Tues.3.MAY.2011 -- Encountering the WHO
Problem
In the most recent release of MindForth
artificial intelligence for autonomous robots
possessing fre
e will and personhood, our decision to zero out post-
ReEn
try concepts is only tentative. If the mind-
design decision introduces more problems than it
solves, then the decision is reversible. It was
disconcerting to notice that the newest version of MindForth
could no longer answer who-are-you questions properly, and
would only utter the single word "WHO" as output in
response to the question. We expect the necessary bugfix
to be a simple matter of tracking down and eliminating
some stray activation on the "WHO" concept-word, but there
is a nagging fear that we may have made a wrong decision
that worsened MindForth
instead of improving it, that delayed the Singularity instead of hastening it, and that argues
for an AI working group to be nurturing MindForth
instead of a solitary mad
scientist.
Tues.3.MAY.2011 -- Debugging the WHO Problem
In the
InStantiate mind-module, both WHO and WHAT are set to
zero activation as recognized input words, under the
presumption that such query words work in a mind by a kind
of self-effacement that lets the information being sought
have a higher activation than the interrogative pronoun
being used to request the information. Today at first we
could not understand why the setting to zero seemed to be
working for WHAT but not for WHO. Eventually we discovered
that only WHAT and not WHO was being set to zero in the R
eActivate module, with the result that all instances
of the recognized WHO concept were being activated at a
high level in R
eActivate. When we fixed the bug by having both
InStantiate and R
eActivate set WHO to zero activation, the AI Mind
began giving much better answers in response to who-
queries. Immediately, however, other issues popped up,
such as how to make sure that neural inhibition engenders a whole range of
disparate answers if they are available in the knowledg
e base (KB), and whether we still need special
variables like "whoflag" and "whomark". In general, we
tolerate special treatment of words like WHO and WHAT with
the caveat that we expect to do away with the special
treatment when it becomes obvious that we can dispense
with it.