 5:54 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB? And I seriously doubt that a general SMT solver + prob. theory is going to beat a custom probabilistic logic solver. My feeling is that an SMT solver plus appropriate subsets of prob theory can be a very powerful component of a general probabilistic inference framework... I can back this up with some details but that would get too thorny for this list... 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A Follow-Up Question re Vision.. P.S.
Mike, I'm disappointed that you guys, especially Bob M, aren/t responding to this. It just might be important to how the brain succeeds in perceiving images, while computers are such a failure. This is all well-known information!!! Tomasso Poggio and many others are working on making detailed computer simulations of how the brain does vision processing. It's a worthy line of research, but unlike you I am not impelled to consider it AGI-critical ... anyway that line of research appears to be proceeding steadily and successfully... though like everything in science, not as fast we we'd like... 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
C is not very viable as of now. The physics in Second Life is simply not *rich* enough. SL is mainly a space for humans to socialize, so the physics will not get much richer in the near future -- is anyone interested in emulating cigarette smoke in SL? Second Life will soon be integrating the Havok 4 physics engine. I agree that game-world physics is not yet very realistic, but it's improving fast, due to strong economics in the MMOG industry. E is also hard, but you seem to be *unaware* of its difficulty. In fact, the problem with E is the same as that with AIXI -- the thoery is elegant, but the actual learning would take forever. Can you explain, in broad terms, how the AGI is to know that water runs downhill instead of up, and that the moon is not blue, but a greyish color? Water does not always run downhill, sometimes it runs uphill. To learn commonsense information from text requires parsing the text and mapping the parse-trees into semantic relationships, which are then reasoned on by a logical reasoning engine. There is nothing easy about this, and there is a hard problem of semantic disambiguation of relationships. Whether the disambiguation problem can be solved via statistical/inferential integration of masses of extracted relationships, remains to be seen. Virtual embodiment coupled with NL conversation is the approach I currently favor, but I think that large-scale NL information extraction can also play an important helper role. And I think that as robotics tech develops, it can play a big role too. I think we can take all approaches at once within an integrative framework like Novamente or OpenCog, but if I have to pick a single focus it will be virtual embodiment, with the other aspects as helpers... -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
On Feb 20, 2008 1:34 PM, J Storrs Hall, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Looking at the moon won't help -- of course it helps, it tells you that something odd is with the expression, as opposed to say yellow sun ... it might be the case that it described a particular appearance that only had a slight resemblance to other blue things (as in red hair), for example. There are some rare conditions (high stratospheric dust) which can make the moon look actually blue. In fact blue moon is generally taken to mean, metaphorically, something very rare (or even impossible) or the second full moon in a given month (which happens about every two-and-a-half years on the average). ask someone is of course what human kids do a lot of. An AI could do this, or look it up in Wikipedia, or the like. All of which are heuristics to reduce the ambiguity/generality in the information stream. The question is do enough heuristics make an autogenous AI or is there something more fundamental to its structure? On Wednesday 20 February 2008 12:27:59 pm, Ben Goertzel wrote: The trick to understanding once in a blue moon is to either -- look at the moon or -- ask someone --- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
There seems to be an assumption in this thread that NLP analysis of text is restricted to simple statistical extraction of word-sequences... This is not the case... If there were to be a hope for AGI based on text analysis, it would have to be based on systems that parse linguistic expressions into logical relationships, and combine these logical relationships via reasoning. Assessing metaphoric versus literal mentions would be part of that reasoning. Critiquing NLP-based AGI based on Google is a lot like critiquing robotics- based AGI based on the Roomba. Google is a good product implemented very scalably, but in its linguistic sophistication, it is nowhere near the best research systems out there. Let alone what would be possible with further research. I stress that this is not my favored approach to AGI, but I think these discussions based on Google are unfairly dismissing NLP-based AGI by using Google as a straw man. I note also that a web-surfing AGI could resolve the color of the moon quite easily by analyzing online pictures -- though this isn't pure text mining, it's in the same spirit... ben On Feb 20, 2008 2:30 PM, J Storrs Hall, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So, looking at the moon, what color would you say it was? Here's what text mining might give you (Google hits): blue moon 11,500,000 red moon 1,670,000 silver moon 1,320,000 yellow moon 712,000 white moon 254,000 golden moon 163,000 orange moon 122,000 green moon 105,000 gray moon 9,460 To me, the moon varies from a deep orange to brilliant white depending on atmospheric conditions and time of night... none of which would help me understand the text references. On Wednesday 20 February 2008 02:02:52 pm, Ben Goertzel wrote: On Feb 20, 2008 1:34 PM, J Storrs Hall, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Looking at the moon won't help -- of course it helps, it tells you that something odd is with the expression, as opposed to say yellow sun ... --- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
As I am sure you are fully aware, you can't parse English without a knowledge of the meanings involved. (The council opposed the demonstrators because they (feared/advocated) violence.) So how are you going to learn meanings before you can parse, or how are you going to parse before you learn meanings? They have to be interleaved in a non-trivial way. True indeed! Feeding all the ambiguous interpretations of a load of sentences into a probabilistic logic network, and letting them get resolved by reference to each other, is a sort of search for the most likely solution of a huge system of simultaneous equations ... i.e. one needs to let each, of a huge set of ambiguities, be resolved by the other ones... This is not an easy problem, but it's not on the face of it unsolvable... But I think the solution will be easier with info from direct experience to nudge the process in the right direction... 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
Yes, of course, but no human except an expert in lunar astronomy would have a definitive answer to the question either The issue at hand is really how a text-analysis based AGI would distinguish literal from metaphoric text, and how it would understand the context in which a statement is implicitly intended by the speaker/writinger. These are hard problems, which are being worked on by many individuals in the computational linguistics community. I tend to think that introducing (real or virtual) embodiment will make the solution of these problems easier... -- Ben On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Matt Mahoney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I note also that a web-surfing AGI could resolve the color of the moon quite easily by analyzing online pictures -- though this isn't pure text mining, it's in the same spirit... Not really. You can get a better answer to what color is the moon? if you google what color is the moon?. Better, but not definitive. Even the photos are not in agreement. Some photos show a mix of orange and blue. If you stood on the moon, it would look black next to your feet, but white in contrast to the even darker sky. During tonight's eclipse, it should look reddish brown. -- Matt Mahoney, [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] 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 4:27 PM, J Storrs Hall, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK, imagine a lifetime's experience is a billion symbol-occurences. Imagine you have a heuristic that takes the problem down from NP-complete (which it almost certainly is) to a linear system, so there is an N^3 algorithm for solving it. We're talking order 1e27 ops. That's kind of specious, since modern SAT and SMT solvers can solve many realistic instances of NP-complete problems for large n, surprisingly quickly... and without linearizing anything... Worst-case complexity doesn't mean much... 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
Not necessarily, because --- one can encode a subset of the rules of probability as a theory in SMT, and use an SMT solver -- one can use probabilities to guide the search within an SAT or SMT solver... ben On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 5:00 PM, J Storrs Hall, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A PROBABILISTIC logic network is a lot more like a numerical problem than a SAT problem. On Wednesday 20 February 2008 04:41:51 pm, Ben Goertzel wrote: On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 4:27 PM, J Storrs Hall, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK, imagine a lifetime's experience is a billion symbol-occurences. Imagine you have a heuristic that takes the problem down from NP-complete (which it almost certainly is) to a linear system, so there is an N^3 algorithm for solving it. We're talking order 1e27 ops. That's kind of specious, since modern SAT and SMT solvers can solve many realistic instances of NP-complete problems for large n, surprisingly quickly... and without linearizing anything... Worst-case complexity doesn't mean much... 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
To get back to Ben's statement: Is the computer chip industry happy with contemporary SAT solvers Well they are using them, but of course there is loads of room for improvement!! or would a general solver that is capable of beating n^4 time be of some use to them? If it would be useful, then there is a reason to believe that it might be useful to AGI. --- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
And I seriously doubt that a general SMT solver + prob. theory is going to beat a custom probabilistic logic solver. My feeling is that an SMT solver plus appropriate subsets of prob theory can be a very powerful component of a general probabilistic inference framework... I can back this up with some details but that would get too thorny for this list... 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
Yes, I'd like to hear others' opinion on Cyc. Personally I don't think it's the perceptual grounding issue -- grounding can be added incrementally later. I think Cyc (the KB) is on the right track, but it doesn't have enough rules. I do think it's possible a Cyc approach could work if one had a few billion rules in there -- but so what? (Work meaning: together with a logic engine, serve as the seed for an AGI that really learns and understands) It's clear that the mere millions of rules in their KB now are VASTLY inadequate in terms of scale... Similarly, AIXItl or related approaches could work for AGI if one had an insanely powerful computer -- but so what AGI approaches that could work, in principle if certain wildly infeasible conditions were met, are not hard to come by ... ;=) -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
