From: Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Oct 22 2004 - 08:21:17 MDT
Christian Szegedy wrote:
>
> I liked Schmidthubers paper. It contains several important ideas that
> could be important for construction of a practical AI.
>
> Schmidthubers paper is a greatly modified version of Levins (and
> Hutters) universal search algorithm. If one understands the original
> idea, it becomes immediately clear that although the universal search is
> a very simple and provably almost optimal algorithm (at least
> asymptotically), its practical value is simply zero: the unimaginably
> huge additive constant makes it practically untractable.
*nod nod*
> For me, it appears to be some kind of cheating. Assume that some people
> develop by hard work some really good program-/proof-generation
> techniques, then we simply puts their plugins into his framework and
> gets provable optimality and practical performance at the same time and
> can reap the credits for his "important contribution"
Oh, come now, that's not fair; we haven't seen him try anything like that.
And it *would* be an important contribution, to correctly say the X in
"what kind of really good <X> techniques you need to make an AI". My own
fear is that the basic AIXI/OOPS/GM formalism lacks basic, foundational
elements needed for practicality - AIXI might work given enough brute
force, though I'm not sure GM would work at all as it seems underspecified;
but to make an AGI run in our universe, you might need additional basic
theoretical elements not discussed in the Solomonoff-Levin-Schmidhuber
-Hutter tradition.
The value of Schmidhuber's and Hutter's work is precisely that we *can*
talk about it and try to figure out what's missing. All other proposals
for AGI are so underspecified we can't even do that.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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