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To create a super-intelligent machine, start with an equation

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Re: To create a super-intelligent machine, start with an equation

#61

> AIXI now uses this model for approximately predicting the future and bases its decisions on these tentative forecasts. AIXI contemplates possible future behaviour: “If I do this action, followed by that action, etc, this or that will (un)likely happen, which could be good or bad. And if I do this other action sequence, it may be better or worse.” What I want to know, is how long does it spend doing this? Does the d…

Interesting question.

I'm a developer for the linked site - if you're interested in posting the question in the comments I'll ping the author to see if he can answer.

Re: To create a super-intelligent machine, start with an equation

#62

It's interesting that, while the system can learn lots of different games, you still have to give it the reward function special for each different game. This may seem obvious, and not much of a limitation- after all, lots of things that we think of as intelligent to varying degrees (different human beings, as well as members of other species) have wildly different ideas of what constitutes "reward", so that can't be…

For tasks that do not reward us biologically (i.e. eating, sleeping), we ultimately depend on other people to give us reward, be that money, acceptance, praise, or whatever.

Re: To create a super-intelligent machine, start with an equation

#63
For those having trouble getting past the hype to the actual content of AIXI, lesswrong has a nice article [1]. From the article:

"The AIXI formalism says roughly to consider all possible computable models of the environment, Bayes-update them on past experiences, and use the resulting updated predictions to model the expected sensory reward of all possible strategies."

I will add that the prior over models comes from a measure of model complexity, which is a reasonable way to construct a prior.

While I think the idea of connecting deep mathematical formalisms with actual AI goals is mostly hype, these formalisms are still interesting in themselves. There is something very intuitive about how AIXI works, but that doesn't mean it is going to practical for a large range of problems.

[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/AIXI

Re: To create a super-intelligent machine, start with an equation

#64
post #15

>This scientific field is called universal artificial intelligence How many times do we need to re-define the same concept? Artificial Intelligence, Human Level Artificial Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, Strong Artificial Intelligence etc.... Lets pick one as a community and stick with it. I thought AGI was in the lead there recently what with the conference, journal and high amount of web searches but…

> How many times do we need to re-define the same concept? Artificial Intelligence, Human Level Artificial Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, Strong Artificial Intelligence etc.... Every time the name gets co-opted to mean something else. These days "artificial intelligence" == "machine learning and natural language processing" which is most definitely not what TFA is about.

No. There is a perfectly good term which has been around for a very long time: Strong AI. In no context does this mean "ML + NLP" (which, by the way, AI itself hardly means). I think terms like AGI are just rebranding.

Re: To create a super-intelligent machine, start with an equation

#65
post #32

>This scientific field is called universal artificial intelligence How many times do we need to re-define the same concept? Artificial Intelligence, Human Level Artificial Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, Strong Artificial Intelligence etc.... Lets pick one as a community and stick with it. I thought AGI was in the lead there recently what with the conference, journal and high amount of web searches but…

I like computational intelligence since we still don’t really know what intelligence is and whether our kind of intelligence can be reproduced artificially (although there are some hints that it can be done).

Ok there's no conclusive proof yet as no one has been able to do it yet, but as far as I know no one actually debates this anymore. It would be incredibly surprising, to say the least, if the brain turned out to work completely outside the known laws of physics.

Re: To create a super-intelligent machine, start with an equation

#66
post #13

Is AIXI capable of recognizing itself? If an AIXI agent were controlling a robot body, would it realize that the body's actions correlate with its own intentions? Would it pass the mirror test?

No. It would probably pick up on the correlation, but AIXI assumes that its only interactions with the universe are through its input and output channels, so it cannot recognize that a particular part of the universe is itself. It does not know how to formulate that hypothesis.

Re: To create a super-intelligent machine, start with an equation

#67
post #41

YEs this is all good but who determines whether something is "good" or "bad"? That's the interesting part. Who sets the goals? And how do they score an intermediate situation on the way to achieving them? Don't get me wrong, a machine can achieve goals is really, really useful. After all, chess playing programs use the AlphaBeta algorithm to prune future positions intelligently, but to score the positions they still…

I assume it gets reward for getting points in the pacman game (eating dots and ghosts) and presumably loses them if it dies or loses the game. There might also be a time factor involved so it doesn't waste time.

I'm really not entirely sure how it's decision making process works and I'm really curious to know. Because simulating every possibility would be ridiculous, but trying to predict the distant future based on some small action that happens in the present is also really difficult.

>So while this is intelligence, this is not sentience.

No one is claiming it is, and "sentience" is a really dubious concept itself.

Re: To create a super-intelligent machine, start with an equation

#68
post #54
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically that, formulated into a reinforcement learning algorithm. It's innovative because this combination which is unique to Marcus Hutter's Ph.D. thesis basically "solves" the problem of general AI.. if given infinite computation resources. It's provable mathmatically to the be the best possible artificial general intelligence, with constant-time operation.. it's just that constant happens to be larger than…

It's not constant-time. It's not even computable, even in theory, even with infinite resources.

True but the approximations of it are (i.e. limiting the amount of running time each hypothesis has and limiting the number of hypothesis you test.)

This is sort of like criticizing the concept of a Turing machine because no one has built one with infinite tape or running time.

Re: To create a super-intelligent machine, start with an equation

#69
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many times do we need to re-define the same concept? Artificial Intelligence, Human Level Artificial Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, Strong Artificial Intelligence etc.... Every time the name gets co-opted to mean something else. These days "artificial intelligence" == "machine learning and natural language processing" which is most definitely not what TFA is about.

No. There is a perfectly good term which has been around for a very long time: Strong AI. In no context does this mean "ML + NLP" (which, by the way, AI itself hardly means). I think terms like AGI are just rebranding.

I don't think strong AI has quite the history you think it does. It's one of these later coinages. Also, it has separate quasi-related meanings in philosophy of the mind...

Re: To create a super-intelligent machine, start with an equation

#70
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not constant-time. It's not even computable, even in theory, even with infinite resources.

True but the approximations of it are (i.e. limiting the amount of running time each hypothesis has and limiting the number of hypothesis you test.) This is sort of like criticizing the concept of a Turing machine because no one has built one with infinite tape or running time.

Further, you can show with information theory that limiting the number of hypothesis tested or the running time does not reduce generality so long as you test up to a certain amount for a problem domain (e.g. hypothesis sizes up to the maximum representable if the causally observable universe where converted into computium, and maximum number of steps equal to the number of possible combinatorial configurations of program state).

Of course as mentioned, this gives you constant factors equal to the size of the observable universe. No one said it was practical :)

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