1) While in my own AI projects I am currently gravitating toward an approach involving virtual-worlds grounding, as a general rule I don't think it's obvious that sensorimotor grounding is needed for AGI. Certainly it's very useful, but there is no strong argument that it's required. The human path to AGI is not the only one. 2) I think that, potentially, building a KB could be part of an approach to solving the grounding problem. Encode some simple knowledge, instruct the system in how to ground it in its sensorimotor experience ... then encode some more (slightly more complex) knowledge ... etc. I'm not saying this is the best way but it seems a viable approach. Thus, even if you want to take a grounding-focused approach, it doesn't follow that fully solving the grounding problem must precede the creation and utilization of a KB. Rather, there could be a solution to the grounding problem that couples a KB with other aspects. In the NM approach, we could proceed with or without a KB, and with or without sensorimotor grounding; and I believe NARS has that same property... My feeling is that sensorimotor grounding is an Extremely Nice to Have whereas a KB is just a Sort of Nice to Have, but I don't have a rigorous demonstration of that -- Ben G On Feb 17, 2008 11:30 AM, Russell Wallace [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Feb 17, 2008 3:34 PM, Pei Wang [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As Lukasz just pointed out, there are two topics: 1. Cyc as an AGI project 2. Cyc as a knowledge base useful for AGI systems. Well, I'm talking about Cyc (and similar systems) as useful for anything at all (other than experience to tell us what doesn't work and why not). But if it's proposed that such a system might be a useful knowledge base for something, then the something will have to have solved the grounding problem, right? And what I'm saying is, I wouldn't start off building a Cyc-like knowledge base and assume the grounding problem will be solved later. I'd start off with the grounding problem. --- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
I agree, that might be a viable approach. But the key phrase is Encode some simple knowledge, instruct the system in how to ground it in its sensorimotor experience - i.e. you're _not_ spending a decade writing a million assertions and _then_ looking for the first time at the grounding problem. Instead grounding is addressed, if not as step 1, then at least as step 1.001. Well, I find that grounding-based AGI is the kind I can think about most easily, since that's how human intelligence works... But I'm less confident that it's the only possible kind of AGI... I've got to wonder if the masses of text on the Internet could, in themselves, display a sufficient richness of patterns to obviate the need for grounding in another domain like a physical or virtual world, or mathematics. In other words, maybe what you think needs to be gotten from grounding in a nonlinguistic domain, could somehow be gotten indirectly via grounding in masses of text? I am not confident this is feasible, nor that it isn't ... and it's not the approach I'm following ... but I'm uncomfortable dismissing it out of hand... -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] would anyone want to use a commonsense KB?
In other words, maybe what you think needs to be gotten from grounding in a nonlinguistic domain, could somehow be gotten indirectly via grounding in masses of text? I am not confident this is feasible, nor that it isn't ... and it's not the approach I'm following ... but I'm uncomfortable dismissing it out of hand... *nods* I'm comfortable dismissing it out of hand, for several reasons, not least of which is that we humans do not and cannot do anything remotely resembling what you're proposing. I don't assume that all successful AGI's must be humanlike... At the end of the day, the Internet just doesn't contain most of the needed information. Consider the question of whether it's possible to learn about water flowing downhill, from Internet text alone. From Google (example not original to me, though I forget who first ran this test): Results 1 - 10 of about 864 for water flowing downhill Results 1 - 10 of about 2,130 for water flowing uphill The prosecution rests :) Google is not an AGI, so I have no idea why you think this proves anything about AGI ... I strongly suspect there is enough information in the text online for an AGI to learn that water flows downhill in most circumstances, without having explicit grounding... -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Visual Reasoning Part 1 The Scene
where people and animals are likely to move, objects are likely to move/splash, whether a figure is threatening to reach or actually reaching for his gun, considering shooting or about to shoot a rifle, what those girls on the sofa are trying to do, what those four feet mean, what that man by the sea is looking at and even what mood he might be in, how that woman dancing is talking to the man and how he is reacting, why that lovers' embrace is particularly hot, why that man is a drunk,how a child or the cat will play that piano and even react and what noises she may make, what those people in the dark are looking at, and so on ...? One thing's for sure: you are doing a lot of visual reasoning. And in fact, you are doing visual reasoning all day long - reasoning - composing stories-in-pictures about what has just happened and is about to happen in front of you - where objects are going to move, or how they've just moved, (fallen on the floor), how the people around you are about to move, how fast they will approach you and whether that car might hit you, what their expressions mean, and whether they are likely to be friendly or come on or be angry, and how fast that blood may coagulate, whether that light indicates someone is in a room, whether the clouds indicate rain, whether those people are grouping together in friendship or to fight, whether that shop attendant is going to take too long etc etc. And all day long you are in effect doing tacit physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology about the world around you. But almost none of it involves formal reasoning that any of those disciplines could explain. They couldn't begin to tell you for example how you work out visually how things and animals and people are likely to behave - how you read the emotional complexities of a face - how someone is straining that smile too hard. There are no formulae that can tell you just by looking whether that suitcase is likely to be too heavy. All of this is visual and common-sense reasoning, most of which you'd be v. hard put to explain verbally let alone mathematically or logically . And that's why you were that wonderful little scientist of legend as an infant, pre-verbally exploring all the physical qualiities and nature of the world, conducting all those physical experiments with objects and people - very largely without words. And actually you've never stopped being a tacit scientist. For the moment, all I want you to retain is that we are all doing a massive amount of tacit, visual, commonsense reasoning which we are, blithely unaware of.. The supreme example of our blind prejudice here is our idea that thinking is primarily a medium of language. Seems obvious. And yet, if you stop to think about it, there is only one form of thinking that never stops from the moment you wake till the moment you go to sleep, and that is the movie-in-the round that is your consciousness. It never stops. Verbal thinking stops. The movie goes on and on with you continually visually working out what is going on or about to go on behind the scenes. And when your unconscious brain wants to think,it always, always thinks in movies never in just words. Movies are the basic medium of thought - not just pictures, still pictures - but continuous rolling movies, involving all the senses simultaneously. That's how you interpreted those photos - as slices-of- , stills-from-a-movie - and NOT just as pure photos. I merely want to suggest here - and not really argue - that all that visual reasoning is indeed truly visual - that we actually process all those photos and visuals as *whole images* and *whole image sequences* against similar images/sequences stored in memory, and that we couldn't possibly process them as just symbols. In the next post, I will zero in on a simple proof. P.S. I am not attacking symbols - I am attacking the idea that we or an AGI can think in symbols exclusively, and that includes thinking in images-as-symbolic-formulae. I believe that we think - and so must an AGI - in symbols-AND- graphics/schemas-AND detailed images - simultaneously, interdependently - that we are the greatest movie on earth with words/symbols-AND-pictures. 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Visual Reasoning Part 1 The Scene
you. But almost none of it involves formal reasoning that any of those disciplines could explain. They couldn't begin to tell you for example how you work out visually how things and animals and people are likely to behave - how you read the emotional complexities of a face - how someone is straining that smile too hard. There are no formulae that can tell you just by looking whether that suitcase is likely to be too heavy. All of this is visual and common-sense reasoning, most of which you'd be v. hard put to explain verbally let alone mathematically or logically . And that's why you were that wonderful little scientist of legend as an infant, pre-verbally exploring all the physical qualiities and nature of the world, conducting all those physical experiments with objects and people - very largely without words. And actually you've never stopped being a tacit scientist. For the moment, all I want you to retain is that we are all doing a massive amount of tacit, visual, commonsense reasoning which we are, blithely unaware of.. The supreme example of our blind prejudice here is our idea that thinking is primarily a medium of language. Seems obvious. And yet, if you stop to think about it, there is only one form of thinking that never stops from the moment you wake till the moment you go to sleep, and that is the movie-in-the round that is your consciousness. It never stops. Verbal thinking stops. The movie goes on and on with you continually visually working out what is going on or about to go on behind the scenes. And when your unconscious brain wants to think,it always, always thinks in movies never in just words. Movies are the basic medium of thought - not just pictures, still pictures - but continuous rolling movies, involving all the senses simultaneously. That's how you interpreted those photos - as slices-of- , stills-from-a-movie - and NOT just as pure photos. I merely want to suggest here - and not really argue - that all that visual reasoning is indeed truly visual - that we actually process all those photos and visuals as *whole images* and *whole image sequences* against similar images/sequences stored in memory, and that we couldn't possibly process them as just symbols. In the next post, I will zero in on a simple proof. P.S. I am not attacking symbols - I am attacking the idea that we or an AGI can think in symbols exclusively, and that includes thinking in images-as-symbolic-formulae. I believe that we think - and so must an AGI - in symbols-AND- graphics/schemas-AND detailed images - simultaneously, interdependently - that we are the greatest movie on earth with words/symbols-AND-pictures. 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 -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.20.6/1282 - Release Date: 2/15/2008 7:08 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 -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] A 1st Step To Using Your Image-ination
Perhaps it will start to give you a sense that words and indeed all symbols provide an extremely limited *inventory of the world* and all its infinite parts and behaviours. I welcome any impressionistic responses here, including confused questions. I agree with the above, but I think one needs to be careful about levels of description... One way to define symbol is in accordance with Peircean semiotics ... and in this sense, not every term, predicate or variable utilized in a logical reasoning engine is actually a symbol from the standpoint of the reasoning/learning process implemented by the reasoning engine Similarly, if one implements a neural net learning algorithm on a digital computer, the bits used to realize the software program are symbols from the standpoint of the programming language compiler and executor, but not from the standpoint of the neural net itself... LIke neurons, logical tokens may be used as components of complex patterned arrangements, without any individual symbolic meaning. Visual images may be represented with superhuman accuracy using logical tokens for instance. These tokens are symbolic at one level, but not visually symbolic... 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Applicable to Cyc, NARS, ATM others?
