[habitue]

The human brain has specialized structures in it, it isn't a homogeneous mass from which all parts of human cognition emerge once you have enough brain cells (see elephant brain size vs. human brain size). If you've ever seen anything else designed by evolution, you'll know it generally tends to be a grab-bag of weird tricks all combined together in a way that somehow works. We don't know what all the tricks are, nor which are necessary or sufficient to create human-like intelligence.

There are also a lot of indications that ultimately you need some tricks (i.e. specialized portions of the architecture that bias the kinds of solutions the AI can learn) to be able to learn effectively in the environments we're interested in. For example, we know that there is a time dimension to agent tasks, and that objects don't pop in and out of existence, they tend to exist continuously. These are biases we are free to add to a learning system without worrying about it limiting the ultimate intelligence of the system.

In the limit, the No Free Lunch theorems indicate that there's no such thing as a general learning system that doesn't sacrifice performance on some kinds of tasks. The goal of AI research is to sacrifice performance on tasks that we'll never encounter in favor of getting good performance on tasks we care about.

[GuiA]

> If you've ever seen anything else designed by evolution, you'll know it generally tends to be a grab-bag of weird tricks all combined together in a way that somehow works. We don't know what all the tricks are, nor which are necessary or sufficient to create human-like intelligence.

That is precisely the core of my interrogation. The papers mentioned in the article seem to be about "hand designing" the weird tricks; shouldn't the goal be to build a system that enables the emergence of these weird tricks without involving human design?

[PeterisP]

> shouldn't the goal be to build a system that enables the emergence of these weird tricks without involving human design

It depends on your goals - if your goal is to build a system that can perform smart actions (e.g. build/simulate something comparable to a brain), then that's not required (it may happen to be useful, or not); if your goal is to build a system that can create and build systems that can perform smart actions (e.g. build/simulate something comparable to the evolution process of an intelligent species) then it should.

[habitue]

> shouldn't the goal be to build a system that enables the emergence of these weird tricks without involving human design?

Two comments:

1. Just because evolution came up with them for humans, doesn't mean if we run an evolutionary algorithm we'll come up with an intelligent system in any reasonable amount of time. There's no reason to believe it's easy to evolve such systems given that we only know of one human-level intelligence in the universe, and it seems to have taken billions of years to come about.

2. This is unnecessarily tying our hands. Evolution often builds very inefficient, overly complicated versions of things that can be simplified dramatically once humans understand the underlying principles behind why they work. In addition we have a huge body of theoretical work on planning, decision theory etc that improves dramatically on our natural learning processes that we can take advantage of. We get no points for not "cheating" here.

[eduren]

Hand designing is the only feasible option available to us. A system that could architect itself would either need:

A bootstrap intelligence in order to self-plan, self-experiment, and self-modify. Escher hands drawing each other basically... or

Similar conditions to our only known spontaneous intelligence (us). That includes some sort of base code (genetics), competitive environments for rewarding good architectures, and lots of time in simulation. No guarantee this would work either.