I’d like to be able to say that some household names in the AI field are finally coming around to my way of thinking, but the ridicule would probably be overwhelming. If there’s one thing i’ve learned to expect from talking with other people working on this stuff, it’s that they will tolerate about 3 minutes of my theories before they launch into a lengthy description of everything that is wrong with them, and sum up by suggesting i read all about their theories. Naturally, i respond in kind.
So it was with excitement that i read about Peter Voss’s approach, since i felt that they coincided pretty strongly with my own. I was disappointed when he didn’t immediately offer me a signing bonus and an exotic car to go work with him, but maybe he needs to save up for that. You never know what will happen.
My latest source of excitement is this article. I haven’t talked much about the approach of combining huge quantities of tiny processing agents in ways that produce interesting emergent behaviour, mostly because i would never do it that way. It’s just way too hard; ask the Artificial Life and Neural Net people. Even trying to genetically evolve such things is about a billion times harder than you might think, as this book will tell you. But inherent in the RALA ideas is situation in time, which is something i certainly have talked about. Of course, RALA at the time of writing is all vapour-ware, but i might find some time to implement a simulation of it in a traditional computer to explore its potential. That would be right after i create a new AGI programming language, 4 more GoID tasks, and run for Prime Minister of Canada. But, hey, it’s on the list.
Also interesting in the article is the Minsky Test, a desperately needed replacement for the Turing Test. Basically, the Minsky Test says that if an AGI implementation can read a childrens’ book (assumedly an arbitrary one) and then somehow summarize what happened (obviously, the details need to be worked out a bit), then the implementation is likely at least approaching intelligence. Hopefully Marvin can fill in a few more blanks.