, to encode a description of genes in XML, but it would be impossible to get a universal standard for such a description, because biologists are still arguing about what a gene actually is. There are several competing standards for describing genetic information, and the semantic divergence is an artifact of a real conversation among biologists. You can't get a standard til you have an agreement, and you can't force an agreement to exist where none actually does. Furthermore, when we see attempts to enforce semantics on human situations, it ends up debasing the semantics, rather then making the connection more informative. Social networking services like Friendster and LinkedIn assume that people will treat links to one another as external signals of deep association, so that the social mesh as represented by the software will be an accurate model of the real world. In fact, the concept of friend, or even the type and depth of connection required to say you know someone, is quite slippery, and as a result, links between people on Friendster have been drained of much of their intended meaning. Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it. Worse is Better # In an echo of Richard Gabriel's Worse is Better argumment, the Semantic Web imagines that completeness and correctness of data exposed on the web are the cardinal virtues, and that any amount of implementation complexity is acceptable in pursuit of those virtues. The problem is that the more semantic consistency required by a standard, the sharper the tradeoff between complexity and scale. It's easy to get broad agreement in a narrow group of users, or vice-versa, but not both. The systems that have succeeded at scale have made simple implementation the core virtue, up the stack from Ethernet over Token Ring to the web over gopher and WAIS. The most widely adopted digital descriptor in history, the URL, regards semantics as a side conversation between consenting adults, and makes no requirements in this regard whatsoever: sports.yahoo.com/nfl/ is a valid URL, but so is 12.0.0.1/ftrjjk.ppq. The fact that a URL itself doesn't have to mean anything is essential -- the Web succeeded in part because it does not try to make any assertions about the meaning of the documents it contained, only about their location. There is a list of technologies that are actually political philosophy masquerading as code, a list that includes Xanadu, Freenet, and now the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web's philosophical argument -- the world should make more sense than it does -- is hard to argue with. The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to admit. Much of the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming, but it is not coming because of the Semantic Web. The amount of meta-data we generate is increasing dramatically, and it is being exposed for consumption by machines as well as, or instead of, people. But it is being designed a bit at a time, out of self-interest and without regard for global ontology. It is also being adopted piecemeal, and it will bring with it with all the incompatibilities and complexities that implies. There are significant disadvantages to this process relative to the shining vision of the Semantic Web, but the big advantage of this bottom-up design and adoption is that it is actually working 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] reasoning knowledge.. p.s.
Hi Mike, P.S. I also came across this lesson that AGI forecasting must stop (I used to make similar mistakes elsewhere). We've been at it since mid-1998, and we estimate that within 1-3 years from the time I'm writing this (March 2001), we will complete the creation of a program that can hold highly intelligent (though not necessarily fully human-like) English conversations, talking to us about its own creative discoveries and ideas regarding the digital data that is its worldOf course, 1-4 years from real AI and 1-3 years more to fully self-modifying AI are very gutsy claims, similar to other claims that have been made (and not fulfilled) throughout the history of AI. But we believe that, due to the combination of advances in computer hardware and software with advances in various aspects of cognitive science, real AI really now is possible - and that we know how to achieve it, and are substantially advanced along the path to this goal. http://www.goertzel.org/books/DIExcerpts.htm I'd like to note that at that time I was working with a team of about **40** full-time RD staff focused on nothing but AGI. On April 1, 2001, the company hosting that team (Webmind Inc.) shut its doors. Who knows what we might have achieved had that level of dedication actually continued for 4-7 more years? Our codebase had some problems, and some of our ideas at that point were inadequately specified. But we were moving in the right direction, and my progress since that point has been significantly slower due to having less than 1/10 the team-size devoted to AGI. The real stupidity underlying that prediction I made, in early 2001, was my naivete in not realizing how suddenly the dot-com bubble was going to burst. The prediction was conditional on the Webmind AI team continuing in the form it existed at that time; but as it happened, the creation and maintenance of that sort of AGI RD team was an epiphenomenon of the temporary dot-com bubble. -- 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=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Reading on automatic programming?
8. Generative Programming, Methods, Tools, and Applications (2000) - Krzysztof Czarnecki, Ulrich W. Eisenecker The above is a very good book, IMO ... not directly AGI-related, but damn insightful re generative software design... - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=94114734-b6bbb4
[agi] A little more technical information about OpenCog
I got a free hour this afternoon, and posted a little more technical information about our plans for OpenCog, here: http://opencog.org/wiki/OpenCog_Technical_Information Nothing surprising or dramatic, mostly just a clear online explanation of our basic plans, as have already been discussed in various emails... -- Ben G p.s. for those who don't know what opencog is, see http://opencog.org/wiki/Main_Page -- 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 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=93259758-229b0c
Re: [agi] Emergent languages Org
IMO language is integral to strong AI in the same way that logic is integral to mathematics. The counterargument is that no one has yet made an AI virtual chimp ... and nearly all of the human brain is the same as that of a chimp ... I think that language-centric approaches are viable, but I wouldn't dismiss sensorimotor-centric approaches to AGI either ... looking at evolutionary history, it seems that ONE way to achieve linguistic functionality is via some relatively minor tweaks on a prelinguistic mind tuned for flexible sensorimotor learning... (tho I don't believe this is the only way, unlike some) -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=93270421-5eade1
Re: [agi] Emergent languages Org
Hi, I'd be interested in what you see as the path from SLAM to AGI. To me, language generation seems obvious: 1. Make a language and algorithms for generating stuff in that language. 2. Implement pattern recognition and abstraction (imo not _that_ hard if you've designed your language well) 3. Ground the language through real-world sensorimotor experiences so the utterances mirror the agents' experiences. What do you see as the equivalent path from mapping, navigation and SLAM? Mapping, navigation and SLAM are not the key point -- embodied learning is the point ... these are just prerequisites... The robotics path to AI is a lot like the evolutionary path to natural intelligence... Create a system that learns to achieve simple sensorimotor goals in its environment... then move on to social goals... and language eventually emerges as an aspect of social interaction... Rather than language being a separate thing that is then grounded in experience, make language **emerge** from nonlinguistic interactions ... as it happened historically See Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals for ideas about how language may have emerged from prelinguistic sound-making ... and a host of researchers for ideas about how language may have emerged from gesture (I have a paper touching on the latter at novamente.net/papers ) -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=93273630-9e8239
Re: Singularity Outcomes [WAS Re: [agi] OpenMind, MindPixel founders both commit suicide
Google already knows more than any human, This is only true, of course, for specific interpretations of the word know ... and NOT for the standard ones... and can retrieve the information faster, but it can't launch a singularity. Because, among other reasons, it is not an intelligence, but only a very powerful tool for intelligences to use... When your computer can write and debug software faster and more accurately than you can, then you should worry. A tool that could generate computer code from formal specifications would be a wonderful thing, but not an autonomous intelligence. A program that creates its own questions based on its own goals, or creates its own program specifications based on its own goals, is a quite different thing from a tool. -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=90465940-5ffd85
Re: [agi] Study hints that fruit flies have free will
I think a more precise way to phrase what they showed, philosophically, would be like this: Very likely, to the extent that flies are conscious, then they have a SUBJECTIVE FEELING of possessing free will. In other words, flies seem to possess the same kind of internal spontaneity-generation that we possess, and that we associate with our subjectively-experienced feeling of free will. -- Ben G On Jan 24, 2008 7:57 AM, Robert Wensman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1. Brembs and his colleagues reasoned that if fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) were simply reactive robots entirely determined by their environment, in completely featureless rooms they should move completely randomly. Yes, but no one has ever argued that a flier is a stateless machine. It seems like their argument ignores the concept of internal state. If they went through all this trouble just to prove that the brain of the flies has an internal state, it seems they wasted a lot of time on something trivial. I cannot see how the concept of free will has got anything to do with this. /R This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?; -- 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 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=89412948-cb41f5
Re: [agi] Study hints that fruit flies have free will
In other words, flies seem to possess the same kind of internal spontaneity-generation that we possess, and that we associate with our subjectively-experienced feeling of free will. -- Ben G To clarify further: Suppose you are told to sit still for a while, and then move your hand suddenly at some arbitrary moment. The choice of the moment is a kind of spontaneous action on your part -- not determined by external reality in any obvious way. You just suddenly decide to do it, and then do it. This same kind of spontaneous action-choice seems to be made by flies. It's not exactly the same as a reflective, deliberative choice. We humans seem to couple the two together: reflective deliberation and spontaneous choice. But I think they're different things. However, I don't think that this sort of spontaneous choice is necessarily free in any profound sense ... rather, Libet's classic work suggests the opposite, as summarized e.g. in http://www.consciousentities.com/experiments.htm#decisions where it says Libet asked his experimental subjects to move one hand at an arbitrary moment decided by them, and to report when they made the decision (they timed the decision by noticing the position of a dot circling a clock face). At the same time the electrical activity of their brain was monitored. Now it had already been established by much earlier research that consciously-chosen actions are preceded by a pattern of activity known as a Readiness Potential (or RP). The surprising result was that the reported time of each decision was consistently a short period (some tenths of a second)after the RP appeared. This seems to prove that the supposedly conscious decisions had actually been determined unconsciously beforehand. This seems to lend strong experimental support both to the idea that free will is an illusion (at most, it would seem, there is scope for a last-minute veto by the conscious mind - a possibility which has been much debated since) -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=89416197-1c6823
