RE: Towards a prototype mini-AI

From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Fri Jan 31 2003 - 23:07:53 MST


Hi,

> What I want to see is a pseudocode schema for a general AI: the
> "Hello, world" of LOGI-compliant programming, something you might
> find on page 1 of a SIAI textbook for seed AI programmers. Even
> if Novamente meets all the AGI criteria, it's a mature project
> and is way too big and sophisticated for a print-out of source
> code to be enlightening. I want a minimal example of the proposed
> architecture, just a few dozen or a few hundred lines long.

Yes, it would be pretty easy to cast the Novamente architecture into a vague
sort of pseudocode in the way you describe.

It would be a full day's work, and I'm not going to do it tonight or this
week, but I can see that it might be a useful mode of exposition. Maybe
we'll do it in the final version of the Novamente book....

It would look a little different than you're thinking though.

More like:

* Definition of our knowledge representation
* Definition of our "mind OS" scheduling/process control framework
* List of a couple dozen MindAgents acting within the framework on the
knowledge representation
* List of a dozen functionally specialized units, each running the Mind OS
and with a certain set of MindAgents with certain parameter values

So it'd be *concurrent, agent-system style* pseudocode, not linear
von-Neumman-program-style pseudocode...

And it would be a few hundred lines because there are a couple dozen
MindAgents and a dozen units configuring them in different ways...

I'd stress though, that having this pseudocode does not get you very far
toward having the Novamente design. The devil is in the details -- in
working out the complex business inside the MindAgents in a way that will
lead to emergent cooperativity.

> Again, I want to emphasize: I'm not talking of a schema for a
> *seed AI*, but of a schema for a *general AI*. A seed AI is a
> highly particular subspecies of general AI, namely one that
> is optimized for self-enhancement. A seed AI will necessarily
> conform to the general-AI schema, but is likely to have enough
> specific architectural properties that it deserves its own
> schema (see part 2 of the textbook).

In the case of Novamente,

seed AI = general AI + codic modality + tuning of inference MindAgents for
automated theorem-proving

(to oversimplify a little)

-- Ben Goertzel



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