Center for Analysis and Design of Intelligent Agents

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T-720-ATAI-2018

Lecture Notes, W10: Reasoning, Understanding, Curiosity, Creativity

Reasoning

What It Is	The establishment of axioms for the world and applying logic to these.
But The World Is Non-Axiomatic!	Yes. But there is no way to apply logic unless we hypothesize some pseudo-axioms. The only difference between this and mathematics is that in science we must accept that the so-called “laws” of physics may be only conditionally correct (or possibly even completely incorrect, in light of our goal of figuring out the “ultimate” truth about how the universe works).
Deduction	Results of two statements that logically are necessarily true. Example: If it's true that all swans are white, and Joe ifIs a swan, then Joe must be white.
Abduction	Reasoning from conclusions to causes. Example: If the light is on, and it was off just a minute ago, someone must have flipped the switch.
Induction	Generalization from observation. Example: All the swans I have ever seen have been white, hence I hypothesize that all swans are white.

Understanding

What It Is	A concept that people use all the time about each other's cognition. With respect to achieving a task, given that the target of the understanding is all or some aspects of the task, more of it is generally considered better than less of it.
Why It Is Important	Seems to be connected to “real intelligence” - when a machine does X reliably and repeatedly we say that it is “capable” of doing X qualify it with “… but it doesn't 'really' understand what it's doing”.
What Does It Mean?	No well-known scientific theory exists. Normally we do not hand control of anything over to anyone who doesn't understand it. All other things being equal, this is a recipe for disaster.
My Theory	Understanding involves the manipulation of causal-relational models (like we discussed in the context of the AERA AGI-aspiring architecture).
Evaluating Understanding	Understanding any X can be evaluated along four dimensions: 1. Being able to predict X, 2. being able to achieve goals with respect to X, 3. being able to explain X, and 4. being able to “re-create” X (“re-create” here means e.g. creating a simulation that produces X and many or all its side-effects.)

Meaning

What It Is	Something of great importance to people. Meaning seems “extracted” from other people's actions, utterances, attitudes, etc. It is generally considered to require intelligence.
Why It Is Important	Meaning seems to enter almost every aspect of cognition.
My Theory	Meaning is generated when a causal-relational model is used to compute the implications of some action, state, event, etc. Any agent that does so will extract meaning when the implications interact with its goals in some way.

Status in AI

Since the 70s the concept of understanding has been relegated to the fringes of research. The only AI contexts it regularly appears in are “language understanding”, “scene understanding” and “image understanding”.

Curiosity

Creativity

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