Can Curiosity Be Programmed?

destinyland writes "AI researcher Jurgen Schmidhuber says his main scientific ambition 'is to build an optimal scientist, then retire.' The Cognitive Robotics professor has worked on problems including artificial ants and even robots that are taught how to tie shoelaces using reinforcement learning, but he believes algorithms can be written that allow the programming of curiosity itself. 'Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising...' He's already created art using algorithmic information theory, and can describe the simple algorithmic principle that underlies subjective beauty, creativity, and curiosity itself. And he ultimately addresses the possibility that the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program."

Comments

Physics of computing the universe

[BitZtream]

And he ultimately addresses the possibility that the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program.

The problem with this is that you need to be outside the universe in order to do so, you can't calculate the universe from within itself any more than a VMWare can run a machine faster than the host processor.

You'd also need more mass in your computer than exists in the universe, observable or otherwise.

So sure, I'll go with the theory that its possible, just not by any thing in our universe.

Likewise, nothing in our universe could leave it to perform the calculation elsewhere, as doing so links the two realities together, so you now need to simulate both.

Everything is interconnected and the very act of attempting to simulate the universe changes the simulation. Every new version of the simulation would instantly require a new version to take into account the changes from the previous version.

The theory is ... cute at best, but unworkable.

Re:Physics of computing the universe

[Profane MuthaFucka]

There's a workaround. You don't need to simulate the entire universe at one time, and there's no way that anything inside the universe would ever be able to tell that huge swaths of the universe aren't being actively simulated.

Reasoning: If a universe simulator needs to have more states than exist inside the universe (we're both assuming this) then then any process which verifies the universe simulator would also need to have more states than exist inside the universe. Therefore, the universe can only be fully simulated from outside the universe, and you could only determine that the universe was fully simulated from outside the universe. From inside the universe, all you could simulate and all you could check would be a subset of the universe you are in.

So you could actually pull off a neat trick, just like the human eye does. The human eye doesn't actually see clearly except in the very middle of the vision. But, wherever you look, whatever you're looking at is clearly resolved. Your brain gets the distinct impression that it's looking at the entire scene clearly, except it's not. Only the part that it's actually looking at is clear.

Well, that's enough hacking of the universe for today. I need a beer.

Re:Physics of computing the universe

[p00ya]

Even at a slower rate than real time you cannot simulate the universe from within the universe. This has been proved by Cantor diagonalization (see Wolpert's "Physical limits of inference" paper).

Re:Physics of computing the universe

[mcgrew]

At the atomic level there's a lot of randomness.

Can we be sure? What seems random may not in fact be truly random. The flip of a coin is considered random, but if you could account for all the variables with enough precision; angle of the coin, angle of the thumb, force of the flip, distance to the floor, etc, you could likely predict each and every toss.

Rather than being random it could be that it's just more complex than we know, or that we can't determine the variables with enough accuracy. What is the exact value of PI?

Coding For Patterns of Anomalies

[neorush]

Aren't we really just talking about coding for patterns of anomalies? We know how to code for patterns, we know how to code for anomalies. Isn't it a matter of processing huge data sets and looking for patterns that have not been recorded before? Of course, you could argue that whether or not the pattern is relevant is the big problem, but curiosity is not necessarily about relevance.

of course it can

[walkoff]

When I was a fledgling programmer in the 80s I worked on some financial AI programs for a bank with some very smart people with lots of letters after their names and programming artificial curiosity was assigned to me. After some thought and a lot of dead ends I managed to program a reasonable (for our needs) facsimile of curiosity by assigning weights to the various pathways the program was evaluating and making those weights tend towards 0 (curiosity satisfied) or 1 (Curious) without ever reaching the final values. By having the program modify the weights and make decisions on which paths to follow based on those weights the program acted as if it was curious and came up with several interesting results that were completly unexpected.

Re:Of course it can.

[Fantastic Lad]

Of course curiosity can be programmed. What are humans if not big, fleshy, biological machines of sorts? Granted we do not work like computers do, but the underlying processes are still structured and computational--if the brain were chaotic it wouldn't work.

~waves hand~ Speak for yourself, Mister Roboto. ~/waves hand~

But seriously, this is a really fascinating question. Souls aren't handed out like candy. You have to build them through main force; by actively choosing to be aware from moment to moment. What I am finding to be the biggest challenge in that requires the supreme effort of recognizing one's own automatic nature and cleaning the gunk out of it.

Every time some subject comes up in conversation which makes me twitch or sweat or want to pull away, THAT indicates a piece of gunk. Each time I want to fall back and use a comfortable and proven behavior routine to deal with a given moment, THAT indicates a piece of gunk.

After one does enough work, you begin to see very clearly just how messy and automatic the people around you are. -These days, I find I am constantly aware of people's programs and little acts, why they work and what they are designed to do, and where people get stuck running those silly programs over and over day after day, year after year without ever stopping to ask, "What is the real me under this?". The soul is that part of us which is capable of recognizing the automatic nature of the brain and body and stepping in through an application of Will to interrupt the code execution.

It's difficult and the ego doesn't like it at all; Any suggestion that one is a robot is usually met with disgust and fear, if the accusation is even understood in the first place. The Ego is, I think, a foreign installment designed exactly to keep us from performing that self-examination. With the Ego in place and strong, there is no hope of breaking out of the cage of automatic behavior.

Like I said, a fascinating topic.

-FL