ONT Re: Prospects for Inquiry Driven Systems

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PRO.  Note 48

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2.2.1.1.  Distance and Direction

Legend tells us that the primal twins of AI, the strife-born siblings of
Goal-Seeking and Hill-Climbing, began to stumble and soon came to grief
on certain notorious obstacles.  The typical scenario runs as follows:

| At any moment in time the following question is posed:
| In this problem space how ought one choose to operate
| in order to forge of one's current state a new update
| that has hopes of being nearer to one's engoaled fate?

But before Jack and Jill can start up the hill they will need
a whole bucket of prior notions to prime the pump.  There must
be an idea of distance, in short, a metric function defined on
pairs of states in the problem space.  There must be an idea of
direction, a longing toward a goal that informs the moment, that
fixes a relation of oriented distances to transition operators on
states.  Stated in linguistic terms the directive is a factor that
commands and instructs.  It arranges a form of interpretation that
endows disparities with a particular sense of operational meaning.

Intelligent systems do not get to prescribe the problem spaces that will
be thrown their way by nature, society, and the outside world in general.
These nominal problems would hardly constitute problems if this were the
case.  Thus it pays to consider how intelligent systems might evolve to
cast ever wider nets of competence in the spaces of problems that they
can handle.  Striving to adapt the differential strategies of classical
cybernetics and of early AI to "soaring" new heights (Newell, 1990), to
widening gyres of ever more general problem spaces, there comes a moment
when the predicament thickens but the atmosphere of theory and the wings
of artifice do not.

Jon Awbrey

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http://www.cs.bsu.edu/homepages/mighty/history.html
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