I don’t know that it’s that impressive. If we launch a pinball in a pinball machine, we may have a devil of a time calculating the path off all the bumpers, but we know that the pinball is going to wind up fallin in the hole in the middle. Is gravity really such a genius?
This is confused about who/what the agent is and about assumed goals. The final question suggests that the agent is gravity. Nobody thinks that the goal/value function of gravity is to make the pinball fall in the hole—At a first approximation, its goal is to have ALL objects fall to earth and we observe it thwarted in that goal almost all the time, the pinball happens to be a rare success. If we were to suggest that the pinball machine were the agent that might make more sense but then we would say that the pinball machine does not make any decisions and so cannot be an agent. The first level at which agency makes any sense is when considering the agency of the pinball designer -The goal of the designer is to produce a game that attracts players and has a playtime within a preferred range even for skilled players. The designer is intelligent.
It seems to me that you are predicting the path of the pinball, but quickly enough that you don’t realize you’re doing it. It’s such a fundamental axiom that if there is a clear downward path to a given position, this position will be reached, that it’s easy to forget that it was originally reasoning about intermediate steps that led to this axiom. At most points the pinball can reach, it is expected to move down. At the next point, it’s expected to move down again. You would inductively expect it to reach a point where it cannot move down anymore, and this point is the hole (or sometimes a fault in the machine).
Contrast with the hole being upraised, or blocked by some barrier. All of the paths you envision lead to a point other than the hole, so you conclude that the ball will land instead on some other array of points. There it’s easier to see that gravity still requires path-based reasoning.
No, gravity isn’t genius, because even a well-designed pinball machine can have a fault that lets the ball get stuck somewhere. You are using a closed-form solution, not an optimization process anticipation.
Gravity doesn’t let water flow uphill a little in order to flow downhill a lot later.
You might not be aware of my reaction times or how good I am at pinball, but you may anticipate with high probability that if I play this pinball game, the pinball will not just wind up falling straight in the hole.
Superfluids still do not jump to higher energy states in order to descend to a lower one afterwards. Each atomic interaction a superfluid exhibits will always conserve energy and be, on average, entropic.
I don’t know that it’s that impressive. If we launch a pinball in a pinball machine, we may have a devil of a time calculating the path off all the bumpers, but we know that the pinball is going to wind up fallin in the hole in the middle. Is gravity really such a genius?
This is confused about who/what the agent is and about assumed goals.
The final question suggests that the agent is gravity. Nobody thinks that the goal/value function of gravity is to make the pinball fall in the hole—At a first approximation, its goal is to have ALL objects fall to earth and we observe it thwarted in that goal almost all the time, the pinball happens to be a rare success.
If we were to suggest that the pinball machine were the agent that might make more sense but then we would say that the pinball machine does not make any decisions and so cannot be an agent.
The first level at which agency makes any sense is when considering the agency of the pinball designer -The goal of the designer is to produce a game that attracts players and has a playtime within a preferred range even for skilled players. The designer is intelligent.
It seems to me that you are predicting the path of the pinball, but quickly enough that you don’t realize you’re doing it. It’s such a fundamental axiom that if there is a clear downward path to a given position, this position will be reached, that it’s easy to forget that it was originally reasoning about intermediate steps that led to this axiom. At most points the pinball can reach, it is expected to move down. At the next point, it’s expected to move down again. You would inductively expect it to reach a point where it cannot move down anymore, and this point is the hole (or sometimes a fault in the machine).
Contrast with the hole being upraised, or blocked by some barrier. All of the paths you envision lead to a point other than the hole, so you conclude that the ball will land instead on some other array of points. There it’s easier to see that gravity still requires path-based reasoning.
No, gravity isn’t genius, because even a well-designed pinball machine can have a fault that lets the ball get stuck somewhere. You are using a closed-form solution, not an optimization process anticipation.
Gravity doesn’t let water flow uphill a little in order to flow downhill a lot later.
You might not be aware of my reaction times or how good I am at pinball, but you may anticipate with high probability that if I play this pinball game, the pinball will not just wind up falling straight in the hole.
Not to detract from your main point, but superfluids do exactely that.
Superfluids still do not jump to higher energy states in order to descend to a lower one afterwards. Each atomic interaction a superfluid exhibits will always conserve energy and be, on average, entropic.
Each move in an optimization process will increase expected utility...
Yes. The only variables are the Utility Function, the Search Space Compression and the Primitive Action Set.