From: Simon McClenahan (peepsplat@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Feb 07 2002 - 14:10:38 MST
I just read The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer at
http://www.jargon.8hz.com/jargon_49.html . Everyone knows that Real
Programmers write in machine code or assembly, their code is self modifying
and is tightly coupled with the hardware and maybe the OS. Modern
programmers use higher-level languages such as C, LISP, etc. and rely on the
compiler to optimize the code. Modern operating systems (including MSDOS?)
have a memory manager to protect the code section of a process from being
modified.
When creating a seed AI, is it still wise to use a component-based
architecture with an OS that provides memory protection? Is top-down
programming going to give a seed AI any advantage over a bottom-up
implementation? So what if we don't understand it, so long as a few people
do and they don't all die at the same time, why shouldn't we get the latest
PC or supercomputer, start hacking in self-modifying assembly for the first
generation of seed AI? Not an easy task I know, but we have hardware
emulators or virtual machine software to help debug the seed during
development.
I know there are many correlations between self-modifying code and our
biological DNA programming, and I do faintly recall reading about it in the
canonical SAI/CFAI/xAI papers. From what I understand about WebMind, the
intelligence architecture was almost finished, then it was going to be
trained and re-create itself as version 2.0 at some stage. Instead of
re-writing itself completely (or even whole components at the component
level), why not continuously modify itself at a sub-component level?
Even if we don't understand how it works now, we can eventually ask it to
decompile (or super-compile) itself into a human/programmer readable
language for our benefit.
cheers,
Simon
_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:37 MDT