Re: [agi] Study hints that fruit flies have free will
The question vis-a-vis the fly - or any animal - is whether the *whole* course of action of the fly in that experiment can be accounted for by one - or a set of - programmed routines or programs period. My impression - without having studied the experiment in detail - is that it weighs against that conclusion, without being the final word. Definitely not ... there is vast evidence from the theory of complex, deterministic dynamical systems that this sort of apparently spontaneous behavior can emerge from simple underlying deterministic dynamics... ben g - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=89465283-62b335
Re: [agi] Study hints that fruit flies have free will
If you're asking whether there are accurate complex-systems simulations of whole animals, there aren't yet ... At present, we lack instrumentation capable of gathering detailed data about how animals work; and we lack computers powerful enough to run such simulations (though some supercomputers may be on the verge) Theory suggests that such simulations will be possible, but it hasn't been proved conclusively ... so I guess you can still maintain some kind of vitalism for a couple decades or so if you really want to ;-) ben On Jan 24, 2008 11:27 AM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I take your general point re how complex systems can produce apparently spontaneous behaviour. But to what actual courses of action of actual animals (such as the fly here) or humans has this theory been successfully applied? Ben: The question vis-a-vis the fly - or any animal - is whether the *whole* course of action of the fly in that experiment can be accounted for by one - or a set of - programmed routines or programs period. My impression - without having studied the experiment in detail - is that it weighs against that conclusion, without being the final word. Definitely not ... there is vast evidence from the theory of complex, deterministic dynamical systems that this sort of apparently spontaneous behavior can emerge from simple underlying deterministic dynamics... - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?; -- 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 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=89482521-9ee316
Re: [agi] Study hints that fruit flies have free will
Possible major misunderstanding : I am not in any shape or form a vitalist. My argument is solely about whether a thinking machine (brain or computer) has to be instructed to think rigidly or freely, with or without prior rules - and whether, with the class of problems that come under AGI, programming is possible at all. I have no idea what you mean by programming ... Anything that happens on a digital computer is controlled by some program ... hence programmed ... So, the fundamental question seems to be whether entities like flies are digitally simulable or not... I think so, but am open to the possibility that quantum-gravity weirdness renders this false... ben g - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=89502643-dc40c1
Re: [agi] SAT, SMT and AGI
As far as I know there is little or no work done yet to integrate probabilistic reasoning with these solvers and it will probably not be easy to do it and keep things efficient. I don't think it will be easy, but what's intriguing is that it seems like it might be feasible-though-difficult ... -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=88136383-b552d3
KILLTHREAD -- Re: [agi] Logical Satisfiability
Hi all, I'd like to kill this thread, because not only is it off-topic, but it seems not to be going anywhere remotely insightful or progressive. Of course a polynomial-time solution to the boolean satisfiability problem could potentially have impact on AGI (though it wouldn't necessarily do so -- this would depend on many things, e.g. the average-case time of the algorithm, the size of the constants in front of the terms of the polynomial, etc.). However, no one has such a solution yet, and no one is putting forth any detailed ideas about such a solution, in this thread. There are lots of scientific breakthroughs that could impact AGI -- for instance, faster semiconductors, nanotech-based computer memories, accelerated Monte Carlo integration routines, whatever -- but they're not really on-topic for the AGI list unless being discussed specifically in the context of their AGI implications. So, I wouldn't say discussions of P=NP are universally verboten for this list; but unless there are specific AGI implications, let's leave that sorta discussion for elsewhere. Luke, I've also had some fun proofs of P=NP, and my best one only lasted about 3 days ... but that is because I thought of it while backpacking ... and it only evaporated after I wrote it down when I got back from the wilds and checked the details ;-) My office-mate in grad school proved P=NP and mailed the proof to 200 professors worldwide. He mailed a retraction 2 days later. I believe he thought he had reduced it to linear programming somehow. Thanks Ben Goertzel List Owner On Jan 20, 2008 1:51 PM, Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jim, I'm sure most people here don't have any difficulty understanding what you are talking about. You seem to lack solid understanding of these basic issues however. Please stop this off-topic discussion, I'm sure you can find somewhere else to discuss computational complexity. Read a good textbook, if you are sincerely interested in these things. On Jan 20, 2008 9:21 PM, Jim Bromer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I had no idea what you were talking about until I read Matt Mahoney's remarks. I do not understand why people have so much trouble reading my messages but it is not entirely my fault. I may have misunderstood something that I read, or you may have misinterpreted something that I was saying. Or even both! But if you want to continue this discussion feel free. Robin said: As for your problem involving SAT, it's not applicable to P-NP because they are classes of decisions problems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_problem), which means problems that can be answered yes or no. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem In complexity theory, the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) is a decision problem, whose instance is a Boolean expression written using only AND, OR, NOT, variables, and parentheses. The question is: given the expression, is there some assignment of TRUE and FALSE values to the variables that will make the entire expression true? -- Vladimir Nesovmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?; -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. -- Vernor Vinge - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=87929019-bbd33f
Re: KILLTHREAD -- Re: [agi] Logical Satisfiability
On Jan 20, 2008 2:34 PM, Jim Bromer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am disappointed because the question of how a polynomial time solution of logical satisfiability might affect agi is very important to me. Well, feel free to start a new thread on that topic, then ;-) In fact, I will do so: I will post a message on SAT, SMT and AGI -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=87997968-9121a0
[agi] SAT, SMT and AGI
I wrote On Jan 20, 2008 2:34 PM, Jim Bromer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am disappointed because the question of how a polynomial time solution of logical satisfiability might affect agi is very important to me. Well, feel free to start a new thread on that topic, then ;-) In fact, I will do so: I will post a message on SAT, SMT and AGI And here it is: However, I would rephrase the question as: How would a pragmatically useful polynomial time solution of logical satisfiability affect AGI? In fact, it's interesting to talk about how existing SAT and SMT solvers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfiability_modulo_theories -- which are often quite effective on surprisingly large real-world problems, in spite of being exponential time in the worst case -- affect AGI. SMT in particular seems to have deep potential applicability. It would seem to me that a practical SMT solver handling quantifier logic would be a more useful research goal than proving P=NP. In AGI, we don't care that much about worst-case complexity, nor even necessarily about average-case complexity for very large N. We care mainly about average-case complexity for realistic N and for the specific probability distribution of problem-cases confronted in embodied experience. Most work with SMT solvers seems to have to do with theories like arithmetic... simple stuff. But what if the theory involved is the (large) set of predicates probabilistically held to be true by an AGI system. How effective are current SMT solvers then? If they are effective, then SMT could prove an interesting tool within an AGI inference engine... a way of relatively rapidly resolving complex queries... -- Ben -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. -- Vernor Vinge - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=88001594-8a8210
Re: [agi] SAT, SMT and AGI
So, people do have a practically useful way of cheating problems in NP now. Problem with AGI is, we don't know how to program it even given computers with infinite computational power. Well, that is wrong IMO AIXI and the Godel Machine are provably correct ways to achieve AGI with infinite (or even huge finite) computational power. Furthermore, if we assume humongous computational power, the Novamente design becomes a lot simpler ... almost but not quite as trivial as AIXI or the Godel machine... The whole AGI problem is about coping with seriously bounded computational resources ... as has been pointed out on this list s many times ... and as Eric Baum argues quite elegantly (among other points) in What Is Thought? ben -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. -- Vernor Vinge - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=88042864-3133e9
Re: [agi] OpenMind, MindPixel founders both commit suicide
Well, Lenat survives... But he paid people to build his database (Cyc) What's depressing is trying to get folks to build a commonsense KB for free ... then you get confronted with the absolute stupidity of what they enter, and the poverty and repetitiveness of their senses of humor... ;-p ben On Jan 19, 2008 4:42 PM, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-02/ff_aimystery?currentPage=all I guess the moral here is Stay away from attempts to hand-program a database of common-sense assertions. -- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?; -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. -- Vernor Vinge - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=87836600-bf128b
Re: [agi] OpenMind, MindPixel founders both commit suicide
On Jan 19, 2008 5:53 PM, a [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This thread has nothing to do with artificial general intelligence - please close this thread. Thanks IMO, this thread is close enough to AGI to be list-worthy. It is certainly true that knowledge-entry is not my preferred approach to AGI ... I think that it is at best peripheral to any really serious AGI approach. However, some serious AGI thinkers, such as Doug Lenat, believe otherwise. And, this list is about AGI in general, not about any specific approaches to AGI. So, the thread can stay... -- Ben Goertzel, list owner Bob Mottram wrote: Quality is an issue, but it's really all about volume. Provided that you have enough volume the signal stands out from the noise. The solution is probably to make the knowledge capture into a game or something that people will do as entertainment. Possibly the Second Life approach will provide a new avenue for acquiring commonsense. On 19/01/2008, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What's depressing is trying to get folks to build a commonsense KB for free ... then you get confronted with the absolute stupidity of what they enter, and the poverty and repetitiveness of their senses of humor... ;-p - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?; -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. -- Vernor Vinge - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=87842518-105d7f
Re: [agi] Glocal knowledge representation?
