Shane, It still seems decidedly odd to me to call AIXI intelligent. For similar reasons, I wouldn't call a program that generates all possible strings of characters, sometimes randomly producing a literary masterpiece, artistic or creative. While I'm sympathetic to a functional account of these concepts, I think those functions have to be more substantive than just external behavioral outputs.
After a certain point though, I'm not sure much is really hanging on this semantic debate anymore. I don't particularly care about which labels we use for which concepts. If people can understand what I mean by "intelligence" and agree with the overall point I am making even if they wouldn't put it in the same terms (and of course, vice versa of me understanding what others mean), then I'm satisfied. Some people like to say that AIXI is intelligent but just impractical and useless for actually going about building AI. I would prefer to describe it as not actually intelligent and therefore, impractical and useless for the project of building AI. Although I suspect their way of putting things would still be more initially confusing to people who aren't familiar with the way they use their terms, I think we're pretty much in agreement by this point. John http://www.umich.edu/~jsku On 3/6/07, Shane Legg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
John, > > However, it appears that infinite computation is not feasible, certainly > at least not in the short- or medium-term. So, I think what we do is aim at > genuine intelligence instead. But now, *given* that our goal is genuine > intelligence, I think it is important for many purposes to distinguish > between genuine intelligence and infinite computation or Blockhead style > "intelligence." > I don't like this kind of distinction between "intelligence" and "genuine intelligence". To me it's like saying that planes don't have "genuine flight" because they don't have some property that birds have. All I care about with regards to intelligence is how well it works. If a machine can cure me of some disease and speed up the development of technology 1000 fold and write computer programs a billion times better than me... and post a few remarkably insightful emails to a few email lists on the side, to me it is intelligent. I really don't care if the machine is a fancy quantum computer or has hamsters running around inside of it. Of course if you want to build a machine with a lot of intelligence (as I define it), then approaching the problem based on the assumption of infinite computation power probably won't get you very far. What you will need to do is to work out how to get as much intelligence as possible out of each unit of computational resource that you have. Once you have done that, you will want to apply as much resource as possible in order to get the maximal intelligence. I've only taken a very cursory look at the AIXI stuff so I didn't want to > talk in any detail about it, but from what I can gather at the moment, that > *might* be an example of where this distinction can be relevant. If someone > is claiming to be proving some abstract stuff about intelligence but they > are really just talking about infinite computation or Blockheadish stuff, > then it might be important to keep this distinction in mind and take any > claims made about the nature of genuine intelligence with a grain of salt. > For sure. Indeed my recent paper on whether there exists an elegant theory of prediction tries to address that very problem. In short the paper says that if you want to convert something like Solomonoff induction or AIXI into a nice computable system... well you can't. Indeed my own work on building an intelligent machine is taking a neuro science inspired approach with just a few bits that are in some sense "inspired" by AIXI. I think the value of AIXI is that it gives you a relatively simple set of equations with which to mathematically study the properties of an ultra intelligent machine. In contrast something like Novamente can't be expressed in a one line equation. This makes it a much more difficult mathematical object to work with if you want to do theoretical analysis. Shane ------------------------------ 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=11983
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