From: Charles D Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Jan 31 2006 - 15:47:35 MST
On Monday 30 January 2006 05:49 am, Kevin Osborne wrote:
> a few points, probably worth signficantly less than two cents:
>
> - coding an AGI will require programmers. As a programmer, newly
> interested in the field (my current n00b entry vector is
> Vinge->Anissimov->Kurzweil->Yudkowsky->Goertzel) the SIAI page in
> question was, while almost certainly valid, the html equivalent of
> being given the finger. As an open source nut, I'm used to programmers
> being wooed to add momentum to a given project; I thought the idea is
> that any code is better code than no code (cf. vaporware) and that the
> more programmers you have, the more likely you are to get a few who
>...
Different projects do things differently. This group is doing it the way it
chooses to. I'm sure there are/will be others. One of them will succeed.
We just need to hope that it's one that doesn't create a monster. It's
always been the rule that the project leaders set the criteria that they use
for acceptance. It's true for Kernel Hackers, it's true for Python
developers, etc. And it's true here. I'm not currently aware of a good open
source project. And this one demands that it be taken on faith. (Well, I
don't trust languages that heavily demand pointers...so I didn't check any
further than that. This lets me out of most projects, except the ones that
use Java, which I also don't like. Sigh. And it's difficult to do anything
dynamic in Ada [not impossible, but difficult], and the pool of possible
programmers is too small for such a project to be viable. That leaves
Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, ... Of the languages that I've
examined, I prefer Ruby. Unfortunately, it's also the slowest at
execution...so I keep bouncing around. A project would stabilize me, but I'm
unwilling to devote myself to pointers [i.e. C, C++] to achieve that. And I
fear Mono/C#. It's just too likely that MS has some hidden gotcha! that will
surface just as it becomes important.)
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