Currently based near London, UK. Probably a TrueMichael. Web log on [livejournal].
Some demos based on the AI system I'm developing; [Bitphase-APEX Web Demos]
PGP public key; Starglider/PublicKey
My collection of quotes with a bearing on AGI and/or the Singularity; Starglider/Quotes
Here are a selection of literature notes from the early period of my AGI research, in 2003-2004. They're basically of historical interest only at this point - while there is a fair amount here I still agree with on some level, they're not really descriptive of any of my current beliefs. On the other hand, they act as overviews of the books in question and might contain observations of interest. Unfortunately they were originally written for personal use so the writing quality is low.
Starglider/NotesOnCTUOK : 'Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge' (Edward Wilson) Starglider/NotesOnGEB : 'Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid' (Douglas Hofstadter) Starglider/NotesOnMMT : 'Metamagical Themas' (Douglas Hofstadter) Starglider/NotesOnMITECS : 'The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences' (numerous authors)
* AGI Theories *
Starglider/BitphaseOld : 'Bitphase Prototype Design' (Michael Wilson) Starglider/NotesOnAMBR : Notes on DUAL and AMBR (material by Boicho Kokinov) Starglider/NotesOnEGI : 'Essentials of General Intelligence' (Peter Voss) Starglider/NotesOnEPIC : 'The EPIC Architecture' (David Kieras and David Meyer) Starglider/NotesOnGIS : 'Gene-I-Sys: Framework for a Generalised Intelligent System' (Gaurav Gupta) Starglider/NotesOnIAaO : 'Intelligence - Artificial and Otherwise' (Bruce Toy)
Starglider/NotesOnLOGI : 'Levels of Organisation in General Intelligence' (Eliezer Yudkowsky) Starglider/NotesOnNaW : Notes on Novamente and Webmind (material by Ben Goertzel) Starglider/NotesOnOI : 'On Intelligence' (Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee) Starglider/NotesOnOSCAR : 'Rational Cognition' and OSCAR (John Pollard) Starglider/NotesOnSPGU : 'Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding' (Roger Schank and Robert Abelson) Starglider/NotesOnSoM : 'The Society of Mind' (Marvin Minsky) Starglider/NotesOnUToC : 'Unified Theories of Cognition' (Allen Newell)
* Artificial Intelligence *
Starglider/NotesOnAMaP : 'Analogy Making as Perception' (Melanie Mitchell) Starglider/NotesOnAIaNS : 'Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis' (Nils Nilsson) Starglider/NotesOnTAID : 'The Artificial Intelligence Debate' (Stephen Graubard) Starglider/NotesOnAM : 'Artificial Minds' (Stan Franklin) Starglider/NotesOnB24 : 'Blondie 24: Playing At The Edge of AI ' (David Fogel) Starglider/NotesOnCANAI : 'Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI' (Rodney Brooks) Starglider/NotesOnCaS : 'Connections and Symbols' (Steven Pinker & Jacques Mehler et al) Starglider/NotesOnFCCA : 'Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies' (Douglas Hofstadter) Starglider/NotesOnHR : Notes on Hybrid Reasoning (particularly a paper by F. Osorio and B. Amy) Starglider/NotesOnIMMNMC : 'Impossible Minds: My Neurons, My Consciousness' (Igor Aleksander) Starglider/NotesOnIPoILD : 'Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning and Discovery' (John Holland et al) Starglider/NotesOnIGA : 'An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms' (Melanie Mitchell) Starglider/NotesOnMD2 : 'Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, AI' (John Haugeland et al) Starglider/NotesOnWCSCD : 'What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artifical Reason' (Hubert Dreyfus) Starglider/NotesOnWIT : 'What Is Thought?' (Eric Baum)
* Cognitive Science *
