Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!DRogers@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA From: DRogers@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA@sri-unix.UUCP Newsgroups: net.ai Subject: intelligence and genius Message-ID: <5451@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Wed, 14-Sep-83 15:35:11 EDT Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.5451 Posted: Wed Sep 14 15:35:11 1983 Date-Received: Mon, 19-Sep-83 00:18:53 EDT Lines: 114 From: David Rogers [This continues a discussion on Human-Nets. My original statement, printed below, was shot down by several people. Individuals certainly derive satisfaction from hobbies at which they will never excel. It would take much of the fun out of my life, however, if I could not even imagine excelling at anything because cybernetic life had surpassed humans in every way. -- KIL] From: Ken Laws Life will get even worse if AI succeeds in automating true creativity. What point would there be in learning to paint, write, etc., if your home computer could knock out more artistic creations than you could ever hope to master? I was rather surprised that this suggestion was taken so quickly as it stands. Most people in AI believe that we will someday create an "intelligent" machine, but Ken's claim seems to go beyond that; "automating true creativity" seems to be saying that we can create not just intelligent, but "genius" systems, at will. The automation of genius is a more sticky claim in my mind. For example, if we create an intelligent system, do we make it a genius system by just turning up the speed or increasing its memory? That"s like saying a painter could become Rembrandt if he/she just painted 1000 times more. More likely is that the wrong (or uncreative) ideas would simply pour out faster, or be remembered longer. Turning up the speed of the early blind-search chess programs made them marginally better players, but no more creative. Or let's say we stumble onto the creation of some genius system, call it "Einstein". Do we get all of the new genius systems we need by merely duplicating "Einstein", something impossible to do with human systems? Again, we hit a dead end... "Einstein" will only be useful in a small domain of creativity, and will never be a Bach or a Rembrandt no matter how many we clone. Even more discouraging, if we xerox off 1000 of our "Einstein" systems, do we get 1000 times the creative ideas? Probably not; we will cover the range of "Einstein's" potential creativity better, but that's it. Even a genius has only a range of creativity. What is it about genius systems that makes them so intractable? If we will someday create intelligent systems consistently and reliably, what stands in the way of creating genius systems on demand? I would suggest that statistics get in our way here; that genius systems cannot be created out of dust, but that every once in a while, an intelligent system has the proper conditioning and evolves into a genius system. In this light, the number of genius systems possible depends on the pool of intelligent systems that are available as substrate. In short, while I feel we will be able to create intelligent systems, we will not be able to directly construct superintelligent ones. While there will be advantages in duplicating, speeding up, or otherwise manipulating a genius system once created, the process of creating one will remain maddeningly elusive. David Rogers DRogers@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA [I would like to stake out a middle ground: creative systems. We will certainly have intelligent systems, and we will certainly have trouble devising genius systems. (Genius in human terms: I don't want to get into whether an AI program can be >>sui generis<< if we can produce a thousand variations of it before breakfast.) A [scientific] genius is someone who develops an idea for which there is, or at least seems to be, no precedent. Creativity, however, can exist in a lesser being. Forget Picasso, just consider an ordinary artist who sees a new style of bold, imaginative painting. The artist has certain inborn or learned measures of artistic merit: color harmony, representational accuracy, vividness, brush technique, etc. He evaluates the new painting and finds that it exists in a part of his artistic "parameter space" that he has never explored. He is excited, and carefully studies the painting for clues as to the techniques that were used. He hypothesizes rules for creating similar visual effects, trys them out, modifies them, iterates, adds additional constraints (yes, but can I do it with just rectangles ...), etc. This is creativity. Nothing that I have said above precludes our artist from being a machine. Another example, which I believe I heard from a recent Stanford Ph.D. (sorry, can't remember who): consider Solomon's famous decision. Everyone knows that a dispute over property can often be settled by dividing the property, providing that the value of the property is not destroyed by the act of division. Solomon's creative decision involved the realization (at least, we hope he realized it) that in a particular case, if the rule was implemented in a particular theatrical manner, the precondition could be ignored and the rule would still achieve its goal. We can then imagine Solomon to be a rule-based system with a metasystem that is constantly checking for generalizations, specializations, and heuristic shortcuts to the normal rule sequences. I think that Doug Lenat's EURISKO program has something of this flavor, as do other learning programs. In the limit, we can imagine a system with nearly infinite computing power that builds models of its environment in its memory. It carries out experiments on this model, and verifies the experiments by carrying them out in the real world when it can. It can solve ordinary problems through various applicable rule invocations, unifications, planning, etc. Problems requiring creativity can often be solved by applying inappropriate rules and techniques (i.e., violating their preconditions) just to see what will happen -- sometimes it will turn out that the preconditions were unnecessarily strict. [The system I have just described is a fair approximation to a human -- or even to a monkey, dog, or elephant.] True genius in such a system would require that it construct new paradigms of thought and problem solving. This will be much more difficult, but I don't doubt that we and our cybernetic offspring will even be able to construct such progeny someday. -- Ken Laws ]