Yes, Google reveals that the term glocal has been used a few times in the context of social activism. I am writing a conference paper on knowledge representation and am thinking of introducing it as a buzzword for the type of mixed global/local knowledge rep used in Novamente, which I also hypothesize is used in the brain... thx ben On 3/25/07, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Does anyone know if the term glocal (meaning global/local) has previously been used in the context of AI knowledge representation? While not recognized as a formal term of knowledge representation, glocal has strong connotations of think globally, act locally which is a fairly deep principle of effective interaction for any agent with its environment. - Jef - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
[agi] Re: Why is progress toward AGI so slow?
The project was founded officially in 2001 but for much of the time between 2001 and 2004 there was NOBODY working on it full time. All of us founders had day jobs, either actual jobs or AI consulting jobs, needed to pay the bills. For the last couple years there were 2-3 people working on it full-time. Now there are 3 people working on it full-time, and a fourth just came on board, but hasn't come up to speed yet. Plus much-valued part-time efforts from a few others. Actually, I realized I phrased things a little too pessimistically in the above. During the period 2001-2004, we had a number of staff working on consulting projects that used the Novamente core system to do various practical narrow-AI things like natural language processing and bioinformatic data analysis. This helped us build out the core system and refine various AI algorithms used within the Novamente AGI system. But still, it's different than having staff actually working on building out Novamente **as an AGI system**. The work done on these Novamente-core-utilizing consulting projects did get us a certain distance toward AGI, but in the end we found there was only so much mileage we could get this way, because the requirements of the consulting projects were too different from the requirements of Novamente as an AGI system. Which led us to our current direction ... which I will discuss in another email a little later ;-) ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
[agi] New business direction for Novamente LLC
Hi all, As there has been a lot of discussion of the Novamente AI system on this list, it seems apropos to announce here that Novamente LLC has decided upon a significant shift in business direction/approach. If you're curious a pertinent company blog entry is here: http://www.novamente.net/blog/ -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
[agi] Why is progress toward AGI so slow?
Hi, - what is the REAL reason highly talented AGI research groups keep pushing their deadlines back. E.g. Ben's announced imminent breakthrus several times ... the one fact he mentioned a few years back that made sense is the huge parameter space/degrees of freedom (you have at least 5 to 10 tunable parameters per module) but I wonder about the others he hasnt mentioned (barring the excuses) and even more so for other projects - newcomers might learn from concentrating their thinking on AGI aspects where current projects are weak. Well, the real reason the Novamente Cognition Engine is taking so damn long to develop is that the design is big and the staff working on it are few. The project was founded officially in 2001 but for much of the time between 2001 and 2004 there was NOBODY working on it full time. All of us founders had day jobs, either actual jobs or AI consulting jobs, needed to pay the bills. For the last couple years there were 2-3 people working on it full-time. Now there are 3 people working on it full-time, and a fourth just came on board, but hasn't come up to speed yet. Plus much-valued part-time efforts from a few others. But 3-5 full-time people is not enough to make extremely rapid progress on a large-scale software system like Novamente. We need at least double that, just counting core AI stuff (not stuff like prettying up the AGISim sim world, system administration, etc.). Now you may say: OK, that proves your AI design is too complex, so go make a simpler design that can be completed by a couple good computer scientists in a year or so. Well, I've tried. Novamente is the simplest thing I could come up with that has a prayer of working on networks of contemporary computers. Of the 10 or so major topics covered in the Novamente design document, there are 3-4 that haven't even been touched yet in terms of implementation, and a couple others that have only been handled on a prototype level. And even the aspects that have been implemented still have known shortcomings (relative to what the design specifies), that are being filled in. Maybe, if we got the staff we need, we would then run into some OTHER obstacle. (Like the, Oops, we built this whole huge cognitive system, and the theory says it should learn stuff, but in fact it's a complete moron obstacle ;-) I can't rule that out, though I've certainly done a lot of theory to minimize the odds of it happening. But anyway, what I've said above is the actual reason why our progress has been slow. -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
[agi] Glocal knowledge representation?
