Slashdot Mirror
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."
#!/bin/sh
for i in who what where when why how; do
echo "But $i, dad?"
done
I hereby submit this project to the /. community under the GPL v2.
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Why you wanna know?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
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.
neorush
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.
Schmidhuber has interesting claims, like about his Goedel machine, an algorithm that makes provably globally optimal self-modifications.
But he never seems to get around to actually writing the code, or even non-vague pseudocode to implement these algorithms to show how they actually work and that they actually work. I guess it's just an "implementation issue". Ah, the chorus of the pure theorist...
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
A minority of AI researchers have tackled the problem on and off, and even built some small-scale models of curious agents. One of the classic precursors is Doug Lenat's 1977 system Automated Mathematician, which shifted from the idea of using AI to prove theorems, to instead looking for theorems that would be interesting if they were true (it didn't actually prove them; it was an interesting-conjecture generator). Essentially a model of mathematical curiosity.
Some interesting more recent work is a 2001 thesis that modeled curiosity as a social phenomenon in societies of agents, where agents try to find things that are: 1) new enough to interest its fellow agents; yet not 2) so new that they were incomprehensible in its cultural context.
(I'm an AI researcher, though not precisely in this area.)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If curiosity is a behavior, then it should be pretty straight forward. In fact, depending on how you define "curiosity", then there are already many examples of programs that are curious. Google or Bing or any web crawler is definitely "curious". A satnav that searches for the best route from point A to point B could be "curious"...
A robot is only as smart as its smartest programmer.
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 that is often ignored with this and similar claims is the problem of observability as illustrated in areas such as quantum physics, and even economics.
You cannot calculate the behavior of a black box without opening it. If opening it alters the state of its contents, then it may even be impossible. And if you have no means of observation to begin with, then it is downright impossible. Before you can claim you can calculate the next moment in time, you must be able to claim you have observed and know all the variables within the system of interest.
Depends greatly on what you research. Unfortunately, the vast majority isn't as glamorous as you might imagine. I work in a pretty interesting area (an academic area with connections to videogame AI and game design), and this sort of creativity / discovery-systems / curiosity / art / etc. research is interesting too. But the vast majority is more pedestrian. Sure, there's interesting applications: computer vision, robotics, planning, data mining, bioinformatics, etc. But 90% of the work that comes out is incrementalist stuff; relatively boring proofs of some fact, or new algorithm that's 7% faster in some important special case (I suppose that's true of a lot of scientific fields, though).
It goes back and forth in waves, though. It seems that there will be waves of pretty exciting AI research, then a backlash as some of it goes over the top into sci-fi Singularity Is Nigh sort of AI, then things swing all the way to the other direction into AI as a really narrow field that's basically applied statistics, control theory, symbolic logic, and planning, and the only stuff that can get published is Rigorous stuff with Proofs (sort of a defensive reaction by people worried about being branded kooks). Then after a few years of that everyone realizes that 5000 more proofs in some super-narrow area aren't getting us anywhere because the field is stagnant with no direction, and people start doing more speculative applications and proposing new problems again. Then repeat.
It's somewhat unfortunate on the whole that there's such a big gap between what you might call "layperson AI" and "academic AI". The layperson AI (the singularity crowd, etc.) are excited about stuff, and have interesting goals, etc., but often do stuff that verges more on the sci-fi than the scientific. But academic AI is so scared of being them that it consciously tries at times to be super-boring so nobody mistakes them for Hans Moravec.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
No more ridiculous than the idea that Consciousness is reducible to basic, known, physical laws.
Scientologists would say the same about the reactive mind.
Scientology is one of the premier examples of spiritual exploration gone horribly awry, co-opted by the very forces which seek to keep people locked down. Their trick is to take a bunch of good ideas and quietly interweave them with creeped-out insanity.
The New Age bookstores are filled to brimming with fail-safe nets designed to catch people who fall out of the matrix.
There IS a path, but it takes a lot of comparative study, source-checking and in the end, rolling up your pant leggings and getting out there yourself to figure out who the heck is on first.
-FL
let me be the first to say... what the hell are you talking about?
First of all, your question is a lie. You don't actually want to know what I'm talking about. Here's what I see:
You recognized a pattern which is out of keeping with the "official" mode of thinking, and the automatic program you come pre-installed with kicked into play. Some variant of herd-motivated ridicule.
When the program finished running, you felt better about yourself; secure in your membership in the herd. That warm, fuzzy hit of feeling of belonging is the reward for running the program. The program itself is a very simple, but otherwise clever little trap for those ensnared by it. It pushes those it is run against to stop thinking outside the official parameters while at the same time blocking awareness of whatever topic of thought or discussion first activated the program.
In order to implant the program, the subject needs to have been tormented as a child so that it A) recognizes and understands the dynamics of the social pecking order, and B) has had its self-confidence crushed through repeated attacks so that it remains dependent upon the herd for all of its personal validation and love.
This program is layer one; among the first and most basic hurdles which must be cleared in order to have even the smallest hope of waking up. Very, very few people are able to this. Until then, you are a robot, plain and simple.
That's what I'm talking about.
Aren't you glad you asked? ;)
And don't worry. We all go through this. I'm not trying to hurt you.
-FL