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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Another way to approach AGI? (Very early, preliminary thoughts.)
Say you write an evolutionary algorithm, like the ones that have been written before. Then DD would argue it’ll get stuck because all it can do is explore a given landscape for its best features. Whereas real evolution creates new landscapes.
To address this issue, you subject your algorithm itself to variation and selection, by wrapping it in another evolutionary algorithm. But this approach just kicks the can down the road because now it’s the space of programs that’s limited.
How do you break out of this limitation?
You can’t just keep wrapping your programs in evolutionary algorithms like that because that only keeps kicking the can down the road. It’s like adding more and more entries to a multiplication table. It’s not the same as a multiplication algorithm. But for evolution, the problem is harder, in a way, because not even recursion solves the issue, and the starting point wasn’t as ‘flat’ as a multiplication table. The starting point is already an algorithm, not just a list.
What’s needed, in DD’s lingo, is a jump to universality. But a jump to what kind of universality, exactly?
cc @tyler-mills
At its core, I think evolution needs three variables: an environment, a mechanism for reproduction, and a mechanism for destruction. If either of these is missing, evolution will not happen. The algorithm for evolution is then definitively defined by the environment and the mechanisms of reproduction and destruction, with the current set of genes as the initial condition.
This sounds true but does it add anything new to saying that "AGI is an attempt to program Darwins theory of evolution"? 🤔
Please remember to mark your ideas as criticisms whenever appropriate. Although this idea is phrased as a question, it’s still a pending criticism as long as it doesn’t get answered.
Do you think my comment shouldn't count as a criticism? The content of Martin's comment doesn't contain any errors, but it can be criticised as an attempt to solve problems towards AGI
If you think his comment won’t work as a solution for AGI, then his comment is erroneous from that POV.
Like, the criticism flag isn’t just for factual errors, if that’s what you mean.
Great, that makes sense. True statements should ofc be criticisable depending on the problem situation.
Indeed. And this is one of the reasons the cynics are wrong. They think true ideas couldn’t be improved further. This worries them because they want unbounded progress. So they conclude our ideas can never be 100% true. Not only is that motivated reasoning but, as you’ve just said, true ideas can still be improved anyway.