From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon May 28 2001 - 10:54:32 MDT
James Rogers wrote:
>
> This represents a real hard limit, for now
> at least. Basically, you have to look at the problem as determining the
> maximum throughput of a given algorithm (AI in this case) on a given piece
> of hardware (A large, loosely distributed system in this case).
I think that you're visualizing an AI as something like a large search
tree, or a large neural network, or something of the sort. In traditional
AI the AI *has* been the algorithm, but this is because traditional AI
doesn't know how to build anything else, so they build an algorithm and
call it AI. A real AI is a system. The system components are built from
algorithms. If a component is built using an algorithm that doesn't scale
well for the Internet, a seed AI can rewrite that component using a
different algorithm that scales well for the Internet - unless, like Ben
and I said in slightly different words, the nature of the thought itself
is inherently such that it doesn't fit the Internet. And, as Ben and I
continued to say in slightly different words, this just means that part of
the AI / seed AI's psychology winds up being distributed and part of it
does not.
The only thoughts that don't fit on the Internet are thoughts that
inherently require low S, where S is (Anders Sandberg's?) measure of
latency compared to clock speed. If a lot of parallel or serial
operations are being performed on a very wide data-set, and you can't
predict which operations will need to talk to another operation *right
now*, then the thought has an inherent size too large to be broken up into
packets.
Ben also points out that for an AI with a definite center, network latency
will prevent you from using distributed processing for user actions that
need responses in real time. It is likewise true that serial actions
should be carried out on the fastest serial processor available.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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