From: Ben Houston (ben@exocortex.org)
Date: Fri Jul 20 2001 - 14:47:20 MDT
Hi Eliezer,
I'd strongly recommend against creating a language. It will take way too
much work and more probably will never get done. Also I have not yet seen
any new features that are really driving you towards a new language.
Describe the feature that you want and I'll bet that I can find an existing
language that has that feature.
Cheers,
-ben houston
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-sl4@sysopmind.com [mailto:owner-sl4@sysopmind.com]On Behalf
Of Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 4:02 PM
To: sl4@sysopmind.com
Subject: Re: Languages and AI
Well, then, let me respond with a quote from the second paragraph of the
Flare overview:
> The Singularity Institute needs Flare, not because of any deep
> correspondence between Flare and the structure of intelligence,
> but because existing programming tools are just plain old
> inadequate for the job of building AI. It's hard enough to create a
> mind without spending all your time fighting the programming
> language. (AI has always been one of the traditional drivers of
> programming language advances, although usually for the wrong
> reasons.)
And more:
> I don't believe in AI that is so simplistic that the
> thought processes have anything to do with the idioms of the
> underlying programming language, but I also think that current
> programming tools are simply inadequate. It would be really hard
> to code an AI in a non-object-oriented language and it probably
> won't be easy to build AI in a non-annotative language either.
> Also, the farther we go, the more powerful the purely
> programmatic tools we'll need. Flare, an extensible language
> easily modifiable by Flare programs, will let us write more
> powerful tools without needing to become compiler and
> interpreter specialists.
I read Hofstadter too, you know...
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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