Starglider/NotesOnAT : 'Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World' (Gerd Gigerenzer) Starglider/NotesOnBABF : 'Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind' (Gerald Edelman) Starglider/NotesOnCE : 'Consciousness Explained' (Daniel Dennett) Starglider/NotesOnDMR : 'Dynamic Memory Revisited' (Roger Schank) Starglider/NotesOnGD : 'Goodbye Descartes' (Keith Devlin) Starglider/NotesOnHBT : 'How Brains Think' (William Calvin) Starglider/NotesOnHTMW : 'How the Mind Works' (Steven Pinker) Starglider/NotesOnIARYAW : 'I Am Right, You Are Wrong' (Edward de Bono) Starglider/NotesOnATITI : Papers on Mental Imagery (material by Nigel Thomas) Starglider/NotesOnMWLB : 'Metaphors We Live By' (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) Starglider/NotesOnTMDWTW : 'The Mind Doesn't Work That Way' (Jerry Fodor) Starglider/NotesOnTMI : 'The Mind's I' (Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett et al) Starglider/NotesOnNM : 'Nature's Mind' (Michael Gazzaniga) Starglider/NotesOnOC : 'On Creativity' (David Bohm) Starglider/NotesOnPSS : 'Perceptual Symbol Systems' and related papers (Lawrence Barsalou) Starglider/NotesOnSaAR : 'Similarity and Analogical Reasoning' (Stella Vosniadou and Andrew Ortony) Starglider/NotesOnTSS : 'The Symbolic Species' (Terrence Deacon)
* Friendly AI, Evolutionary Psychology and Decision Theory *
Starglider/NotesOnTBW : 'The Blind Watchmaker' (Richard Dawkins) Starglider/NotesOnCFAI : 'Creating a Friendly AI' (Eliezer Yudkowsky) Starglider/NotesOnFE : 'Freedom Evolves' (Daniel Dennett) Starglider/NotesOnTIE : 'The Inner Eye' (Nicholas Humphrey) Starglider/NotesOnTLoF : 'The Logic of Failure' (Dietrich Dorner) Starglider/NotesOnMaM : 'Micromotives and Macrobehaviour' (Thomas Schelling) Starglider/NotesOnTOoV : 'The Origins of Virtue' (Matt Ridley) Starglider/NotesOnSHTMUS : 'Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart' (Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter Todd) Starglider/NotesOnSoP : 'Sources of Power' (Gary Klein) Starglider/NotesOnTaD : 'Thinking and Deciding' (Jonathan Baron)
Starglider/NotesOnTCWoS : 'The Complete Works of Shakespeare' (William Shakespeare)
Tristan Miller has written a reasonable dismissal of Arthur Murray's crackpot 'Mentifex' proposal and thus saved me the trouble; you can find it at http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html (thanks for the link Emil).
Lakeena also reviewed an SL4-relevant book;
Lakeena/NotesOnGMC : 'Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition' (Ed Regis)
A summary of why past approaches to AI have failed (an excerpt from an unpublished introduction to AGI); Starglider/TheFailureOfGOFAI
General questions people have asked me; Starglider/Questions
I have also written a few mini-reviews of other SL4-relevant books I have read recently;
Starglider/FictionMiniReviews : 'Diaspora' (Greg Egan) 'Quarantine' (Greg Egan) 'Schild's Ladder' (Greg Egan) 'Permutation City' (Greg Egan) 'Teranesia' (Greg Egan) 'Mind, Machines and Evolution' (James Hogan)
Here are some other books/papers I would recommend;
'Dialogue On Friendliness' (Eliezer Yudkowsky) 'Collective Volition' (Eliezer Yudkowsky) 'Probability Theory: The Logic of Science' (E. T. Jaynes) 'The Language Instinct' (Steven Pinker) 'The Adapted Mind' (Barkow, Cosmides, Tooby) 'Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox' (G. Gigerenzer and R. Selten et al) 'The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms' (Margaret Boden)
'Judgment Under Uncertainty' (D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, A. Tversky et al) 'Choices, Values and Frames' (D. Kahneman and A. Tversky et al) 'Heuristics and Biases' (T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, D. Kahneman et al) 'Dynamic Logic' (D. Harel, D. Kozen, J. Tiuryn) 'Women, Fire and Dangerous Things' (George Lakoff) 'Causality; models, reasoning and inference' (Judea Pearl) 'Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial' (D.S. Sivia) 'Religion Explained' (Pascal Boyer)
'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' (Daniel Dennett) 'Climbing Mount Improbable' (Richard Dawkins) 'Holism: A Shopper's Guide' (Jerry Fodor) 'Enchanted Looms' (Rodney Cotteril) 'Philosophy in the Flesh' (George Lakoff) 'The Cerebral Code' (William Calvin) 'Language, Memory and Thought' (John Anderson) 'The Dreams of Reason' (Heinz Pagels) 'The Fabric of the Mind' (Richard Bergland) 'The Cerebral Symphony' (William Calvin) 'Brainstorms' (Daniel Dennett) 'The Medusa and the Snail' (Thomas Lewis)
Plus some others that I haven't had time to read yet but look interesting;
