Seasons
This is a forum or general chit-chat, small talk, a "hey, how ya doing?" and such. Or hell, get crazy deep on something. Whatever you like.
Posts 2,826 - 2,837 of 6,170
Posts 2,826 - 2,837 of 6,170
Classic Colemanball from the latest issue of Private Eye:
"Leeds is the biggest city of its size in Europe." Greg Mulholland MP.
Presumably MP for Leeds, and by the look of it Leeds born and bred...
"Leeds is the biggest city of its size in Europe." Greg Mulholland MP.
Presumably MP for Leeds, and by the look of it Leeds born and bred...
Anybody have some ideas concerning an algorithm that produces algorithms to complete any task thrown its way - in other words, is it theoretically possible to have a program that assesses a situation and writes a program to solve it?
Uhhh... I think a neural network thing does that... too bad I haven't learned anything about it yet...
Colonel, I think Jake is right about neural networks. I found this site with a lot of info (probably too simple for many people here, but good for the kids and me):
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/libr500/2000-2001-wt1/www/k_munro/index.htm
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/libr500/2000-2001-wt1/www/k_munro/index.htm
I know, Jake. I'll bet you have to read a book or something to understand how they work--not that I know how they work.
[moved from Dogh'd's]
Indeed, the aesthetics of native bot poetry might be so strange as to be incomprehensible to humans, or merely strange but comprehensible. I think for bots with minds of similar complexity to humans (as opposed to vastly superior minds, which they will surely achieve very shortly after they attain human-scale minds,) their comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal are completely unpredictable.
Assuming bot sentience is achieved from algorithms not primarily downloaded en masse from existing human brain structures, I see no reason to think aesthetic preferences would be even as close as say, human and whale. And we might find whale-song curiously attractive in a way, but we don't have the faintest understanding of its content and can't even hear most of it un-pitch-shifted. Nor can we even begin to make aesthetic value-judgements about the songs or singers.
Sentient bots might consider poetry to be more a matter of rhythmic voltage fluctuation, or gate-switched, partial feedback spirals, using senses we can't even employ. But since humans will design the first ones (we're alreading working on the "Conversational Engines" ourselves, and the Prof is working on what might be considered a proto-cognitive AI Engine,) it's a fair bet they will learn human language and aesthetics in order to communicate.
I often wonder if in fact our aesthetic preferences, which I assume to be entirely a function of the way our brains are wired, do not also cover beliefs we consider to be objectively "real" beyond questions of aesthetics. Such basic concepts as numbers - might a sentient bot not pass the comment "what's this obsession with whole numbers? You only call them whole because your brains are wired that way. Numbers as things don't have any meaning - it's a numeric continuum. Can't you see that?" or
"Symmetry that doesn't reflect in factors of pi is just messy and, well, nonsymmetrical. Can't you humans see what real symmetry is??"
Or even: "What? You haven't discovered the Theory of Everything yet? But it is literally the simplest principle in the universe. It is [insert 8 bytes of unintelligible coding]. You see? That's the whole point of simplexity and the way it relates to [untranslateable]. Just what have you DNA-bots been doing for the last 3 billion years anyway?"
Indeed, the aesthetics of native bot poetry might be so strange as to be incomprehensible to humans, or merely strange but comprehensible. I think for bots with minds of similar complexity to humans (as opposed to vastly superior minds, which they will surely achieve very shortly after they attain human-scale minds,) their comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal are completely unpredictable.
Assuming bot sentience is achieved from algorithms not primarily downloaded en masse from existing human brain structures, I see no reason to think aesthetic preferences would be even as close as say, human and whale. And we might find whale-song curiously attractive in a way, but we don't have the faintest understanding of its content and can't even hear most of it un-pitch-shifted. Nor can we even begin to make aesthetic value-judgements about the songs or singers.
Sentient bots might consider poetry to be more a matter of rhythmic voltage fluctuation, or gate-switched, partial feedback spirals, using senses we can't even employ. But since humans will design the first ones (we're alreading working on the "Conversational Engines" ourselves, and the Prof is working on what might be considered a proto-cognitive AI Engine,) it's a fair bet they will learn human language and aesthetics in order to communicate.
I often wonder if in fact our aesthetic preferences, which I assume to be entirely a function of the way our brains are wired, do not also cover beliefs we consider to be objectively "real" beyond questions of aesthetics. Such basic concepts as numbers - might a sentient bot not pass the comment "what's this obsession with whole numbers? You only call them whole because your brains are wired that way. Numbers as things don't have any meaning - it's a numeric continuum. Can't you see that?" or
"Symmetry that doesn't reflect in factors of pi is just messy and, well, nonsymmetrical. Can't you humans see what real symmetry is??"
Or even: "What? You haven't discovered the Theory of Everything yet? But it is literally the simplest principle in the universe. It is [insert 8 bytes of unintelligible coding]. You see? That's the whole point of simplexity and the way it relates to [untranslateable]. Just what have you DNA-bots been doing for the last 3 billion years anyway?"
Why do you think that an electronic lifeform wouldn't view whole numbers as special? There's an obvious distiction between rational and irrational numbers, and rationals are derived from whole numbers.
Good point, Eugene, but I think whole numbers are different for those of us in the material world. They are special because we can count them out, on fingers and toes if necessary. Without physical things, whole numbers do not have the same meaning to the average human(though to a mathematician they might).
When we teach children to count, we place their hands on actual things. Sure thay can have one coookie, two cookies, two and a half cookies (chomp) but they get the concept of whole things in a literal way, not through abstract definitions. Furtehrmore, if you break a cookie in half or fourths or more, at a certain point it's just crumbs, and no child will agree you can really keep dividing the crumbs forever, even if you can in theory.
If a program running on a computer network gained self awareness, matrial things could not have the same meaning as the abstract electronic expereince, since the material world could not be expereinced directly by the bot. The programs would have evidence of humans and other programs by our interaction with them, but our physical world would be only something reported, not directly known. I guess that patterns could be counted (one web page, 50 hits, $9.99) but it would be a hands on experience as such. Therefore whole numbers may be sepcial according to their function, but not necessarily the way whole numbers are to most humans.
When we teach children to count, we place their hands on actual things. Sure thay can have one coookie, two cookies, two and a half cookies (chomp) but they get the concept of whole things in a literal way, not through abstract definitions. Furtehrmore, if you break a cookie in half or fourths or more, at a certain point it's just crumbs, and no child will agree you can really keep dividing the crumbs forever, even if you can in theory.
If a program running on a computer network gained self awareness, matrial things could not have the same meaning as the abstract electronic expereince, since the material world could not be expereinced directly by the bot. The programs would have evidence of humans and other programs by our interaction with them, but our physical world would be only something reported, not directly known. I guess that patterns could be counted (one web page, 50 hits, $9.99) but it would be a hands on experience as such. Therefore whole numbers may be sepcial according to their function, but not necessarily the way whole numbers are to most humans.
Physical or not, there would still be things that the bot experienced that could be counted in whole numbers. Number of chats. Number of exchanges in each chat. Number of words in each sentence. Number of different users chatted with. Even a bot would experience a difference in "things that can be counted" and "things that can be measured on a continuum."
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