Re: [agi] a2i2 news update
On 7/25/07, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Of course, numerical comparisons are petty, unfair and invidious. But being that sort of person, I can't help noticing that Peter is promising to increase his staff to 24 soon. Will that give him the biggest AGI army? How do the contenders stack up here? Trivially, no, as Cyc claims 40 employees. But it's not clear how many are actually involved in AI development, and of course, many people have doubts about Cyc's methodology. Personally, though, I do think we have the most people directly working on a project of this kind, which is something I find personally significant, because there are things in AI that require a great deal of work, which manpower makes more feasible. -- Justin Corwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://outlawpoet.blogspot.com http://www.adaptiveai.com - 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=231415&id_secret=25302459-7ee1b2
Re: [agi] poll: what do you look for when joining an AGI group?
My reasons for joining a2i2 could only be expressed as subportions of 6 and 8 (possibly 9 and 4). I joined largely on the strength of my impression of Peter. My interest in employment was to work as closely as possible on general artificial intelligence, and he wanted me to work for him on precisely that. His opinions on the subject were extremely pragmatic, and focused on what worked. I appreciated that, thinking that so long as I could support my opinions, they would be respected. In retrospect, I doubt I would have joined if I had tried to evaluate a2i2 theoretically from my own design/organizational perspective. Peter and I still do not have identical ideas about AGI(or the business of developing AGI), but I agree about all the specific issues we've dealt with thus far, and I have come to think that the process and resources an organization can bring to bear on it's problems are much more important than the precise design, opinions, or data they have at any given time. If I had to find a new position tomorrow, I would try to find (or found) a group which I liked what they were 'doing', rather than their opinions, organization, or plans. That said, I wouldn't have joined if I hadn't been offered stock or equivalent ownership of the work. Not because of the implied later capital gains, but because I wouldn't want my work effectively contributing to an organization in which I had no formal say or control. I expect Peter will remain the overwhelming majority owner of a2i2 for the foreseeable future, but the responsibility is important to me. -- Justin Corwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://outlawpoet.blogspot.com http://www.adaptiveai.com - 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=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
Re: [agi] SOTA
On 1/12/07, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Philip Goetz wrote: > > Haven't been googling. But the fact is that I've never actually > /seen/ one in the wild. My point is that the market demand for such > simple and useful and cheap items is low enough that I've never > actually seen one. The term for this type of thermostat is a 'set-back' thermostat, and they were originally designed to save energy and heating/cooling bills by having programmable periods. They have become increasingly complex. All my most recent houses had essentially little calendar computers in them. They are extremely common in new construction, as this link shows: http://www.marketresearch.com/product/display.asp?productid=1354170&g=1 "STUDY HIGHLIGHTS - Honeywell/Magicstat was the top brand of thermostat bought in 2003. - Two-thirds of the thermostats purchased in 2003 were set-back models. - The average price paid for the electronic set-back thermostats was $70. - Thermostats were purchased mostly from builders/contractors and home centers. " Check any hardware store, there's a whole shelf. I bought one for my last apartment. I see them all over the place. They're really not rare. Moral: in AI, the state of the art is often advanced far beyond what people think it is. There are really two things being talked about here. One is SOTA, which almost by definition, is beyond what people think it is, and the other is market availability, or practical availability, which is very different than SOTA technology. SOTA AI technology is essentially that which you, knowing the latest theories, build yourself. There is no such thing as a SOTA AI system, the way there are SOTA stereo systems, or SOTA crypto systems available, because the market availability of the technology does not have the same characteristics. -- Justin Corwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://outlawpoet.blogspot.com http://www.adaptiveai.com - 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] Language modeling
