Anonymous_Coward4

Karma: 101

Anonymous_Coward4 Nov 17, 2008, 3:26 PM
0 points
on: Logical or Connectionist AI?

And you’d have been right. (Ever try running Bit Torrent on a 9600 bps modem? Me neither. There’s a reason for that.)

Not sure I see your point. All the high speed connections were built long before bittorrent came along, and they were being used for idiotic point-to-point centralised transfers.

All that potential was achieving not much, before the existance of the right algorithm or approach to exploit it. I suspect a strong analogy here with future AI.

Anonymous_Coward4 Nov 17, 2008, 2:32 PM
2 points
on: Logical or Connectionist AI?
>It took 17 years to go from perceptrons to back propagation… >… therefore I have moldy Jell-O in my skull for saying we won’t go from manually debugging buffer overruns to superintelligent AI within 30 years…
If you’d asked me in 1995 how many people it would take for the world to develop a fast, distributed system for moving films and TV episodes to people’s homes on an ‘when you want it, how you want it’ basis, internationally, without ads, I’d have said hundreds of thousands. In practice it took one guy with the right algorithm, depending on whether you pick napster or bittorrent as the magic that solves the problem without the need for any new physical technologies.

The thing about self-improving AI, is that we only need to get the algorithm right (or wrong :-() once.

We know with probability 1 it’s possible to create self-improving intelligence. After all, that’s what most humans are. No doubt other solutions exist. If we can find an algorithm or heuristic to implement any one of these solutions, or if we can even find any predecessor of any one of them, then we’re off—and given the right approach (be that algorithm , machine, heuristic, or whatever) it should be simply a matter of throwing computer power (or moore’s law) at it to speed up the rate of self-improvement. Heck, for all I know it could be a giant genetically engineered brain in a jar that cracks the problem.

Put it this way. Imagine you are a parasite. For x billion years you’re happy, then some organism comes up with sexual reproduction and suddenly it’s a nightmare. But eventually you catch up again. Then suddenly, in just 100 years, human society basically eradicates you completely out of the blue. The first 50 years of that century are bad. The next 20 are hideous. The next 10 are awful. The next 5 are disastrous… etc.

Similarly useful powerplant-scale nuclear fusion has always been 30 years away. But at some point, I suspect it will suddenly be only 2 years away, completely out of the blue....

Anonymous_Coward4 Oct 7, 2008, 3:37 PM
14 points
0
on: Make an Extraordinary Effort
Eliezer, this is probably the most useful blog on the internet. Don’t stop writing...

Anonymous_Coward4 Sep 29, 2008, 1:04 PM
0 points
on: Friedman’s “Prediction vs. Explanation”
Throughout these replies there is a belief that theory 1 is ‘correct through skill’. With that in mind it is hard to come to any other conclusion than ‘scientist 1 is better’.

Without knowing more about the experiments, we can’t determine if theory 1′s 10 good predictions were simply ‘good luck’ or accident.

If your theory is that the next 10 humans you meet will have the same number of arms as they have legs, for example...

There’s also potential for survivorship bias here. If the first scientist’s results had been 5 correct, 5 wrong, we wouldn’t be having this discussion about the quality of their theory-making skills. Without knowing if we are ‘picking a lottery winner for this comparison’ we can’t tell if those ten results are chance or are meaningful predictions.

Anonymous_Coward4 Sep 29, 2008, 7:12 AM
−1 points
on: Friedman’s “Prediction vs. Explanation”
Which do we believe?
What exactly is meant here by ‘believe’? I can imagine various interpretations.

a. Which do we believe to be ‘a true capturing of an underlying reality’? b. Which do we believe to be ‘useful’? c. Which do we prefer, which seems more plausible?

a. Neither. Real scientists don’t believe in theories, they just test them. Engineers believe in theories :-)

b. Utility depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re an economist, then a beautifully complicated post-hoc explanation of 20 experiments may get your next grant more easily than a simple theory that you can’t get published.

c. Who developed the theories? Which theory is simpler? (Ptolemy, Copernicus?) Which theory fits in best with other well-supported pre-existing theories? (Creationism, Evolution vs. theories about disease behaviour). Did any unusual data appear in the last 10 experiments that ‘fitted’ the original theory but hinted towards an even better theory? What is meant by ‘consistent’ (how well did it fit within error bands, how accurate is it)? Perhaps theory 1 came from Newton, and theory 2 was thought up by Einstein. How similar were the second sets of experiments to the original set?

How easy/difficult were the predictions? In other words, how well did they steer us through ‘theory-space’? If theory 1 predicts the sun would come up each day, it’s hardly as powerful as theory 2 which suggests the earth rotates around the sun.

What do we mean when we use the word ‘constructs’? Perhaps the second theorist blinded himself to half of the results, constructed a theory, then tested it, placing himself in the same position as the original theorist but with the advantage of having tested his theory before proclaiming it to the world? Perhaps the constructor repeated this many times using different subsets of the data to build a predictor and test it; and chose the theorem which was most consistently suggested by the data and verified by subsequent testing.

Perhaps he found that no matter how he sliced and diced and blinded himself to parts of the data, his hand unerringly fell on the same ‘piece of paper in the box’ (to use the metaphor from the other site).

Another issue is ‘how important is the theory’? For certain important theories (development of cancer, space travel, building new types of nuclear reactors etc.), neither 10 nor 20 large experiments might be sufficient for society to confer ‘belief’ in an engineering sense.

Other social issues may exist. Galileo ‘believed’ bravely, but perhaps foolishly, depending on how he valued his freedom.

d. Setting aside these other issues, and in the absence of any other information: As a scientist, my attitude would be to believe neither, and test both. As an engineer, my attitude would be to ‘prefer’ the first theory (if forced to ‘believe’ only one), and ask a scientist to check out the other one.

Anonymous_Coward4 Sep 28, 2008, 12:19 PM
−10 points
on: Above-Average AI Scientists
″ he turned out to be… …a creationist.”

On the one hand … you find yourself impressed by the aura of ’1000-year-old vampire’ academics...

And on the other … this guy worships a 2000-year old bloke who asked people to drink his blood, and was famous for rising from his coffin.

Are your worldviews really so far apart? ;-)