Normal_Anomaly comments on The Design Space of Minds-In-General - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 June 2008 06:37AM

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Comment author: Will_Newsome 08 January 2011 03:39:29AM *  2 points [-]

If you're just giving it a shape to copy then I don't see why that would be more than a hundred bytes or so - trivial compared to the optimizer.

A hundred bytes in what language? I get the intuition, but it really seems to me like paper clips are really complex. There are lots of important qualities of paperclips that make them clippy that seem to me like they'd be very hard to get an AI to understand. You say you're giving it a shape, but that shape is not at all easily defined. And its molecular structure might be important, and its size, and its density, and its ability to hold sheets of paper together... Shape and molecular component aren't fundamental attributes of the universe that an AI would have a native language for. This is why we can't just keep an oracle AI in a box -- it turns out that our intuitive idea of what a box is is really hard to explain to a de novo AI. Paperclips are similar. And if the AI is smart enough to understand human concepts that well, then you should also be able to just type up CEV and give it that instead... CEV is easier to describe than a paperclip in that case, since CEV is already written up. (Edit: I mean a description of CEV is written up, not CEV. We're still working on the latter.)

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 11 January 2011 01:26:57AM 4 points [-]

Well, here's a recipe for a paperclip in English: Make a wire, 10 cm long and 1mm in diameter, composed of an alloy of 99.8% iron and 0.2% carbon. Start at one end and bend it such that the segments from 2-2.5cm, 2.75-3.25cm, 5.25-5.75cm form half-circles, with all the bends in the same direction and forming an inward spiral (the end with the first bend is outside the third bend).