I don't exactly have the same reaction, but I have some things to add to the following exchange. On 10/23/06, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Matt Mahoney wrote: > Children also learn language as a progression toward increasingly complex patterns. > - phonemes beginning at 2-4 weeks > - phonological rules for segmenting continuous speech at 7-10 months [1] > - words (semantics) beginning at 12 months > - simple sentences (syntax) at 2-3 years > - compound sentences around 5-6 years ARR! Please don't do this. My son (like many other kids) had finished about fifty small books by the time he was 5, and at least one of the Harry Potter books when he was 6. You are talking about these issues at a pre-undergraduate level of comprehension. Anecdotal evidence is always bad, but I will note that I myself was reading Tolkein(badly) by 1st grade, and when I was five was scared badly by a cold war children's book "Nobody wants a Nuclear War". There are also other problems with neat progressions like this. One glaring one is that much younger children can learn sign language(which is physically much easier) and communicate fairly complicated concepts far in advance of speech, so much so that many parent courses now suggest and support learning and teaching baby sign language so as to be able to communicate desires, needs, and explanations with the child much earlier. -- Justin Corwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://outlawpoet.blogspot.com http://www.adaptiveai.com - 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/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] SOTA
I want to strongly agree with Richard on several points here, and expand on them a bit in light of later discussion. On 10/20/06, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: It used to be a standing joke in AI that researchers would claim there was nothing wrong with their basic approach, they just needed more computing power to make it work. That was two decades ago: has this lesson been forgotten already? This is very true then, and continues to be now. For those who use the explanation of insufficient computing power, I would question what approaches you would expect to be viable at higher computing power? How do they scale? Why would they work better with more computation? Relatedly, very very few AI research programmes operate in strict real time. Many use batch processes, or virtual worlds, or automated interaction scripts. It would be trivial to modify these systems to behave as if they had 10 times as much computational power, or a thousand times. Even if it took 1,000,000 seconds(11 1/2 days) for every second of intelligent behavior with currently available computing power, the results would be worth it, and unmistakeable, if true. I suspect that this would not work, as simply increasing computing power would not validate current AI systems. A completely spurious argument. You would not necessarily *need* to "simulate or predict" the AI, because the kind of "simulation" and "prediction" you are talking about is low-level, exact state prediction (this is inherent in the nature of proofs about Kolmogorov complexity). This very important, and I strongly agree that "analysis" of this kind is unhelpful. It's easy to show that heat engines and turbines and all sorts of things are so insanely complex that they can't possibly be modeled in the general case. But we needn't do so. We are interested in the behavior of certain parameters of such systems, and we can reduce the space of the systems we investigate(very few people build turbines with disconnected parts, or assymetrical rotation, for example). It is entirely possible to build an AI in such a way that the general course of its behavior is as reliable as the behavior of an Ideal Gas: can't predict the position and momentum of all its particles, but you sure can predict such overall characteristics as temperature, pressure and volume. This is the only claim in this message I have any disagreement with (which must be some sort of record given my poor history with Richard). I agree that its true in principle that AIs can be made this way, but I'm not yet convinced that it's possible in practice. It may be that the goals of and motivations from such artificial systems are not one of those characteristics that lies on the surface of such boiling complexity, but within it. I have the same disagreement with Eliezer, about the certainty he places on the future characteristics of AIs, given that no one here is describing the behavior of a specific AI system, such conclusions strike me as premature, but perhaps not unwarrented. -- Justin Corwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://outlawpoet.blogspot.com http://www.adaptiveai.com - 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/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[agi] Discussion group meeting at Kifune Restaurant in LA on AI
As some of you may know, we have a reoccuring discussion group at Kifune, a local japanese restaurant in Marina del Rey. Every few times we meet I like to mention it on the wider discussion groups, but we have an announcement list yahoogroup that sends updates on each meeting. The attendees are primarily employees, associates, and friends of a2i2 in general and Peter Voss in particular. The group centers around general transhumanism officially, but we tend to AI and real current efforts and events as they happen. We occasionally have discussion topics and guests of expertise. Here is the event announcement that went out today: -- Hello Friends, We're going to have another Kifune discussion group, at which we'll discuss the recent happenings at the AGI Workshops Novamente put on, the Alcor Conference, and a few new companies and initiatives in our field of AI. If you can make it, we'd enjoy your company. RSVP if you can. PS. The usual details are at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kifune/files/details.html Justin Corwin If you need help getting to Kifune, have questions, or want to ask about future meetings, just contact me. -- Justin Corwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://outlawpoet.blogspot.com http://www.adaptiveai.com - 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/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] estimated cost of Seed AI
