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I'd think a 'simple' algorithm for intelligence would be even more distant than artificial general intelligence itself.

• knodi123 11y ago
  Simplicity is always only a little ways off. If I sat you next to god and told you to pair program and write an OS equivalent to Windows XP, with you driving the keyboard- you'd be sitting there for quite a while. But if I told you guys to pair program an AGI, you could probably finish in a day or so. A simple algorithm is a matter of finding just one or two basic discoveries. It could happen tomorrow! It probably won't, but that's the nature of discovery.
  • thomasfoster96 11y ago
    Well, supposing I'm not programming with god, rather I'm with a bunch of programmer friends, I still doubt the first artificial general intelligence (assuming we happen to be the people who make it) will be a beautifully simple piece of software. It'll probably be horribly hacked together and hard to maintain, and only in time will a simpler way to do things emerge. For example, I'd reckon we'll find that a lot of things that today only make sense to solve with a neural net are actually perfectly representable using a simple(ish) algorithm, but it's unlikely we'll find that out until after we create an artificial general intelligence and know more about the problem of intelligence. In other words, we'll solve the problem, and then realise how much easier it could have been.
    • knodi123 11y ago
      https://xkcd.com/224/ https://xkcd.com/224/