Hi, Does anyone know if the term glocal (meaning global/local) has previously been used in the context of AI knowledge representation? thx Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda
If we're talking language for AGI _content_ (as opposed to framework for which Ben Goertzel has made a fair case for even C++), then more like removal of features. Because for AGI content, it's not what you can do in principle, it's what you can be _casual_ with. Correct, this is an important distinction. One thing that's nice about LISP --- at first glance -- is that it looks like it can be a language for both AGI content and AGI framework. But I believe this is somewhat deceptive. In principle LISP could be OK for AGI framework (though I'm not convinced it's there yet ... though Allegro LISP arguably comes close...), but I don't think it's right for AGI content. On the other hand, you could build an AGI-content language by **extending** LISP ... whereas if your framework language is C++ you need to make a content language totally separately. In fact our content language, Combo, looks a bit like LISP, but with other features like -- explicit higher-order typing [not yet implemented, but needed soon] -- a particular kind of uncertain truth values -- probabilistic tools for dealing with statements based on their truth values Currently this content language is used almost only for internal AI-generated programs, and has an awkward textual syntax, but we intend to improve the syntax so that in some cases we can supply the system with human-programmed modules to use as a starting-point for learning. Anyway, the plan is that initial NM self-modification will take the form of NM modifying its **cognitive control scripts** that are written in the internal Combo language ... modification of the underlying C++ code is going to be a later-phase thing. [This also enforces some basic, non-absolute AGI safety in that the C++ layer provides certain constraints.] Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda
Is the research on AI full of Math because there are many Math professors that publish in the field or is the problem really Math related? Many PhDs in computer science are Math oriented exactly because the professors that deem their work worth a PhD are either Mathematicians or their sponsoring professor was. I don't know of any math profs who publish in artificial intelligence, though no doubt there are a few that do. No, thinking about it now I can think of a few. My PhD is in math and I used to be a math prof, but I have found no opportunity yet to use really advanced math in AI Advanced undergraduate level math is as far as it's gone so far ... the most advanced stuff has been in Novamente's probabilistic reasoning component, but there's nothing here really going beyond undergrad probability, stats, and vector calculus... No algebraic geometry, no modular forms or inaccessible cardinals of the mind, etc. ;-) Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda
The fact that C, C++ and I would presume C# has pointers, precludes any of these from my list up front. There can be no boundary checks at either compile or execution time so this feature alone is incompatible with a higher level language IMO. FYI, C# has no pointers generically, but you can create unsafe code blocks that can contain pointers inside them. Your language may well be a great one, but personally, I feel like your criticisms of other languages aren't really adequately informed... -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: Environments and Languages for AGI [WAS Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda]
As for all the other talk on this list, recently, about programming languages and the need for math, etc., I find myself amused by the irrelevance of most of it: when someone gets a clue about what they are trying to build, and why, the question of what language (or environment) they need to use will answer itself. Yes ... and this is the same thing those of us actually working on AGI projects have been saying. My experience is: Once you have an AGI design, the choice of prog. language becomes a pragmatic rather than philosophical/emotional choice. Even if none of the existing languages matches one's desires perfectly, one chooses a decent option and gets on with it. -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: Environments and Languages for AGI [WAS Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda]
Richard Loosemore wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: Richard Loosemore wrote: As for all the other talk on this list, recently, about programming languages and the need for math, etc., I find myself amused by the irrelevance of most of it: when someone gets a clue about what they are trying to build, and why, the question of what language (or environment) they need to use will answer itself. Yes ... and this is the same thing those of us actually working on AGI projects have been saying. You mean to imply I am *not* one of those actually working on an AGI project? No, sorry for the inaccurate phrasing... ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: Environments and Languages for AGI [WAS Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda]
rooftop8000 wrote: one chooses a decent option and gets on with it. -- Ben That's exactly the problem.. everyone just builds their own ideas and doesn't consider how their ideas and code could (later) be used by other people I'm not at all sure something like AGI is well-suited to a large-scale, open-source project. Linux, for instance, is based on well-known ideas (Unix) and consists of a lot of loosely-related parts; it's well-suited to construction by a large pool of part-timers. An AGI design like Novamente is based on a lot of very obscure ideas that are quite hard to understand (due to being at the research frontier), and consists of a set of parts that interdepend very intricately and subtlely. It really needs to be built by a small team with a deep common understanding and close interaction. I guess most other AGI designs are the same way. Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda
Mark Waser wrote: IMO, creating an AGI isn't really a programming problem. The hard part is knowing exactly what to program. Which is why it turns into a programming problem . . . . I started out as a biochemist studying enzyme kinetics. The only reasonable way to get a reasonable turn-around time on testing a new fancy formula was to update the simulation program myself. If the tools were there (i.e. Loosemoore's environment), it wouldn't be a programming problem. Since they aren't, the programming turns into a/the real problem.:-) Well, programming AGI takes more time and effort now than it would with more appropriate programming tools ... But it seems like what Loosemore wants is an environment that will help him **discover** the right AGI design ... this is a different matter Or am I misunderstanding? -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
[agi] Why C++ ?
Samantha Atknis wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: Regarding languages, I personally am a big fan of both Ruby and Haskell. But, for Novamente we use C++ for reasons of scalability. I am curious as to how C++ helps scalability. What sorts of scalability? Along what dimensions? There are ways that C++ does not scale so well like across large project sizes or in terms of maintainability. It also doesn't scale that well in terms of space requirements if the class hierarchy gets too deep or uses much multiple inheritance of non-mixin classes. It also doesn't scale well in large team development. So I am curious what you mean. I mean that Novamente needs to manage large amounts of data in heap memory, which needs to be very frequently garbage collected according to complex patterns. We are doing probabilistic logical inference IN REAL TIME, for real time embodied agent control. This is pretty intense. A generic GC like exists in LISP or Java won't do. Aside from C++, another option might have been to use LISP and write our own custom garbage collector for LISP. Or, to go with C# and then use unsafe code blocks for the stuff requiring intensive memory management. Additionally, we need real-time, very fast coordinated usage of multiple processors in an SMP environment. Java, for one example, is really slow at context switching between different threads. Finally, we need rapid distributed processing, meaning that we need to rapidly get data out of complex data structures in memory and into serialized bit streams (and then back into complex data structures at the other end). This means we can't use languages in which object serialization is a slow process with limited customizability-for-efficiently. When you start trying to do complex learning in real time in a distributed multiprocessor context, you quickly realize that C-derivative languages are the only viable option. Being mostly a Linux shop we didn't really consider C# (plus back when we started, .Net was a lot less far along, and Mono totally sucked). C++ with heavy use of STL and Boost is a different language than the C++ we old-timers got used to back in the 90's. It's still a large and cumbersome language but it's quite possible to use it elegantly and intelligently. I am not such a whiz myself, but fortunately some of our team members are. -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
[agi] Re: Why C++ ?
BTW I think I have answered that question at least 5 times on this list or on the SL4 list. I'm almost motivated to make a Novamente FAQ to avoid this sort of repetition!!! ben Ben Goertzel wrote: Samantha Atknis wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: Regarding languages, I personally am a big fan of both Ruby and Haskell. But, for Novamente we use C++ for reasons of scalability. I am curious as to how C++ helps scalability. What sorts of scalability? Along what dimensions? There are ways that C++ does not scale so well like across large project sizes or in terms of maintainability. It also doesn't scale that well in terms of space requirements if the class hierarchy gets too deep or uses much multiple inheritance of non-mixin classes. It also doesn't scale well in large team development. So I am curious what you mean. I mean that Novamente needs to manage large amounts of data in heap memory, which needs to be very frequently garbage collected according to complex patterns. We are doing probabilistic logical inference IN REAL TIME, for real time embodied agent control. This is pretty intense. A generic GC like exists in LISP or Java won't do. Aside from C++, another option might have been to use LISP and write our own custom garbage collector for LISP. Or, to go with C# and then use unsafe code blocks for the stuff requiring intensive memory management. Additionally, we need real-time, very fast coordinated usage of multiple processors in an SMP environment. Java, for one example, is really slow at context switching between different threads. Finally, we need rapid distributed processing, meaning that we need to rapidly get data out of complex data structures in memory and into serialized bit streams (and then back into complex data structures at the other end). This means we can't use languages in which object serialization is a slow process with limited customizability-for-efficiently. When you start trying to do complex learning in real time in a distributed multiprocessor context, you quickly realize that C-derivative languages are the only viable option. Being mostly a Linux shop we didn't really consider C# (plus back when we started, .Net was a lot less far along, and Mono totally sucked). C++ with heavy use of STL and Boost is a different language than the C++ we old-timers got used to back in the 90's. It's still a large and cumbersome language but it's quite possible to use it elegantly and intelligently. I am not such a whiz myself, but fortunately some of our team members are. -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda
David Clark wrote: I appreciate the amount of effort you made in replying to my email. Most of your questions would be answered if you read the documentation on my site. The last time I looked, LISP had no built-in database. Allegro Lisp has a very nice (easy to use, scalable, damn fast) built in database, FYI ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] Fwd: Numenta Newsletter: March 20, 2007
