RE: Questions about any Would-Be AGI

From: ben goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Tue May 21 2002 - 14:22:27 MDT

***

If you stripped away all the English names from all AI content and replaced
them with randomly generated strings, so that the AI could no longer handle
human-supplied problems and human-supplied data which required
identification or invocation of concepts by English name, what capabilities
would the AI still possess?

***

Let me be sure I understand this one by exploring it in a Novamente context

Your question is about what happens if, in Novamente, I do the following
process:

--> For all WordNodes and WordInstanceNodes in the system, replace the
ListLink of CharacterNodes that is connected to the WordNode or
WordInstanceNode by a ConcatContained Link, with a ListLink to a random
sequence of CharacterNodes. Do this in a way so that the WordInstanceNodes
with MemberLinks to WordNode X all get the same random sequence of
CharacterNodes

The answer is:

1) The links to the random sequences will be forgotten in time as they will
prove useless, as will be the ListLInks of random char sequences and the
bogus WN/WIN's

2) In time, through exposure to human language again, new WordNodes will
form representing actual linguistic groundings for the system's concepts

However, process 2 may take a while. This is less hard than first language
learning because a linguistically-inspired concept structure has been left
intact; it's basically like second-language learning of a language that has
no phonological or typographical similarity to one's first language.

So your question is designed to identify systems that are capable of
language understanding based on programmed-in rules, but not of language
learning, e.g. systems like the current version of Cyc, right?

I clarify that my answer refers to the behavior we expects to see in a
complete Novamente system, not the behavior one would see in the current
Novamente system, which is far from having functional language learning
capability yet.

-- Ben

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:39 MDT