JeffShrager@sri-unix.UUCP (09/22/83)
, Letter Spirit (perception of the style of letters), Jumbo
(reshuffling of parts to make "well-chunked" wholes), and Deep Sea
(analogical perception). These tightly related projects share a
central philosophy: that cognition (mentality) cannot be programmed
explicitly but must emerge "epiphenomenally", i.e., as a consequence
of the nondeterministic interaction of many independent "subcognitive"
pieces. Thus the overall "mentality" of such a system is not directly
programmed; rather, it EMERGES as an observable (but onnprogrammed)
phenomenon -- a statistical consequence of many tiny semi-cooperating
(and of course programmed) pieces. My projects all involve certain
notions under development, such as:
-- "activation level": a measure of the estimated relevance of a given
Platonic concept at a given time;
-- "happiness": a measure of how easy it is to accomodate a structure
and its currently accepted Platonic class to each other;
-- "nondeterministic terraced scan": a method of homing in to the best
category to which to assign something;
-- "semanticity": the measure of how abstractly rooted (intensional) a
perception is;
-- "slippability": the ease of mutability of intensional
representational structures into "semantically close" structures;
-- "system temprature": a number measuring how chaotically active the
whole system is.
This strategy for AI is permeated by probabilistic or
statistical ideas. The main idea is that things need not happen in
any fixed order; in fact, that chaos is often the best path to follow
in building up order. One puts faith in the reliability of
statistics: a sensible, coherent total behavior will emerge when there
are enouh small independent events being influenced by high-level
parameters such as temperature, activation levels, happinesses. A
challange is to develop ways such a system can watch its own
activities and use those observations ot evaluate its own progress, to
detect and pull itself out of ruts it chances to fall into, and to
guide itself toward a satisfying outcome.
... Prerequisits: an ability to program well, preferably in
Lisp, and an interest in philosophy of mind and artificial
intelligence.