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Vaniver comments on [LINK] David Deutsch on why we don't have AGI yet "Creative Blocks" - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: harshhpareek 17 December 2013 07:03AM

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Comment author: Vaniver 17 December 2013 09:12:03PM 4 points [-]

Creativity is just search.

Correct, but not helpful; when you say "just search," that's like saying "but Dark Matter is just physics." The physicists don't have a good explanation of Dark Matter yet, and the search people don't have a good implementation of creativity (on the level of concepts) yet.

I agree that there's a lot more work to be done in AI. We need to find better learning and search algorithms. What I disagree with is that the work must be this kind of philosophical work that Deutsch is proposing. I think the work that needs to be done is very much engineering work.

It is not obvious to me that Deutsch is familiar with ideas like Solomonoff induction, Pearl's work on causality, and so on, and thinks that they're inadequate to the task. He might be saying "we need a formalized version of induction" while unaware that Solomonoff already proposed one.

Comment author: passive_fist 17 December 2013 09:46:13PM *  2 points [-]

I made it clear what I mean:

Search that is possibly guided by experience solving similar problems. By learning from past experiences, search becomes more efficient.

I agree that there's a lot more work to be done in AI. We need to find better learning and search algorithms.

Why did I mention this at all? Because there's no other way to do this. Creativity (coming up with new unprecedented solutions to problems) must utilize some form of search, and due to the no-free-lunch theorem, there is no shortcut to finding the solution to a problem. The only thing that can get around no-free-lunch is to consider an ensemble of problems. That is, to learn from past experiences.

And about your point:

It is not obvious to me that Deutsch is familiar with ideas like Solomonoff induction, Pearl's work on causality, and so on, and thinks that they're inadequate to the task.

I agree with this. The fact that he didn't even mention Solomonoff at all, even in passing, despite the fact that he devoted half the article to talking about induction, is strongly indicative of this.

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