Chuck Esterbrook wrote: On 3/20/07, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would certainly expect that a mature Novamente system would be able to easily solve this kind of invariant recognition problem. However, just because a human toddler can solve this sort of problem easily, doesn't mean a toddler level AGI should be able to solve it equally easily. Different specific modalities will come more naturally to different intelligences, and humans are particularly visual in focus... I generally agree, but wanted to ask this: Shouldn't AGIs be visual in focus because we are? We want AGIs to help us with various tasks many of which will require looking at diagrams, illustrations and pictures. And that's just the static material. Eventually, yeah, a useful AGI should be able to process visual info, just like it should be able to understand human language. But I feel that the strong focus on vision that characterizes much AI work today (especially AI work with a neuroscience foundation) generally tends to lead in the wrong direction, because vision processing in humans is carried out largely by fairly specialized structures and processes (albeit in combination with more general- purpose structures and processes). So, one can easily progress incrementally toward better and better vision processing systems, via better and better emulating the specialized component of human vision processing, without touching the general-understanding-based component... Of course, the same dynamic happens across all areas of AI (creating specialized rather than general methods being a better way to get impressive, demonstrable incremental progress), but it happens particularly acutely with vision Gary Lynch, in the late 80's, made some strong arguments as to why olfaction might in some ways be a better avenue to cognition than vision. Walter Freeman's work on the neuroscience of olfaction is inspired by this same idea. One point is that vision processing has an atypically hierarchical structure in the human brain. Olfaction OTOH seems to work more based on attractors and nonlinear dynamics (cf Freeman's work), sorta like a fancier Hopfield net (w/asymmetric weights thus leading to non fixed point attractors). The focus on vision has led many researchers to overly focus on the hierarchal aspect rather than the attractor aspect, whereas both aspects obviously play a bit role in cognition. I guess I worry about the applicability... Would a blind AGI really be able to find more effective treatments for heart disease, cancer and aging? IMO vision is basically irrelevant to these biomedical research tasks. Direct sensory connections to biomedical lab equipment would be more useful ;-) Regarding Numenta, they tout irrespective of scale, distortion and noise and they chose a visual demonstration, so it seems that at least their AGI work is deserving of Kevin's criticism. I agree. Poggio's recent work on vision processing using brain models currently seems more impressive than Numenta's, in terms of combining -- far greater fidelity as a brain simulation -- far better performance as an image processing system But, the Numenta architecture is more general and may be used very interestingly in future, who knows... -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
[agi] META: People ... be nice, please! [list moderation action]
Hmmm. I am rarely inspired to an official moderation action [though recently some people moderated **me** due to my overly sarcastic humor regarding AIXI] But, comments like Your arrogance surely exceeds your intelligence. should be avoided on this list Let's keep things civil! Thanks Ben Goertzel (list owner/ moderator) David Clark wrote: I put up with 1 person out of all the thousands of emails I get who insisted on sending standard text messages as a attachment. Because of virus infections, I had normally set all emails with attachments to automatically get put in the garbage can. I had to stop that so I could read your emails for the past 2 years. You have a lot of nerve, indeed. I made a number of arguments in my email about your conclusions (supported I might add by no arguments) and you respond by pointing me to how to post email URL's. Your arrogance surely exceeds your intelligence. -- David Clark - Original Message - From: Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2007 2:04 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Fwd: Numenta Newsletter: March 20, 2007 On Wed, Mar 21, 2007 at 10:47:35AM -0700, David Clark wrote: In my previous email, I mistakenly edited out the part from Yan King Yin and it looks like the We know that logic is easy was attributed to him when it was actually a quote of Eugen Leitl. Sorry for my mistake. It's not your mistake. It's the mistake of those who choose to ignore http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html It is really a great idea to use plaintext posting and set standard quoting in your MUA. For those with braindamaged MUAs there are workarounds like http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/ -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a http://leitl.org __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] Emergence
Richard But where you (I believe) start to confuse the picture is by selecting an example of an 'emergent' system that is a special case. Hopfield nets are barely complex enough to have any emergent properties: in fact, they were pretty much engineered so that they could be analysed using known laws of statistical physics. So it is no surprise that the behavior of the attractors are subject to some predicatble laws. Generalizing from Hopfield Nets to the case of a general complex system with emergent properties is just a sleight of hand. HNs are a freak case, in that larger context. I chose HN's because they were the simplest system I could think of that can fairly be said to involve emergence. If you look at more complex ANN's as described e.g. in Daniel Amit's book Modeling Brain Function, then things get more and more subtle and dramatic in terms of the kinds of emergence that are possible (Here we have strange attractors, strange transients, and all sorts of fun things happen...) Amit reviews a series of more and more complex NN models, starting with simple HN's and ending up with networks that are complex enough to carry out arbitrary Turing computations in a purely emergent way (although he doesn't phrase it this way). [I.e., once you have an ANN with an arbitrarily complex strange attractor, then you can consider the different wings of the attractor as symbols if you wish to, and view the transition of the dynamics through the attractor as carrying out an arbitrarily complex computation.] My own view is that the brain utilizes a combination of emergent representations/dynamics, with representations/dynamics that are more directly and obviously tied to the neural level. The Novamente design also has two levels of representation, with ways to communicate/convert between the two. One feature of my perspective is that it allows me to annoy both the people who like emergence, and the people who dislike it ;-) -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] structure of the mind
Eric Baum wrote: Hayek doesn't directly scale from random start to an AGI architecture in as much as the learning is too slow. But the same is true of any other means of EC or learning that doesn't start with some huge head start. It seems entirely reasonable to merge a Hayek like architecture with scaffolds and hand-coded chunks and other stuff (maybe whatever is in Novamente) to get it a head start. This does seem reasonable in principle, and is something worth exploring. We use some economic ideas in the Novamente design, but those aspects of the design have not been implemented yet except in crude prototype form; and in the current version of the design they are more simplistic than (and much faster than) the sort of stuff in Hayek... An advantage of having the economic system then is to impose coherence and constrainedness-- parts that don't in fact work effectively with others will be seen to be dying, forcing you to fix the problems. Without the economic discipline, you are likely to have subsystems (and sub-subsystems) you think are positive but are failing in some way through interaction effects. True. However, to get the economic system to work effectively enough to identify problems in a general and accurate way, requires significant computational resources to be devoted to the economics aspect. So the system as a whole must make a tradeoff between more accurate economic regulation, and having more processor time for things other than economic regulation... -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] Emergence
Hi, P.S. About Daniel Amit: I haven't read the book, but are you saying he demonstrates coherent, *meaningful* symbol processing as the transition of the dynamics through the lobes of an ultracomplex set of attractor lobes? Like, reasoning with the symbols, or something? And that he does more than just redescribe the system behavior in terms of attractors e.g he uses the analytic math as a way to predict the symbol processing in some way? I'd be willing to bet that he could do this for a Turing machine, maybe, but that he does not derive or predict any new properties of anything remotely resembling real-world symbol processing using the math that describes the attractor dynamics. That is correct... ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda
For people who might be interested in influencing some of the features of this system, I would appreciate them looking at my documentation at www.rccconsulting.com/hal.htm http://www.rccconsulting.com/hal.htm Although my system isn't quite ready for alpha distribution yet, I expect that it will be within a few months. People that help with the alpha and beta testing will be given consideration on the use of the system in the future even if they don't participate in the AGI development. When this project goes ahead, I think even Ben (who has a huge intellectual and financial investment in his Novamente project) will be interested in the experiments and results a system like I am proposing will have, even if he never interfaces his program with it. http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 Your programming language looks interesting, and well designed in many ways, but I have never been convinced that the inadequacies of current programming languages are a significant cause of the slow progress we have seen toward AGI. If you were introducing a radically new programming paradigm for AGI, I would be more interested Not that I think this is necessary to achieve AGI, but I would find it more intellectually stimulating ;-) Regarding languages, I personally am a big fan of both Ruby and Haskell. But, for Novamente we use C++ for reasons of scalability. -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] Project Halo [Was: DARPA Ends Brain Reverse Engineering Project]
FreeBase should be a really wonderful resource for early-stage AGIs to learn from... -- Ben I think Danny Hillis became consumed with FreeBasing. ;-) See http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge205.html for a recent report on his newly announced open database project. - Jef - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda
David Clark wrote: If you were introducing a radically new programming paradigm for AGI, I would be more interested Not that I think this is necessary to achieve AGI, but I would find it more intellectually stimulating ;-) If you care to detail what kind of problem or structure you find hard to deal with in C++ or other major languages, I would be interested either on or off list. Well, **anything** can be dealt with in C++, it's just a matter of how awkward it is. For instance, using Boost you can do lambda-calculus in C++ ... but it's not the most elegant way to do lambda-calculus The biggest thing I miss in C++ are higher-order functions, as you find in Haskell for example. And, at the opposite end of the spectrum, I'm a big fan of Ruby's duck typing , as well ... But I can see that duck typing and higher-order types provide compiler writers with a lot of challenges, where efficiency is concerned... I am hopeful that recent advances in programming language theory will allow the creation of efficient functional language interpreters in the next 5-10 years, see e.g. http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~frs/ But I don't want to wait! Instead of creating a better language for human use, we are coding NM in C++ ... but internally, Novamente learns cognitive code expressed in a different language, which doesn't need to have a nice syntax (and is more like LISP or Haskell than C++) With your huge investment in C++ code, I would be leery of any suggestion of language change as well. It is hard to evaluate the robustness and scalability of a language from only documentation where the actual code isn't available yet. I think once you actually get a copy, you might just change your mind about the scalability and speed of this system but I know all that probably won't be enough for you to switch. Just you having a small interest in the outcome of this project as it goes forward would be great for me. Hey, when the language is ready, I'll try it out ;-) ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda
