SilasBarta comments on Advice for AI makers - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 14 January 2010 11:32AM

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Comment author: SilasBarta 25 June 2010 01:16:46AM 0 points [-]

What Blueberry said. The page you linked just gives the standard program for solving Towers of Hanoi. What JamesAndrix was imagining was a program that comes up with that solution, given just the description of the problem -- i.e., what the human coder did.

Comment author: aletheilia 24 June 2011 10:49:06AM 0 points [-]

Well, this can actually be done (yes, in Prolog with a few metaprogramming tricks), and it's not really that hard - only very inefficient, i.e. feasible only for relatively small problems. See: Inductive logic programming.

Comment author: JamesAndrix 25 June 2011 08:00:18AM 0 points [-]

No, not learning. And the 'do nothing else' parts can't be left out.

This shouldn't be a general automatic programing method, just something that goes through the motions of solving this one problem. It should already 'know' whatever principles lead to that solution. The outcome should be obvious to the programmer, and I suspect realistically hand-traceable. My goal is a solid understanding of a toy program exactly one meta-level above hanoi.

This does seem like something Prolog could do well, if there is already a static program that does this I'd love to see it.