From: Jack Richardson (jrichard@empire.net)
Date: Mon Jul 30 2001 - 18:04:38 MDT
The points made by Ben and Eli regarding the work required to achieve a human-level seed AI and then to build towards a super-human version demonstrate the value of opening the process at the current stage to a broader mix of developers.
One way to do this without necessarily going all the way to reveal every detail about the code is to identify specific problem areas where particular kinds of algorithms may be useful. The first class minds on the main AI team can describe the nature of the problem they are working to solve and provide suggestions of possible algorithms. Then, hundreds of graduate level AI folks could generate potential solutions where the most useful contributions could then be explored in depth by the main research team.
This is likely to be necessary as practical experience shows that the dream of a couple thousand lines of code chugging away on Beowulf machines don't get you very far. Without knowing the details of Ben's work, I can see that he is running up against the many practical, technical problems that require hard, grinding work to solve. Furthermore, there may be hundreds or even thousands of these.
We will know that progress is happening when Ben and Eli are raising lots of specific problems that they are struggling to solve. Then, we'll know they are past the vision and into the nuts and bolts.
Good luck!
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