Re: Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years

DK wrote:
Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

However, the point has been done to death by now, and
me adding words has never, in my experience helped.

If you /seriously/ doubt this, you are on another planet
from me,

When it comes to intelligence, I seriously doubt it but not
out of some theological conviction but simply because
on and off switches fundamentally can't reproduce the
complexity of biochemical behavior.

Right. That's the other planet I was talking about.

FWIW, I think computers can simulate anything - and
that indeed, the universe is isomorphic to a big
digital computation.

and I'd rather get on with other things than
attempt to convince you of the mistaken nature of your view.

If you are just saying that a neuron is worth more than
a few digital switches - then I agree. The question is:
how many. I don't rate the number as /especially/ high -
and "practically infinite" sounds like an over-estimate.

Sounds about right to me. Each cell is thousands of
linked Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions which gives
complexity that is completely intractable to predictive
calculation. That it is stable and in many ways
predictable is only a result of long evolutionary
selection - something we can't reproduce either.

I wouldn't like to try reproducing or predicting the
behaviour of an individual neuron. The idea is to
build something functionally equivalent to the brain.
Most of the details of the behaviour of a neuron are
irrelevant to that.

A video camera reproduces much of the behaviour of
the retina - but it skips the step of simulating
any individual retinal cell. So it will be with AI.

A neuron computes some weighted function of its inputs to
probably not more than a few decimal places.

Except that in real life neuron's inputs and outputs are
continuous and not simple ons and offs and that
a bunch of neurons in turn constitutes another
unpredictable system.

This guy is on the right track, IMO:
http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/adamatzky/index.html
(I am guessing we had some common teachers or
influences).

My hometown - and one of my fields (CAs) ;-)

That is a rather esoteric academic project to
build computing devices using analog components.
IMO, analog computing is usually a waste of time.
You wind up having to simulate a discrete system
if you want to do anything useful.

More accuracy
would be wasted - due to the levels of noise in the brain.

Heh, but the noise of inseparable part of brain functioning.
It's not just about the fact that in real life signal transmission
is imperfect. It's also about the fact that the very way brain
functions generates noise and requires it!

Right - but it is still noise. The brain uses thresholding
in an attempt to eliminate it at regular intervals - and with
the noise goes much of the utility of high precision. There's
usually not much point in doing an 8-significant figure
calculation if the final step is rounding to an integer.

Anyway, we've both outlined our positions. I think it is
probably time to agree to disagree.
--
__________
|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ tim@xxxxxxxxxxx Remove lock to reply.

.

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