

Build a human-level AI by compressing Wikipedia - alexwg
http://prize.hutter1.net/

======
marvin
This won't work! It's a stupid idea! Whereever did these guys get the idea
that the principal task of the human brain consists of compressing information
about our environment? Even if this succeeds, all they will end up with is a
very good compression algorithm for text. This is typical of research on AGI,
just grabbing at straws with no idea of what's going to work. The field is not
scientific.

If history is any guide, though, a lot of trying and failing like this is
necessary before we figure out what's important to work on. I still think they
should instad use their 50000€ on paying food and rent for a young, inspired
researcher in the field to try out as many crazy ideas as possible.

~~~
phaedrus
Well the title is rather misleading; I don't think even they think they will
produce any AI out of this.

I think the reasoning goes more like: 1\. Intelligence is good at representing
information succinctly. 2\. This is similar to what a data compression
algorithm does. 3\. Maybe if we come up with some uber-powerful compression
algorithms, it will teach us something about intelligence too.

There's actually been a lot of papers about the parallels between data
compression and AI. Look up the program "MegaHal" and papers on it by Jason
Hutchens. He shows how a Markov model can be thought of as a kind of data
compression.

That being said, there are theoretical limits on data compression efficiency,
as shown by work by Shannon and Huffman. These apply to lossless compression,
so at best I think all they would be doing is experimentally verifying the
theoretical limits. If they want to find a data compression algorithm that
tells them something about intelligence, it's going to have to be a lossy
compression algorithm, not lossless.

------
Electro
Three problems:

1) Wikipedia has far more information than a normal human, thus it would
surpass human-level AI.

2) Compressing wikipedia into one persons mind would create a schizophrenic AI
that's likely to kill people or die in a fit as its brain has an edit war.

3) It would take a human-level AI to first understand the information and then
discard the useless crap and junk people post on wikipedia. I mean can you
imagine asking an android what they think about Pamela Anderson's next divorce
and having them randomly say "teh big boobs WOOT!1!11!"

Besides, information is redundant in intelligence. A cro-magnon would
understand particle physics just as good as any one of us if they knew the
information because they're intelligent.

------
andreyf
Hm, but when I compress wikipedia, it isn't lossless...

