Eliezer's Seed AI concept

O'Regan, Emlyn (Emlyn.ORegan@actew.com.au)
Thu, 3 Jun 1999 12:10:03 +1000

I've been reading Eliezer's "Coding a Transhuman AI" page (I'm sure most people know of it, but here's the URL anyway:

http://singularity.posthuman.com/AI_design.temp.html ). Actually, that URL looks a bit weird - is there a more correct one?

Eliezer, I've got a couple of questions:

  1. Have you started trying to build this beast? If so, how's it going?
  2. I haven't seen anything about the environment that you'd want to "run" such an AI in (maybe I haven't looked hard enough, but its a damned big document!). Would you give it an artificial, simplistic environment (simulate some simple, maybe 2d space, with some stuff to interact with), or are you thinking that full 3d (2.5d?) vision, natural language, etc... chuck it in the deep end is the way to go?
  3. Do you have some more info on this?

After decades of effort, and due mainly to the intervention of the late David Marr, we now have a relatively good computer model of human vision, and specifically of the transition from 2-D pixels to 3-D model. Some of the algorithms thus invented were later found to correspond to neural computation, so we know we're on the right track. The intervening layers are not chaotic, they are not stochastic, and they are not high-level semantic; they are what Marr called a "2 1/2-D" world, a series of ordered extractions of increasingly high-level features, using a lot of computer code.
(from Coding a Transhuman AI)

Specifically, I'm interested in David Marr's 2.5d model of vision.

Emlyn
Code boy, interested