you assume that knowledge of one's source code permits a fundamentally more powerful kind of recursive self improvement.
It's not really a difference in kind so much as a radical difference in terms of efficiency.
If asked to improve a C program, do you think a C programmer would rather have a memory dump of the running program or the memory dump and the source code for the program? The source code is a huge help in understanding and improving the program, and this translates into an ability to make improvements at a rate that is orders of magnitude greater with the source code than without. There's no reason to expect the case to be different for programs that are AGIs than for other kinds of programs, and no reason to expect it to be different for programmers that are AGIs than for human programmers. On the contrary, I think the advantage of having and understanding the source code increases as programs get larger and more complex, and is greater for programs that were artificially designed and are modular and highly compressed versus naturally evolved programs that have lots of redundancy and are non-modular.
As promised, here is the "Q" part of the Less Wrong Video Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The Rules
1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).
2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed to a few paragraphs, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).
3) Eliezer hasn't been subpoenaed. He will simply ignore the questions he doesn't want to answer, even if they somehow received 3^^^3 votes.
4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.
5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for at least 7 days. After that, it is up to Eliezer to decide when the best time to film his answers will be. [Update: Today, November 18, marks the 7th day since this thread was posted. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to review the questions and vote for your favorites.]
Suggestions
Don't limit yourself to things that have been mentioned on OB/LW. I expect that this will be the majority of questions, but you shouldn't feel limited to these topics. I've always found that a wide variety of topics makes a Q&A more interesting. If you're uncertain, ask anyway and let the voting sort out the wheat from the chaff.
It's okay to attempt humor (but good luck, it's a tough crowd).
If a discussion breaks out about a question (f.ex. to ask for clarifications) and the original poster decides to modify the question, the top level comment should be updated with the modified question (make it easy to find your question, don't have the latest version buried in a long thread).
Update: Eliezer's video answers to 30 questions from this thread can be found here.