[info] [agi] Fwd: Numenta Newsletter: March 20, 2007

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Ben Goertzel <ben at goertzel.org> -----

From: Ben Goertzel <ben at goertzel.org>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 09:32:48 -0400
To: agi at v2.listbox.com
Subject: Re: [agi] Fwd: Numenta Newsletter: March 20, 2007
Reply-To: agi at v2.listbox.com
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 (Macintosh/20070221)


>>Eventually, yeah, a useful AGI should be able to process visual info,
>>just like it should be able to understand human language.
>>    
>
>Being able to learn to see and to learn to hear, yes? How much
>of it do you expect to be hardwired?
>
>E.g. part of what cochlea does directly in hardware is a Fourier
>transform. Do you expect to start with that as a prepositioned
>building block, or let the system figure out the appropriate
>transformation on its own?
>
>  

If we were given a bunch of $$ to embody Novamente in a robot today, and 
I had
to design a vision system for Novamente, I would not try to imitate 
human visual
cortex.  Rather, I would

* use a combination of lidar and camera input
* write code that took this combined input to make a 3D contour map of 
the perceived surfaces in the world
* use standard math transforms to triangulate this contour map
* use some AI heuristics (with feedback from the more general AI 
routines) to approximate sets of these little
triangles by larger polygons
* finally, feed these larger polygons into the "polygon vision" module 
we have designed for NM in a sim-world
context

This is not what the human brain does, but I don't see why it wouldn't 
work OK -- though I'm sure a whole
lot of "small problems" would emerge requiring ample tuning....  
Novamente is not supposed
to be an emulated brain.  The interesting cognitive problems of vision 
processing arise at the level of "polygon
vision" and don't have that much to do with the lower levels.

We just don't have staff bandwidth to play with this stuff right now, 
but that doesn't mean I find it
uninteresting or unimportant.

-- Ben

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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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