Teaching online

Some things can not be taught online. You can’t teach someone how to swim online. You should not try to teach someone brain surgery online. More generally, for subjects that are really difficult* one should have all of the teaching tools and environments available. This will include the internet but should not be limited to only the internet. Totally online instruction is better than nothing,** but not as good as the real thing.

* Quantum mechanics and relativity, for example.
** And may be used in real emergencies like the covid-19 pandemic.

Tacit knowledge learning and A.s.a. H.

It is argued that the majority of human knowledge is tacit knowledge. A.s.a. learns a substantial number of "subsymbolic patterns*," patterns that are never given names.**

* See my blog of 1 January 2016 for example and the end of my 23 August 2017 blog.
** This may be further enhanced when we give A.s.a. the very austere Toki Pona language.

An argument against quantum immortality

Tegmark and others suggest that a conscious agent will be immortal in the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics.* But the argument should work in the -t direction as well so we ought to have  existed from infinitely far in the past. But this does not seem to be the case.

* M Tegmark, Fortsch. Phys., 46: 855-862, 1998.

One-shot learning with A.s.a. H., novelty, and attention

A.s.a. memorizes a new pattern if it is sufficiently different from patterns it already knows. Novelty is the key. The "attention getter." Further observations of similar patterns will fine tune the original memory, however.

New Mac

Over the last year my old iBook* finally died. I have bought a new MacBook and downloaded the latest versions of QB64 and the Xcode IDE. Testing things out I ran my A.s.a. H. code from my 10 February 2011 blog using QB64 and the code from my 14 May 2012 blog using the Xcode IDE. Both ran fine so I again have A.s.a. running on Windows, Linux, and MacOS/Unix.

* Shown in my blog of 7 January 2012.

Modularity and decomposing intelligence

I believe that intelligence has components like those listed in my 23 August 2010 blog. With A.s.a. H.’s architecture long term memory is frequently held in hard drives, flash drives, or even SD cards which can be fairly easily expanded allowing for knowledge growth. It is also possible to add additional (hardware and/or software) modules that perform extrapolation or other algorithms that increase A.s.a.’s creativity. Overall speed can be increased in some cases by use of parallel processing. Other sorts of intelligence can be more difficult to enhance.

Perhaps students should not know their grades too accurately

If the purpose of grades is to make students work harder* then perhaps they should not know too exactly what their grade is at any moment in time. I have seen students who had high grades near the end of a course slack up a bit knowing that it wouldn’t be enough to change their final grade.

* See my blog of 12 October 2010.

Tradeoffs In kinds of intelligence*

Complex domains require that intelligent agents have more knowledge. More memory (knowledge) slows down processing (search). Simple domains favor faster, less knowledgeable agents. Complex domains require more knowledgeable, slower thinking agents. Different environments favor different kinds of intelligence.*

* See my blog of 23 August 2010.

Nouns, verbs, spatial and temporal patterns

Of the words/concepts A.s.a. H. has learned almost all nouns are purely spatial patterns.* One exception is “hardness” which reflects the amount of displacement registered over time as a force is applied. Verbs are more complicated. About half of all verbs are names for temporal patterns. Others like “need,” “listen,” “see,” “obstruct” are not.

* registered at a single time step

Return to school

Before we all return to campus everyone needs to be tested for Covid -19. Will we be?