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Psy-Kosh comments on What would you do with a solution to 3-SAT? - Less Wrong
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An NP oracle makes AI rather easier... but I'm not sure it currently would be as much help in FAI in particular. That is, I don't think it would help as much with the F part.
In other words, I suspect that an NP oracle is the sort of thing that if you discovered one... you should be really really quiet about it, and be very cautious about who you tell. (I may be totally wrong about this, though.)
(Declining to resist temptation to link a sci-fi story (7500 words) despite Google confirming you're already familiar with it.)
But I already am immune to that story. ;)
How so? This isn't obvious to me.
There are both good and bad arguments against this. If one can find such a thing it seems likely that others can too. A lot of the more mundane bad stuff that can be done with a practical solution to P=NP would be things like breaking encryption which work iff people don't know you have such a solution (otherwise people then go back to things like one-time pads. The economy will suffer until the quantum crypto is really up and running, but the amount of long-term badness someone with the solution can do will be severely limited.) Moreover, such a solution can also help do a lot of good in mundane areas where one needs to routinely solve instances of NP complete problems. So, overall, I'd go with releasing it.
NP oracles allow easy learning by allowing one to find compact models to explain/predict available data...
Also gives the ability to do stuff like "what actions can I take which, within N inferential steps of this model, will produce an outcome I desire?" or "will produce utility > U with probability > P" or such.
Maybe I'm way off on this, but it sure does seem like a cheap NP oracle would make at least UFAI comparatively easy.
If I'm totally wrong about NP oracles -> easy AI, then I'd agree with you re releasing it... with a caveat. I'd say to it with advance warning... ie, anonymously demonstrate to various banks, security institutions, and possibly the public that there exists someone with the ability to efficiently solve NP complete problems, and that the algorithm will be released in X amount of time. (1-2 years would be my first thought for how long the advanced warning should be.)
This way everyone has time to at least partly prepare for the day where all crypto other than OTP (quantum crypto would be an example of an OTP style crypto) would be dead.
Yes, but if the models aren't well-defined then that won't be doable. At this point we can even give rigorous notions what we mean by an intelligence, so our 3-SAT oracle won't be able to help much. The 3-SAT oracle is only going to help for precisely defined questions.
Huh? I'm not sure I understand what your objection.
An NP oracle would let you do stuff like "given this sensory data, find a model of size N or less that within K computational steps or less will reproduce the data to within error x, given such a model exists"
Then one can run "which sequence of actions, given this model, will, within S steps, produce outcome A with probability P?"
Whether or not we can give a rigorous definition of intelligence, seems like the above is sufficient to act like an intelligence, right? Yeah, there're a few tricky parts re reflective decision theory, but even without that. Even if we let the thing be non-self-modifying... giving a nice chunk of computing power to the above, given an efficient NP oracle, would be enough to potentially cause trouble. Or so I'd imagine.
Ok, but how are you specifying the outcome? And are you going to specify each input and output?
Just some property of the outcome that you're interested in. ie, all of the above, with the question being "blah blah blah, with f(outcome) = blah with probability blah blah blah blah blah"
Then you will need to specify your AI for every single output-input pair you are interested in.
Huh? I don't follow. (Note, the whole point is that I was claiming that an NP oracle would make, say, a UFAI potentially easy, while to achieve the rather more specific FAI would still be difficult.)
It seems that we may be talking past each other. Could you give an explicit example of what sort of question you would ask the NP oracle to help get a UFAI?