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mwengler comments on New report: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics - Less Wrong
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Just a thought on chess playing. Rather than looking at an extreme like Kasparov vs the world, it would be interesting to me to have teams of two, three, and four players of well-known individual ranking. These teams could then play many games against individuals and against each other. The effective ranking of the teams could be determined from their results. In this way, some sense of "how much smarter" a team is than the individual members could be determined. Ideally, the team would not be ranked until it had had significant experience playing as a team. We are interested in what a team could accomplish, and no strong reason to think it would take less time to optimize a team than to optimize an individual.
Along the same lines, teams could be developed to take IQ and other GI correlated tests to see how much smarter a few people together are than a single human. Would the results have implications for optimal AI design?
I think that teams of up to five people can scale "pretty well by human standards" - not too far from linearly. It's going up to a hundred, a thousand, a million, a billion that we start to run into incredibly sublinear returns.
As group size increases you have to spend more and more of your effort getting your ideas heard and keeping up with the worthwhile ideas being proposed by other people, as opposed to coming up with your own good ideas.
Depending on the relevant infrastructure and collaboration mechanisms, it's fairly easy to have a negative contribution from each additional person in the project. If someone is trying to say something, then someone else has to listen - even if all the listener does is keep it from lowering the signal-to-noise ratio by removing the contribution.
You correctly describe the problems of coordinating the selection of the best result produced. But there's another big problem: coordinating the division of work.
When you add another player to a huge team of 5000 people, he won't start exploring a completely new series of moves no-one else had considered before. Instead, he will likely spend most of his time considering moves already considered by some of the existing players. That's another reason why his marginal contribution will be so low.
Unlike humans, computers are good at managing divide-and-conquer problems. In chess, a lot of the search for the next move is local in the move tree. That's what makes it a particularly good example of human groups not scaling where computers would.
Are you or anyone else aware of any work along these lines, showing the intelligence of groups of people?
Any sense of what the intelligence of the planet as a whole, or the largest effective intelligence of any group on the planet might be?
If groups of up to 5 scale well, and we get sublinear returns above 5, but positive returns up to some point anyway, does this prove that AI won't FOOM until it has an intelligence larger than the largest intelligence of a group of humans? That is, until AI has a higher intelligence than the group, that the group of humans will dominate the rate at which new AI's are improved?
There is the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
That's parallelism for you. It's like the way that four-core chips are popular, while million-core chips are harder to come by.
As far as empirically finding the optimum group size, it'd be cheaper to find the number of researchers in a scientific sub-discipline and measure the productive work they do in that field. They are teams that review work for general distribution, read on others' progress, and contribute to the discussion. Larger sub-fields that would be more efficient divided up would have large incentives to do so, as defectors to the sub-sub-field would have higher productivity (and less irrelevant work to read up on).
Does anyone play (rated) chess on freechess.org? If so, do you want to get together to play some team games for the purposes of adding hard data to this discussion?
My blitz rating is in the high 1200s. My teammate should have a blitz rating close to that to make the data valuable. I play 8-minute games, and am not interested in playing enough non-blitz games to get my rating to be an accurate reflection of my (individual) skill. (Non-blitz games would take too much time and take too much out of me. "Non-blitz" games are defined as games with at least 15 minutes on the clock for each player.)
I envision the team being co-located while playing, which limits my teammate to someone who is or will be in San Francisco or Berkeley.
I've played a little "team chess" before. Was a lot of fun.
My contact info is here.