Friday, March 1, 2024

Embodied AI

 Some researchers believe that embodiment is essential for AGI while others believe it imposes a bottleneck. In providing an AI with some specific sense or a particular concept I have sometimes found simulation to be easier.* In other cases I have found embodiment to be easier.**

Simulations are always an imperfect model of reality. Ultimately we want an AI to have contact with and operate in the real world. It can sometimes be faster to begin AI training on simulations, however.

* Recharging ("feeding") was one example.

** For examples see my blog of  1 Oct. 2015.

Conscious of

 My A.s.a. embodied robots learn concepts like "touch", "smell", "hunger", "pain", "bump", etc.* When one or more of these concepts becomes sufficiently activated** A.s.a. is "aware of"*** their presence. The robot is "conscious of" the sensation. More complex concepts become activated higher up in the concept hierarchy.

* See my blogs of 1 Oct. 2015 and 5 Nov. 2015 for examples.

** By sufficiently strong sensory input.

*** i.e., May react to as appropriate.

Thursday, February 1, 2024

Some A.s.a. H. Societies

 I have tried various societies of A.s.a. H. agents. In a pandemonium-like configuration* all agents see the input and the one with the strongest response takes control. Another configuration has a single ("supervisory") agent receive the input and then select which (one or more) specialist agent(s) the input is sent to for response.** A third configuration is similar to Rod Brooks' subsumption architecture but the levels/behaviors and an arbiter are each replaced with an A.s.a. H. specialist agent. The behavior specialist agents all receive the input and propose output responses. The "arbiter" receives the original input and all the proposed outputs from the behavior agents and then generates an eventual output for the society. Details have varied depending on the problems/tasks being attempted.

* Due to Oliver Selfridge in 1959.

** For a large enough society with many specialists the signal can instead go into a tree of supervisory agents which route the input down to the specialist(s).

Even principles of logic are subject to change

Our human experience is very limited.* All of our concepts and models, even our logics/maths, abstract, idealize, and simplify. As our experience grows we are likely to need new logics,** new maths.

As a simple example, A.s.a. H. can be thought of as employing a kind of approximate vector logic where various sensations constitute an input vector which is processed to generate a vector output composed of actions.

* Although, of course, telescopes (and microscopes) do allow us to look away some distance as well as some way back in time.

** See, for example, Richard Epstein, Propositional Logics, Wadsworth, 2001, especially chapter XI and Paul Weingartner, ed., Alternative Logics: Do Sciences Need Them?, Springer, 2004.

Sunday, January 21, 2024

There is not one single right way of doing science

 It has been said that "There are as many ways of doing science as there are scientists." That is surely an exaggeration, but there is definitely more than one way of doing science.* I have argued that being a scientist is just being intelligent (plus careful hard work).** I have also argued that intelligence is a vector quantity, one can be intelligent in various different ways.***

A given "scientific method" may also be subdivided and a scientist may specialize in just one of the resulting pieces.**** The scientific endeavor as a whole becomes a group effort. Publications may also be quite specialized/focused. I'll give an example from my plasma confinement work. We had calculated the curves describing particle and energy balance for a linear solenoid dominated by endloss. These had been verified by comparison with experiment. We then calculated (and published) the curves that resulted when other different loss mechanisms/scalings were active. These might possibly describe other confinement devices. 

Not everyone is going to be following "THE scientific method" in every one of their publications. There are different ways to do science as there are different ways in which to think.*****

* Theories of Scientific Method, Nola and Sankey, McGill-Queen's U. Press, 2007.

**See, for example, my blog of 1 September 2012.

*** See, for example, my blogs of 23 August 2010 and 8 September 2011.

**** For example: theory, computation, experiment.

***** For example: induction, deduction, abduction.

Sunday, January 14, 2024

Limited reusability in A.s.a. H.

Many of my A.s.a. H. agents are specialists. They can not be reused (without modification/retraining) for some different specialty. It may be possible, however, to reuse some of the various layers (if the concepts used by the two specialists are the same and defined in the same way).   

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

A pantheism

With the universe as the body of god.

Evolution as the mind of god.

And evolved agents as children of god.