Robert J. Bradbury writes:
> Gentlemen, as Greg pointed out in August, I've demonstrated the
> Alpha Male Syndrome (AMS) adequately (in my discussions with John)
> for the 1999 archives. Its probably advisable for further exhibitions
> to await either the coming millennia or some hard data on which
> the beating on one's chest is justified. (If you think about the
I think reasoning clauses and hand-code a true AI is now fairly firmly disproved. I like LISP as much as the next person, and personally think some of the biggest and most robust systems even have been written in it. Heck, I use XEmacs, and I love it despite all its failings. God knows, I was even a firm believer in AI in mid-80s myself. I simply didn't knew better back then.
However, I now do not see any alternative in stealing from the design of life, either by blind copying the blueprints, or (better) harnessing the metamethod (evolution) itself.
Nonbrittleness, massive finest-grain parallelism and an astonishing economy of resource utilization are not possible to achieve otherwise. This comes at a price, of course: the evolved designs are not understandable by a human. A nightmare of coupled autofeedback loops do not appeal to the orderly engineer's mind. However, as long as it outperforms anything the engineer can produce, I do not really care.
If it thinks, do we really have to know in detail how and why it thinks? And if we _really_ have to, we can really find out later.
Weird? Sounds like a badge of honour to me.
> list en-toto, you can imagine the number of --
> "See, I told you so!"s
> that people are saving up...)