Re: the Temple of Aggregated Optimizations Re: The First Church of Robotics

Yevgen Barsukov <evgenijb@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
c...@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:
Yevgen Barsukov <evgen...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
casey <jgkjca...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Evolution is a simple process and so is all intelligence.
There is no magic complexity in any of it, it's just
different forms of reinforcement learning systems - which
at their core, are all dead simple.

And you are dead wrong. Yes RL and natural selection are
simple mechanisms but the environment to bring about all
these complexities is not itself simple.

I would like to give it yet anther spin. Both of the involved
entities:
1) mechanisms of the evolution (selection, memory, replication), and
2) the environment laws that shape evolution (second law of
thermodynamics, catalysis
accelerating entropy increase and use of released energy
to counteract own complexity)
...are simple.
But the RESULT of evolution that continued for several billions of
years
under continuously changing, while still simple, environment, is NOT
simple,
just because the process (1) is ACCUMULATIVE. It is accumulating and
reconsiling
the empirically found answers posed by (2) over extremely long
periods of time.
The resulting aggregated knowledge can be arbitrarily complex.

To give you an example, imagine that you are entering a labyrinth
with a notepad in your hand. You have a simple rule - you record a
right and left
turn that you are making, and crossing out all the "bad" turns. After
some
long time you emerge on the exit of the labyrinth with your notepad
containing
the optimal walk-through map.
Now, both the method you used to record your turns,
and the goal you had (coming through) are very simple.
The labyrinth structure could also be very simple, in fact it can be
completely
random so it would not have any structure.
But the complexity of the map you got as the result is going to be
determined
only by the size of the labyrinth!

The same thing is with complexity of Life and of our "cross organism"
type of
intelligence. Life has accumulated its "map", now stored in the
genetic code, over
2 billions of years. The complexity of the map is immense and
immeasurable.

It's not so big. =A0It's only a few hundred MB of map data in the DNA
(if=
I
remember correctly) and some hard to measure (but not so huge) amount
in the structure of the cell that interprets it. =A0It's far from
immense in=
my
book seeing the cheap computer in front of me has a few orders of
magnitu=
de
more complexity to it.

It is important to differentiate complexity of the result, and
"computing resources"
or in case where physical experiments are needed, generally "energy
resources and time
resources". For example for typical example of NP problem (selecting
optimal
permutions between 100 students in a dorm) the result might be just a
100 bytes but it
takes million years worth of computations to obtain it.

Sure, because the complexity in question we are interested in there is the
size of the search space, not the size of the input, or output, of the
process.

The same is
true for example
for factoring numbers created by multiplying large primes. In both
cases, single
steps to get the information are well understood, however the immense
amount of
these operations is what makes it unattainable and result very
precious.
For obtaining information by interaction with physical world it is
even more costly.
For example to find that sun raises on the east, you need to actually
wait for 1 day.
To find that some particular plan was toxic, someone had to die.

To summarize, what makes _results_ of evolution unique is not the size
of resulting information,
but billions of years of effort (as well as unique combination of
physical environment factors)
needed to obtain this information. Which makes this information
irreplaceable, despite of knowledge
of the simple steps involved in getting it.

Sure, the search space was huge and we are just lucky enough to be here to
see the result of the work to date.

Its
loss would be completely unrecoverable (except by going through the
labirith
again!) therefore we should not get careless or disrespectful to it
even though
we know basic principles behinds its aquisition.
If there anything that we would call "magic" (in the sense of great
respect
and admiration), that map of optimization accumulated over billions
of years
would definitely deserve such designation.

Sure.

"Cross organism" intelligence that our society possess and which is
due
to existence of conceptual language, is a much more recent
phenomenon, and its "map" has been accumulating only for
approximately 100 000 years.
But even that is nothing to sneer at, considering much accelerated
rate of accumulation.
It is is sufficient time to accumulate amazing complexity and to
force us to (mentally)
recline our heads in respect.

This ACCUMULATED COMPLEXITY is the temple to the legitimate God of
the new enlightened religion of information age. It is well worthy of
our admiration.

Well, those few hundred MB of DNA data that took 4 billion years to
accumulate in us is nothing compared to the information accumulated
already
by man in his head (social knowledge), and in books, and on the
internet and the additional information that is being created daily by
the actions of this global brain.

