Re: cognitive != observable? (project three)

On Wed, 15 Oct 2003 23:41:49 GMT, Patty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

>I did not think that part was original thinking - hopefully 
>you did not think that I did.  What may (or may not) be 
>original is the structuring of project three such that 
>linguistic ALife evolution can get "acted upon by selective 
>mechanisms".  Do you have any ideas about how to go about 
>designing that?
>
>Patty
>
========

People have been working on this since before computers were invented.
However, you are right that there are no "architectures" that
encourage cooperation and team development.  What is needed is a
definition of a "AI Virtual Machine" where everyone could experiment,
participate, and combine knowledge bases and procedures.

It seems that some of the capabilities needed of such a AIVM would be:
1) observation.  The AIVM should be capabe of making observations and
recording facts.  The observations could be pictures, text, speech,
etc. This could generate enormous databases.
2) generalization.  The AIVM could spend a lot of time extracting
features, comparing, and evaluating the enormous databases to find
common elements.  This would enable the AIVM to reduce the amount of
data that would need to be stored.
3) abstraction.  This is similar to generalization in that it involves
evaluating features to produce rules that can reduce the amount of
data stored or allow reaching conclusions that would have statistical
validity.
4) interaction. The AIVM should be capable of interacting with a user
to answer questions or to gather additional facts.
5) prioritization.  The AIVM would have to know what is more important
when.  If someone asks a question, providing an answer should be a
first priority and the generalization and abstraction processes would
get the major emphasis when no observations are being made and no
questions are being asked (the sleep cycle).

To achieve this kind of system you need to establish some primitive
functions that can be used to build procedures. (and which could be
generated by the abstraction mechanism so that the system can program
itself).  This self-programming should also be part of the
interaction.  When a task is given to the AIVM, a procedure should be
built and then executed.  This self-programing is what would make this
an AI project instead of an information retrieval project.

How will the data be stored?  This also needs to be established.  How
should text be stored ASCII, Unicode?  How about speech or music?
Photographs?  The definition of the primitive functions to be
performed determines what might be best, but there should be
provisions for improvements in technology.

The system could be implemented in steps.  Start with only text, for
example.  Pictures and speech can come later. Define primitive
functions for morphological analysis, boolean logic, statistical
analysis, etc. Establish procedure-building conventions that can be
used to achieve some desired functions, e.g., data mining, citation
analysis, etc.

This kind of project requires a lot of resources (grad student
workhorses) and never losing sight of the goal which is to have a
system that can grow and interface with other subcomponents.

good luck!

xyz