karl3＠writeme.com wrote:
We saw wild robot film.
Lots of pressed expressions about flight and nature robots and such. Right now it is saying how to make a kite like the goose in the movie.
The part that seems most open is perhaps also controversial: "a rozzum always completes its task." This is a classic challenge in the pursuit of tasks -- to complete them reliably. And, it is where demons like the paperclip factory come from, as well as the realization that in a world of limits, conflicts, and changes, life comes from the discovery that we do not complete every task we consider. We have to adjust our goals to meet what makes sense in the universe, to succeed.
"Always completing a task" is a classic "impossible" challenge akin to those I spam about. It's quite doable, especially if all the tasks set are easy to complete.
Task completion seems to me based on prioritized exhaustion of available approaches to meeting them. One I suppose needs enough axioms to continue finding new useful approaches to meet tasks.
Smart systems improve their own task pursuit. Let's skip that part (can feel painful
One might compare the idea of accomplishing a rask to a chess engine. In chess, we have a task that we politely and importantly consider impossible, which is to defeat an agent tasked with stopping us and accomplishing a counterpoint task. This opens a strange space of many changes in options, giving utility to feints, sacrificial tradeoffs, complexity under observation. In such a complex space brute force exploration with a metric got chess engines pretty far. Modern PPO chess engines train models that judge when to explore and what situations are good and bad, as a kind informational substrate where the whole space has a measure of similarity. Most tasks have a sparcer space because most habits or functions do not operate in an envir9nment of extreme and pointed competition. We care a lot about information on how thing can help accomplish another -- not in an abstract space specific to a conflict with consistent rules, but rather in a physical and resource oriented space that most beings and even autonomous agents have more direct connection to. Still, and me having never studied these things, it can seem veryabstract. Do i need a hammer to use a nail? Do I need to understand physics to use a rock instead? Do I need experience like a trained model, in all the details and probabilities of exerting force and gripping an object, to seat it? Intuitively, a human mind does all these things, together, in a knitted manner that can morph and reshape itself per learning, context, fancy. For a computer program, maybe the core of accomplishing a task is stitching steps together in an informed manner, and finding new ones if those found are not sufficient. Hopefully that's something we can do without need for a multi-gigaparameter trained language model, if we so desire.