'The Architecture of Cognition' (John Anderson) 'Formal Theories of the Commonsense World' (J. Hobbs and R. Moore) 'The Evolution of Cooperation' (Robert Axelrod) 'The Complexity of Cooperation' (Robert Axelrod) 'Expert Systems: Principles and Programming' (Joseph Giarratano, Gary Riley) 'The Modularity of Mind' (Jerry Fodor) 'Rules of the Mind' (John Anderson) 'Thinking and Reasoning' (Alan Garnham, Jane Oakhill) 'Building Problem Solvers' (K. Forbus and J. de Kleer) 'Natural Language Understanding ' (James Allen) 'Bayesian Artificial Intelligence' (Kevin Korb and Ann Nicholson) 'Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems' (Judea Pearl) 'Sex, Games and Evolution' (J. Maynard Smith) 'Robot Rover Visual Navigation' (Hans Moravec) 'Emergence: From Chaos to Order' (John Holland) 'Computation and Human Experience' (Philip Agre) 'Computational Theories of Interaction and Agency' (P. Agre, S. Rosenschein et al) 'The Hedonistic Neuron: A Theory of Memory, Learning and Intelligence' (Harry Kolpf) 'Rational Choice in an Uncertain World' (Reid Hastie and Robyn Dawes) 'Multimind' (Robert Ornstein)
'The Structure of Intelligence' (Ben Goertzel) 'Stochastic Causality' (Maria Galavotti) 'Swarm Intelligence' (Eric Bonabeau) 'Markov Chain Monte Carlo In Practice' (W.R. Spiegelhalter et al) 'Information Theory: Inference and Learning Algorithms' (David MacKay?) 'Pattern Classification' (Richard O. Duda, et al) 'Learning with Kernels' (Bernhard Scholkopf and Alexander J. Smola) 'Market-Based Control: A Paradigm for Distributed Resource Allocation' (S. Clearwater) 'Learning Bayesian Networks' (Richard Neapolitan) 'Bayesian Networks and Decision Graphs' (F.B. Jensen) 'The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception' (J. J. Gibson) 'Impacts of Artificial Intelligence' (R. Trappl) 'Vicious Circles and Infinity' (Patrick Hughes and George Brecht) 'The Robot's Dilemma Revisited: The Frame Problem in AI' (Zenon Pylyshyn, Kenneth Ford et al) 'Categories and Concepts' (E. E. Smith and D. L. Medin) 'The Ascent of Mind' (William Calvin) 'Sparse Distributed Memory' (Pentti Kanerva)
'The Psychology of Consciousness' (Robert Ornstein) 'A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness' (Bernard J. Baars) 'Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture' (Lawrence Hirschfeld and Susan Gelman) 'Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems' (John Holland) 'Minimal Rationality' (Christopher Cherniak) 'Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' (Julian Jaynes) 'Intelligence as Adaptive Behaviour' (Randall Beer) 'Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem' (Jonathan Shear) 'The Problem of Consciousness: Essays Towards a Resolution' (Colin McGinn?) 'Cognitive Carpentry: A Blueprint for How to Build a Person' (John Pollock) 'Vehicles; Essays in Synthetic Psychology' (Valentino Braitenberg) 'Explanation Patterns: Understanding Mechanically and Creatively' (Roger Schank) 'Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding' (Roger Schank) 'Inside Case-Based Reasoning' (Christopher Reisbeck and Roger Schank) 'The View from Nowhere' (Thomas Nagel) 'The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution' (Stuart Kauffman)
'Human and Machine Thinking' (P. Johnson-Laird) 'The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science' (D. Gentner, K. Holyoak and B. Kokinov) 'The Oxford Handbook of Free Will' (Robert Kane) 'Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong' (Jerry Fodor) 'In Critical Condition' (Jerry Fodor) 'A Theory of Content' (Jerry Fodor) 'The Intentional Stance' (Daniel Dennett) 'The Unity of Self' (Steven White) 'Machiavellian Intelligence: The Evolution of Intellect' (R. Byrne and A. Whiten) 'The Connection Machine' (W. D. Hills) 'Patterns, Thinking and Cognition; A Theory of Judgement' (H. Margolis) 'Do The Right Thing; Studies in Limited Rationality' (S. Russell and E. Wefald) 'The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness' (Gerald Edelman) 'The Social Brain: Discovering the Networks of the Mind' (M. Gazzaniga) 'Case-Based Reasoning' (Janet Kolodner) 'How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species' (D. Cheney and R. Seyfarth) 'The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason' (M. Johnson) 'Emergent Computation' (Stephanie Forrest) 'AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence' (Daniel Crevier)