Shane Legg wrote: Ben, I didn't know you were a Ruby fan... Cassio has gotten me into Ruby ... but in Novamente it's used only for prototyping, the real system is C++ For some non-AGI consulting projects we have also used Ruby. Ruby runs slowly, but, other than that, it's a great language. Getting back to AGI: I think that, with AGI, the programming language is pretty much irrelevant, **unless** it stands in the way of getting the ideas worked out right. Personally I find that, with C++, I need to have everything figured out really well in advance before starting coding, or the code becomes a mess. Whereas with Ruby I can fiddle around and think while coding, because modifying code on-the-fly is so easy. So, I have liked using Ruby for prototyping that is aimed at understanding the viability of some idea. Then once something has been fully understood, via prototyping along with other methods, it can be translated to C++ using a proper scalable, maintainable design... -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda
KIF would be a highly practical lingua franca Lojban would work fine too I agree that using English to interface btw modules of an AGI system seems suboptimal... I am glad that the different components of my brain don't need to communicate using English ;-_) Ben Jey Kottalam wrote: On 3/20/07, David Clark [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My proposal certainly allows that. If sockets and some form of standard English is used to communicate between the different systems, then any language should work. If you want to directly use major chunks of code that others have written within a whole set of your own code, then you will have to have compatible interfaces and work from a common language (whether that is mine or not.) Why do you choose English as the lingua-franca amongst modules? Even if you want to use natural language, English is a particularly messy and internally-inconsistent natural language. How about lojban? Or why use natural language at all, as opposed to statements in first-order logic, or semantic nets, or some other machine representation? -Jey Kottalam - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] Fwd: Numenta Newsletter: March 20, 2007
Kevin Cramer wrote: I tested this and it is very very poor at invariant recognition. I am surprised they released this given how bad it actually is. As an example I drew a small A in the bottom left corner of their draw area. The program returns the top 5 guesses on what you drew. The letter A was not even in the top 5, much less being the first best guess... Back to the drawing board for this fundamental problem that no one has solved...including anyone on this list. And I can say with certainty that until it is that AGI will not come to pass. I agree that any reasonably powerful AGI that has been given visual sensors since its childhood will be able to solve this kind of visual invariant recognition problem easily. However, I wouldn't say that this is a prerequisite for human-level AGI: some AGI's could simply not be aware of visual stimuli, existing e.g. in a world of mathematics or quantum-level data, etc. Novamente for example doesn't deal with low-level vision I would certainly expect that a mature Novamente system would be able to easily solve this kind of invariant recognition problem. However, just because a human toddler can solve this sort of problem easily, doesn't mean a toddler level AGI should be able to solve it equally easily. Different specific modalities will come more naturally to different intelligences, and humans are particularly visual in focus... -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] My proposal for an AGI agenda
rooftop8000 wrote: Hi, I've been thinking for a bit about how a big collaboration AI project could work. I browsed the archives and i see you guys have similar ideas I'd love to see someone build a system that is capable of adding any kind of AI algorithm/idea to. It should unite the power of all existing different flavors: neural nets, logical systems, etc The Novamente core system actually does fits this description, but 1) the API is in some places inelegant, though we have specific plans for improving it 2) it's C++, which some folks don't like 3) it currently only runs on Unix systems, though a Windows port will likely be made during the next month, as it happens 4) it is proprietary If there would be use for such a thing, I would consider open-sourcing the Novamente core system, separate from the specific learning modules we have created to go with it. I would only do so after the inelegancies mentioned above (point 1) are resolved though. My own view these days is that a wild combination of agents is probably not the right approach, in terms of building AGI. Novamente consists of a set of agents that have been very carefully sculpted to work together in such a way as to (when fully implemented and tuned) give rise to the right overall emergent structures. The Webmind system I was involved with in the late 90's was more of a heterogeneous agents architecture, but through that experience I became convinced that such an approach, while workable in principle, has too much potential to lead to massive-dimensional parameter- tuning nightmares... This gets into my biggest dispute w/Minsky (and Push Singh): they really think intelligence is just about hooking together a sufficiently powerful community of agents/critics/resources whatever, whereas I think it's about hooking together a community of learning algorithms that is specifically configured to give rise to the right emergent structures/dynamics. Minsky is not big on emergence, and I don't feel he understands the real nature of self very well. He tends to look at self as just another aspect of the system whereas I look at it as a high-level emergent pattern that comes about holistically in a system when the parts are configured to work together properly. Relatedly, I don't think he understands the combined distributed/ localized nature of knowledge representation. Even if a certain faculty or piece of knowledge X is associated with some localized agent or memory store, you should view that localized element as a kind of key for accessing the global, system-wide activation pattern associated with X. Thus, in thinking about each local part of your AGI system, you need to think about its impact on the collective, self-organizing dynamics of the whole. But when you think this way, an AGI starts to seem less like a heterogenous madhouse of diverse learning agents and like something more particularly structured ... even though it may still live within an agents architecture that has general potential.. -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] Emergence
Like so many other terms relevant to AGI, emergence has a lot of different meanings. Some have used a very strong interpretation that I don't like much... a meaning like a property of a collective that is fundamentally unpredictable based on the components According to my interpretation, the attractors in a Hopfield net are emergent properties of the interactions of the neurons ... but this doesn't mean it's impossible to predict the attractors that will arise if one knows about the neurons and their interactions. It just means that the details of the attractors are **computationally hard** to predict from the details of the neurons. But the qualitative nature of the attractors can be understood cleanly by mathematical theory, in this case. So in general I will call a property of a collective **emergent** if it is relatively simple to describe on its own, but computationally very difficult to predict, in detail, from properties of the components of the collective. According to the above definition, it is quite possible to engineer systems with emergent properties, and to prove things about the constraints on emergent system properties as well. -- Ben G Russell Wallace wrote: On 3/19/07, *Ben Goertzel* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Minsky is not big on emergence This is an interesting point. I'm not big on emergence, not in artificial systems anyway. It produced us, sure, but that's one planet with intelligence out of a zillion universes without it. Emergence is what you get when you backcast from sentience to the shortest program that produces it; put more poetically, it's what God uses when His limiting resource is not time or manpower but improbability. That doesn't make it a good tool for human engineers, for whom improbability is no big deal but time and manpower definitely are. Emergence, after all, basically means you couldn't/didn't predict the results from the setup; and when a machine does something unpredicted, it's generally called a bug. (When you bring humans into the equation it's different - blogs, for example, could be called an emergent result of the Internet - but then, humans aren't engineered systems, and we don't look for emergent behavior within blog-serving software.) Obviously you disagree with this perspective, and I'm wondering if that's a significant axis for classifying approaches to AGI. This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] structure of the mind
J. Storrs Hall, PhD. wrote: On Monday 19 March 2007 17:30, Ben Goertzel wrote: ... My own view these days is that a wild combination of agents is probably not the right approach, in terms of building AGI. Novamente consists of a set of agents that have been very carefully sculpted to work together in such a way as to (when fully implemented and tuned) give rise to the right overall emergent structures. There is one way you can form a coherent, working system from a congeries of random agents: put them in a marketplace. This has a fairly rigorous discipline of its own and most of them will not survive... and of course the system has to have some way of coming up with new ones that will. In principle, yeah, this can work. But we have to remember that the biggest problem of AGI is dealing with severe computational resource limitations (and, the brain's resources are also to be considered severely limited, compared to what naive computational algorithms could easily consume, mathematically speaking). The question is whether a virtual marketplace is a viable approach to AGI, in terms of computational expense... For instance, Baum's Hayek is an innovative and exciting use of economics in an AI learning context, yet the approach seems not to be scalable into anything resembling an AGI architecture. Novamente uses economic ideas in some aspects, but mainly just for allocation of attention (system resources) among different internal processes. My strong intuitive feeling is that using a virtual marketplace to originate a coherent working system from a congerie of random agents would not be computationally feasible. This, to me, falls into the same general category as build a primordial soup and let Alife and then AI evolve from it. Yes, these things can work given enough resources. But the resource requirements are way higher than for more direct engineering-oriented approaches. The brain may well involve some economics-ish dynamics. Energy minimization and energy conservation certainly share some common factors with profit maximization and money conservation. However, I really doubt the brain relies on emergent market dynamics to enable interoperation of its various components. The interoperation of the components was originated via evolution, and is merely tuned and minorly adjusted by brain dynamics during the life of the organism (quasi-economic or otherwise). -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] Emergence
Russell Wallace wrote: On 3/19/07, *Ben Goertzel* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: According to the above definition, it is quite possible to engineer systems with emergent properties, and to prove things about the constraints on emergent system properties as well. Sure. I'm not claiming it's impossible (see the couldn't/didn't bit in my description). I'm only claiming that it's typically not an efficient approach. That is, it's efficient in terms of improbability (God's limiting resource), but wasteful of time and manpower (our limiting resource). That is, in most cases (yes, I know about the exceptions - but they are exceptions) a design that exhibits a lower degree of emergence will achieve a given level of performance with less effort, or a higher level of performance with the same effort, than a design that exhibits a higher degree of emergence. Well, I strongly suspect that human-level AGI is one of the exceptions... -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
