Followup to: Cascades, Cycles, Insight...

...4, 5 sources of discontinuity.

Recursion is probably the most difficult part of this topic. We have historical records aplenty of cascades, even if untangling the causality is difficult. Cycles of reinvestment are the heartbeat of the modern economy. An insight that makes a hard problem easy, is something that I hope you've experienced at least once in your life...

But we don't have a whole lot of experience redesigning our own neural circuitry.

We have these wonderful things called "optimizing compilers". A compiler translates programs in a high-level language, into machine code (though these days it's often a virtual machine). An "optimizing compiler", obviously, is one that improves the program as it goes.

So why not write an optimizing compiler in its own language, and then run it on itself? And then use the resulting optimized optimizing compiler, to recompile itself yet again, thus producing an even more optimized optimizing compiler -

Halt! Stop! Hold on just a minute! An optimizing compiler is not supposed to change the logic of a program - the input/output relations. An optimizing compiler is only supposed to produce code that does the same thing, only faster. A compiler isn't remotely near understanding what the program is doing and why, so it can't presume to construct a better input/output function. We just presume that the programmer wants a fixed input/output function computed as fast as possible, using as little memory as possible.

So if you run an optimizing compiler on its own source code, and then use the product to do the same again, it should produce the same output on both occasions - at most, the first-order product will run faster than the original compiler.

If we want a computer program that experiences cascades of self-improvement, the path of the optimizing compiler does not lead there - the "improvements" that the optimizing compiler makes upon itself, do not improve its ability to improve itself.

Now if you are one of those annoying nitpicky types, like me, you will notice a flaw in this logic: suppose you built an optimizing compiler that searched over a sufficiently wide range of possible optimizations, that it did not ordinarily have time to do a full search of its own space - so that, when the optimizing compiler r...

Dan7

Dan7

Dan7

Dan7