Again, I would like to differentiate between "amount" of information,
and computational
cost of it.
Closely related to "resource cost" of information, we could also
evaluate "usefulness" of
information (just like 8 letter password to a bank is much more useful
than 8 letter expletive).
From this point of view, information in DNA that accumulated over
billions of years of optimizatinos
defines an extremely robust algorithm of Life operation, which we know
has survived billions of years
over highly variable conditions. Those it is extremely useful (and is
proven so,

Well, the concept of "useful" is another whole point here. Usefulness is
relative, it's not absolute. There is no universal measure of value. It's
always a measure relative to some randomly choose goal - none of which (at
the universal level) is better or worse than any other.

The usefulness of the the design produced by a billion year product of
evolution, is "useful" only in the context of trying to survive on the
surface of the earth. It's got little value on Mars for example because
the design that took so long to be created on Earth, just doesn't apply to
the Martian environment.

We can likewise dream up some random search problem and let a computer
search for a million years to produce the answer, but just because the
answer was expensive to create, doesn't mean it has value. It just means
it was expensive to create.

The result of evolution is really just the same. Sure it was a long and
expensive (in terms of time and energy), process, but just because it was
expensive in those terms, doesn't mean it's valuable. It's value is always
relative some defined need or context of evaluation of "value". By
default, when we (humans) talk about value, we are talking about the
context of value to a human living on the surface of the earth.

just like
a password can be proven by accessing the bank and transfering million
dollars).

At the other hand, information accumulated over 100 000 years by
cultural evolution (being much larger
in size) gives an decent algorithm for a Life-form "humanity", but it
does not provide for nearly
as robust algorithm compared to single cell DNA algorithm. Life-form
"humanity"
has yet to prove that it can survive any serious cataclism like a full-
scale glaciation
or a large asteroid impact. Once it did that, we can talk about the
information usefulness
being comparable, although it would be still long way about it being
"superior".

Well, again, you are talking as if time and energy cost is value. Human
DNA design cost a lot more because it was a process that ran for billions
of years. Human culture (aka the part of the design of our brain that is
shaped by learning from our culture) is only 10's of thousands of years
old, so it's energy and time cost is a lot less. But it's value, in terms
of survival, is huge to us. I don't see any reasonable way to separate the
value of our DNA based design features from the value of our design
features created by culture, but yet, I feel safe in saying the value of
our culture is far more important to us, relative to it's time and energy
cost, then the value of the rest of our body, in terms of time and energy
cost.

Human culture is created by a process which is simply far more efficient
than the way our DNA based design was created. Human culture is in effect,
"running" on a machine which is many orders of magnitude better at
searching the design space than DNA life. DNA life evolves though a
process of trial and error that is spreading changes though the population
very slowly (improved genes might take 10,000 years to spread though a
majority of the population). An improved brain design (good idea created
by culture) can spread through the majority of population in years now. So
you can't compare years of DNA evolution to years of culture evolution and
assume the two are accurate measures of the value of the result.

Maybe
Humanity can beat class "dinosaur's DNA" derived from mother class
"animal DNA", we will see.
Next asteroid is scheduled to arrive in 2182:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1298285/Massive-asteroid-h
it= -Earth-2182-warn-scientists.html

And, there's also the possibility that culture will kill us, proving it to
be valueless (or negative value), in the context of survival of humans.
It's hard to even guess how the future will play out in the long run. But
the far high adaption speed of culture over DNA, gives it a big advantage
in dealing with sudden changes in the environment that's for sure. You
would think that our culture would be more likely to save us than our DNA
when something like an asteroid strike caused a sudden change in the
environment.

So we need to look at all the accumulated data, not just the DNA, when
we talk like that - which you might well be thinking anyway but you
seemed t=
o
jump form the DNA data to this idea God's temple without making it
clear that there is much more data here already past the DNA.

Of cause with all amazement to the great past achievements
accumulated in this temple, our eyes should still remain on the
future (what we will ADD to this temple). And of cause there are
mistakes in this
temple, nothing is sacred except God himself! So our dedication
should be to the God himself - which is the Law that shapes the
evolution: second law of thermodynamics to which eternal service any
form of Life is dedicated,
until the thermal death of universe will release us from our duties.

:)

Amen.

Yevgen

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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