> Why do you assume AI will rely on hardware so extensively and not work in software? Three reasons: First, hardware is much faster than software. By the time

> Why do you assume AI will rely on hardware so extensively and not work in software? Three reasons: First, hardware is much faster than software. By the time you've built a virtual machine of some sort you're talking about (an) order(s) of magnitude performance loss. We're still speed-limited in how accurately we can emulate the SNES, for example. Sure, there are cases where it is not too bad of a performance loss, but in the case of something like an AI, I would have to assume that a large chunk of the "core" AI would be self-modifying in some form, and self-modifying code just kills most interpreters/JITters. Second, any sufficiently complex software will have bugs. And in the case of something like an AI, I would have to assume that a large chunk of the "core" AI would be self-modifying in some form, and as such will probably hit upon some undocumented feature/"feature"/bug of the sandbox and start relying on something instance-specific. Machine learning algorithms make great fuzzers. (I know - I've actually had this happen myself. Was working on a fairly simple robot arena machine-learning "demo", and the winning robot exploited a bug in the arena to mess up other robots. (Fairly basic stack-based VM, robots could run X virtual instruction subticks in a game tick. Some instructions took multiple subticks, and there was a bug where starting an instruction [number of subticks in the instruction]-1 subticks from the end of your turn would execute the instruction on your opponent's turn, pushing it onto their stack.) And third, I don't see how one could build something that doesn't at some point rely on hardware. Virtual machines still leak data via timing attacks. For that matter, what will you do about I/O? How do you know that the AI isn't relying on the noise on the wall in the background of the webcam for some internal subroutine? > You pull the plug on the hardware. Which immediately wipes all data in RAM and data encoded in the current processor state / current GPU state / etc. Great idea!