For no reason in particular I'm wondering about the size of the smallest program that would constitute a starting point of a recursively self-improving AI.
The analysis of FOOM as a self-amplifying process would seem to indicate that in principle one could get it started from a relatively modest starting point -- perhaps just a few bytes of the right code could begin the process. Or could it? I wonder whether any other considerations give tighter lower-bounds.
One consideration is that FOOM hasn't already happened -- at least not here on Earth. If the smallest FOOM seed were very small (like a few hundred bytes) then we would expect evolution to have already bumped into it at some point. Although evolution is under no specific pressure to produce a FOOM, it has probably produced over the last few billion years all the interesting computations up to some minor level of complexity, and if there were a FOOM seed among those then we would see the results about us.
Then there is the more speculative analysis of what minimal expertise the algorithm constituting the FOOM seed would actually need.
Then there is the fact that any algorithm that naively enumerates some space of algorithms qualifies in some sense as a FOOM seed as it will eventually hit on some recursively self-improving AI. But that could take gigayears so is really not FOOM in the usual sense.
I wonder also whether the fact that mainstream AI hasn't yet produced FOOM could lower-bound the complexity of doing so.
Note that here I'm referring to recursively self-improving AI in general -- I'd be interested if the answers to these questions change substantially for the special case of friendly AIs.
Anyway, just idle thoughts, do add yours.
In terms of natural selection, couldn't homo sapiens be considered a FOOM?
Our first period of FOOMing would be due to social competition, which resulted in those with higher intelligence reproducing more.
Our current style of FOOMing is from the scientific knowledge, and with this we will soon surpass nature (one could even argue that we already have).
If we view nature as our "programer", we could even be called self recursive, as with each passing generation our knowledge as a species increases.
Yeah analogies with evolutionary events are interesting. In the first example it's natural selection doing the optimizing, which latches onto intelligence when that trait happens to be under selection pressure. This could certainly accelerate the growth of intelligence, but the big-brained parents are not actually using their brains to design their even-bigger-brained babies; that remains the purview of evolution no matter how big the brains get.
I agree the second example is closer to a FOOM: some scientific insights actually help us to do more better scie... (read more)