
Gödel Machine - jonbaer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_machine
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est31
Btw, Jürgen Schmidhuber, who proposed Gödel machines, is also the inventor of
LSTMs, an important building block for many neural network designs. Amazing
guy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Schmidhuber)

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abhinai
Could humans be considered to be a Gödel machine? If not a human, could the
entire humanity considered as one entity be considered to be a Gödel machine?

On a different plane could evolution qualify as a Gödel machine as well?

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yongjik
I think that's stretching the analogy too much. Basically, we might say cows
are spherical objects if we want to solve some problems in classical
mechanics, but you won't gain much insights about how cows actually work by
assuming they are spherical objects. Same thing here, IMHO.

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naasking
Not so much as you might think. Didn't we invent math and progressively
improve it, and then invent computers to automate the math we suck at
precisely to extend our problem solving powers? There are a lot of
similarities.

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zwkrt
We have not yet rewritten any of _our own_ code (i.e., DNA), and if we do we
still have to prove that the "re-written" person is more capable of re-writing
subsequent people in an even more efficient way.

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naasking
> We have not yet rewritten any of our own code (i.e., DNA)

Interpreting "code" as "DNA" is too literal. It could apply to thinking
processes and mental models, cultural and social norms, and so on.

A universal Turing machine (UTM) can mimic any other Turing machine via
interpretation, including a Godel machine. So an interpreted Godel machine
isn't changing the code of the UTM, the analogue of our DNA, but it's changing
the interpreted code, the analogue of higher level processes like those I list
above.

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nickelcitymario
Honest question:

Has this been put into practice in any AI to date?

Does TensorFlow count as a Gödel Machine? ML is basically the machine deciding
its own weights right? Is that the same thing? Or have we not crossed into
"writing its own code" territory?

And if we haven't, why not? This seems like the kind of thing we already have
the technology for.

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Voloskaya
In typical ML you just learn the weights. But the architecture stays fixed,
and since we don't have an architecture that can realistically solve well
enough all tasks, it shouldn't count as Godel machine.

Meta-learning, where you also learn hyper-parameters (including potentially
the architecture) are closer to that, see for example:

\- Google Vizier:
[https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub46180](https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub46180)

\- Microsoft neural architecture search:
[https://github.com/Microsoft/nni](https://github.com/Microsoft/nni)

But this is still far from a true Godel machine.

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jimfleming
Hyperparameter optimization (including architectures) is not really meta-
learning. Meta-learning, also known as "learning to learn", is more like
MAML[0], RL2[1], L2RL[2], etc.

0\. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03400](https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03400)

1\. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02779](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02779)

2\. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05763](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05763)

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carapace
It may be too difficult to build one of these directly, but it might be
possible to build a machine that then builds a Gödel Machine.

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joe_the_user
Coding an approximation to a Godel machine naively probably isn't that hard,
relatively speaking - it would essentially be an extension to a symbolic
computation system. What would be hard is running such a thing with any
efficiency.

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carapace
Schmidhuber has a great talk where he sets up the GM then drops the boom on
practical implementations (I forget the details, but the exponent is ~3000, an
impossible lifetime-of-the-Universe search space) and the audience laughs, but
then he also points out that the self-improvement search may well find massive
speed-ups, and so it is perhaps not as hopeless as all that.

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xcq1
Didn't Gödel explicitly proof that there are some statements that cannot be
proven this way? Is it just assumed that these will not be relevant for all
the hard problems that humans cannot solve or am I missing something here?

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ozy
1\. rarely does that come up in practical problems 2\. for many reasons (and
completeness is one) the machine cannot prove the next version is better, thus
must discard it

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empath75
Isn't this somewhat like what the JVM does with runtime optimizations?

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senozhatsky
I had a similar thought - profile guided optimizations (PGO).

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godelmachine
As you folks might have realized, my namesake :)

