From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Sun Oct 06 2002 - 20:24:25 MDT
> > On Sat, 5 Oct 2002, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> >
> > > I reply that the class of systems humanly chunkable into
> human-sized
> > > sub-regularities arranged in a holonic structure of
> humanly understandable
> > > combinatorial complexity, is a tiny subset of the set of
> possible systems
> > > with chunkable regularity, holonic structure, and compressible
> > > combinatorial complexity.
> >
Nice. This the heart of modularity + the argument for maximum possible
complexity; we can understand a thnig only so large, and we can combine such
maximal pieces into a system only so complex (although I'd say we could
continue combining larger level groupings out to about the same order). I
agree that the set of understandable things contains many elements which are
either composed of irreducable pieces that are too hard for humans, or
pieces that are combined in too complex a fashion, or both. But then, I've
done a lot of work (unfortunately) as a maintenance programmer, so I *know*.
This is one of the interesting facets of the calculation intensive
approaches to problem solving (eg: genetic algorithms, neural nets, etc);
they may be able to solve problems that we never will solve by hand, because
of the argument above, but we'll never understand how they do it below the
meta-level (barring intelligence augmentation). In fact, even including
augmentation, I propose that the set of things that an intelligence can
understand will always be less the set of all theoretically understandable
things, if that intelligence is based in the framework that it is trying to
understand. Now I'm just godelling around, I fear.
On the programming side, for those who read "A Deepness in the Sky", the
ziphead coders were examples of entities who produced non (unaltered) human
understandable code. For some reason the ziphead lifestyle is bizzarely
attractive to me.
Emlyn
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