HI, About hybrid/integrative architecturs, Michael Wilson said:
I'd agree that it looks good when you first start attacking the problem. Classic ANNs have some demonstrated competencies, classic symbolic AI has some different demonstrated competencies, as do humans and existing non-AI software. I was all for hybridising various forms of connectionism, fuzzy symbolic logic, genetic algorithms and more at one point. It was only later that I began to realise that most if not all of those mechanisms were neither optimal, adequate or even all that useful.
My own experience was along similar lines. The Webmind AI Engine that I worked on in the late 90's was a "hybrid architecture," that incorporated learning/reasoning/etc. agents based on a variety of existing AI methods, moderately lightly customized. On the other hand, the various cognitive mechanisms in Novamente mostly had their roots in "standard" AI techniques, but have been modified, customized and re-thought so far that they are really fundamentally different things by now. So I did find that even when a standard narrow-AI technique sounds on the surface like it should be good at playing some role within an AGI architecture, in practice it generally doesn't work out that way. Often there is **something vaguely like** that narrow-AI technique that makes sense in an AGI architecture, but the path from the narrow-AI method to the AGI-friendly relative can require years of theoretical and experimental effort. An example is the path from evolutionary learning to "probabilistic evolutionary learning" of the type we've designed for Novamente (which is hinted at in Moshe Looks' thesis work at www.metacog.org; but even that stuff is only halfway there to the kind of prob. ev. learning needed for Novamente AGI purposes; it hits some of the key points but leaves some important things out too. But a key point is that by using probabilistic methods effectively it opens the door for deep integration of evolutionary learning and probabilistic reasoning, which is not really possible with standard evolutionary techniques...) -- 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/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
