In Fendrich's Humble Opinion

Seed AI

Le grand assumption

The assumption of seed AI is this:
If we can make a program intelligent enough, a “seed” of intelligence, we can also make it gradually improve itself.




If we want to talk about improving programs, we have to define what it means to improve one’s intelligence, and thus what it means to be intelligent. We want intelligent systems to be useful. Useful intelligence is, just as science, about prediction, planning and pattern recognition. These are all so intertwined as to be more or less the same thing.








Pattern recognition


Notice the close relationship between pattern recognition and compression.

Intelligence test


  3. Interpret the currently best program’s output as new programs and measure the intelligence of these programs, give this intelligence as feedback to the generating program.



Thanks for the comment on my knol, David!
You're right, it sounds very similar on a high level, & I am sure there are many people who'd agree with the definition. But I don't know of anyone who used it to derive a universal, low-level, quantitative criterion to select inputs & algorithms. The key is to start from the beginning: raw sensory inputs, & "test" their predictive value, in the process discovering more & more complex patterns. That's what scalability is all about, if you can't evaluate pixels, it'll be super-exponentially more difficult to start from more complex data. That's why I think Cyc, NLP, & high-level approaches in general are hopeless for AGI.
I am sorry, but your "Intelligence test" idea, besides it being entirely hypothetical & presumably externally administered, has it exactly backwards. Just like many Algorithmic Learning approaches, you want to generate patterns & algorithms, instead of discovering them in a real world. Quite simply, we predict from experience, these patterns & algorithms will have *no* predictive value beyond mere chance, unless they're derived from the experience. Notice that the difference between patterns & algorithms is strictly in their origin: the former are discovered & the later are "invented".
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