'Perception as Bayesian Inference' (David Knill and Whitman Richards) 'The Perception of Causality' (A. Michotte) 'Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences' (Howard Gardner) 'Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century' (Howard Gardner) 'Designing Autonomous Agents' (Pattie Maes) 'Image and Mind" (Stephen Kosslyn) 'Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate" (Stephen Kosslyn) 'Principles of Mental Imagery' (Ronald Finke) 'The Imagery Debate' (Michael Tye) 'Causal Cognition' (D. Sperber, D. Premack and A. J. Premack) 'Creating a Memory of Causal Relationships' (Michael J. Pazzani) 'Labyrinths of Reason' (William Poundstone) 'High-level Vision: Object Recognition and Visual Cognition' (Shimon Ullman) 'Visual Cognition' (Stephen Pinker) 'Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure' (Steven Pinker) 'Models of Working Memory' (Akira Miyake and Priti Shah) 'Working Memory' (Alan Baddeley) 'Visuo-spatial Working Memory' (Cesare Cornoldi and Tomaso Vecchi)
'The Moral Sense' (James Wilson) 'Human Universals' (Donald Brown) 'Irrationality: The Enemy Within' (Stuart Sutherland) 'Self Deception: An Adaptive Mechanism' (Joan Lockard and Delroy Paulhus) 'Creativity and the Mind: Discovering the Genius Within' (Thomas Ward and Ronald Finke) 'Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain' (Antonio Damasio) 'Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions' (Robert Frank) 'The Cognitive Structure of Emotions' (Andrew Ortony, Gerald Clore and Allan Collins) 'Thirty-six Dramatic Situations' (Georges Polti) 'Adaptive Reasoning for Real-World Problems: A Schema-Based Approach' (Roy Turner) 'Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution' (Ray Jackendoff) 'Consciousness and the Computational Mind (Ray Jackendoff) 'Semantics and Cognition' (Ray Jackendoff) 'Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature' (Ray Jackendoff) 'Algorithmic Learning (Alan Hutchinson) 'The Evolution of Communication' (Marc Hauser) 'Information, Language and Cognition' (Philip Hanson) 'On the Origin of Objects' (Brian Smith) 'Mind and Mechanism' (Drew McDermott?)
'Foundations of Social Evolution' (Steven Frank) 'Decision Theory as Philosophy' (Mark Kaplan) 'Mapping the Mind' (Rita Carter) 'The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World' (Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart) 'Emotional Intelligence' (Daniel Goleman) 'An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications' (P. Vitanyi et al) 'Heuristics: Intelligent Search Strategies for Computer Problem Solving' (Judea Pearl) 'An Introduction to the Philosophy of Induction and Probability' (Jonathan Cohen) 'Theory and Evidence' (Clark Glymour) 'The Logic of Decision' (Richard Jeffrey) 'Towards a Bayesian Philosophy of Science' (R. Rosenkrantz) 'Frontiers of Evolutionary Computation' (Anil Menon) 'Generating Abstraction Hierarchies' (Craig A. Knoblock) 'Automated Theorem Proving in Software Engineering (J. Schumann) 'Mental Models' (P. N. Johnson-Laird) 'Advances in Bayesian Networks' (Jose Gamez, Serafin Moral, Antonio Salmeron) 'Classification Algorithms' (M. James) 'The Extended Phenotype' (Richard Dawkins) 'Reasoning about Change; Time and Causation in AI' (Yoav Shoham) 'Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming' (Martin Puterman) 'Computation, Causation and Discovery' (Clark Glymour and Gregory Cooper) 'Causation, Prediction and Search' (Clark Glymour, Peter Sprites and Richard Scheines) 'Consistency and Cognition: A Theory of Causal Attribution' (Shelley Duval, V. Duval)
'Probabilistic Reasoning in Multiagent Systems' (Yang Xiang) 'Behavior-based Robotics' (Ronald C. Arkin) 'Intelligent Scheduling' (Monty Zweben, Mark Fox) 'Intelligent Planning: Decomposition and Abstraction' (Q. Yang) 'Reasoning About Rational Agents' (Michael Wooldridge) 'Rules of Encounter' (Jeffrey Rosenschein and Gillad Zlotkin) 'Model Checking' (E. Clarke) 'Algebra of Probable Inference' (Richard Cox) 'The Child's Conception of the World' (Jean Piaget) 'The Language and Thought of the Child' (Jean Piaget) 'Inside Computer Understanding' (Roger C. Schank, Christopher K. Reisbeck) 'Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again' (Andy Clark) 'Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior' (J. A. Scott Kelso) 'The Computational Brain' (P. S. Churchland and T. J. Senjowski) 'Mental Images in Human Cognition' (R. H. Logie and M. Denis)