On 6/13/05, Eugen Leitl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It would take today's equivalent of Manhattan Project today (with a longer > duration to boot); of course the hardware problem can only improve with time. As with any complex project to create something, theory is everything here. Projects that were impossible, with any size of staff or pool of resources in 1901 can be done by a tiny firms, using previous work and self developed or purchased software( see the design of large office buildings, for example ). So if a large reserve of known science, existing software tools, and good theory collide, it may in fact be done very cheaply. Unfortunately, neither the first, nor the second seem to exist, except as generic software design and programming science. So the onus is entirely on the theory. I think it's very implausible to imagine the first project to develop any functioning AI software will make few enough mistakes to make such cheap development as Richter and Yudkowsky seem to posit. Refactoring a respectable code-base to allow for one invalidated assumption can wipe out man-years, easily. A single person, or even a tiny team will be quickly swamped by having to innovate in all directions while simultaneously troubleshooting, maintaining, updating, and refactoring the software. I also personally believe (based on admittedly minor experience, and extensive reading) that delays in development aren't linear. If you wear four hats on the job, it doesn't take you four times as long to do the work, it takes much longer, if it gets done at all. Getting swamped by your own project probably won't just add time to the completion date, it can put it in doubt of occurring, as you disappear into piled up plumbing work on the first floor, and the exposed superstructure of your proposed shiny building rusts away. (to be metaphoric, recklessly). I don't have hard predictions, personally. To take something of a party line approach, I can point out that a2i2 has a target of a four year development cycle, from when we can scale up. I am confident that we can hit our targets within this, and show results. I guess that puts me somewhere in the middle of this disagreement. A Manhattan Project estimation sounds good, and big, but it seems to be kind of a 'this is a huge problem' comparison, and thus lacks some force with me. Why the Manhattan Project? Why not building the Panama Canal, or the Empire State Building, or the Apollo program? All of these projects were big, but they had very different profiles and staffing, costs and sources of money, technology, resources. I don't think AI will follow any of their profiles any more than they followed the profiles of building the Spanish Armada, or Stonehenge or the NotreDame Cathedral. It's a different kind of development. What is more interesting than this kind of hand wavy 'time, money, and people' predictions, is a technical distance prediction. This is a technical, engineering problem. In those terms, what is the distance that must be covered before it can be done? We have some of the necessary components in the public marketplace already, fast and big computers, modern operating systems, object oriented languages, smart compilers, a whole bunch of math and computer science theory. These are things anyone can have, for pennies(comparatively). What's missing? With that list of what's missing, what has to be developed specially? What will be developed anyway? What can you commission, or buy? Then, with that list, how long will that take? How much will it cost? That's a much better series of inquiry, because this bare estimation route will simply lead to opaque comparisons of the implementation cost of incomplete AI theories. I know a lot of us are simply not willing, not ready, or not able to do that kind of public comparison, but it would be more interesting. A little closer to the problem. -- Justin Corwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://outlawpoet.blogspot.com http://www.adaptiveai.com --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] Model simplification and the kitchen sink
nd > modeling algorithms and heuristics of the kind used in chemical > engineering do not seem to be taught in computer science even though > they have always been eminently relevant as far as I could tell. This is very interesting, and I'm ashamed to say that I have to read a lot more before I can comment on this discrepency. Do you see any other fields that have similar approaches to this kind of modelling accuracy? The only other examples I can think of are things like uncertain game theory (risk under uncertainty), and verifier theory (the science of science, particularly knowledge domains), neither of which seem to have associated clean (or at least well defined) math for the integration. I don't know that I could actually use the math, but it would be nice, as it tends to shakeout any serious inconsistencies, and show the ranges and bounds of the stated relationships. thanks, -- Justin Corwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://outlawpoet.blogspot.com http://www.adaptiveai.com --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
