On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 16:02, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> An AI can have a very elegant design and still be far more complex than what 
> human programmers are used to.  Overcomplexity and oversimplification are 
> relative to the problem, not relative to what strikes humans as being a lot 
> or a little complexity.  The natural complexity of AI is a lot higher than 
> what programmers are used to, so in an absolute sense a "just-right AI" is 
> probably more complex than most "overcomplicated" programs.  Yet an AI built 
> "just right" might still have in all other ways the signature of good 
> design, rather than bad design.


That makes more sense now.  When I use "complexity" while talking about
machinery, I usually mean intrinsic complexity (a la Kolmogorov).  Human
programmers creating their own "complexity", or the reverse case of
attempting to express an algorithm in a form that contains less
intrinsic complexity than the algorithm they are trying to express (good
luck!) are human factors and not something I generally concern myself
with.  

I don't usually consider something that is an example of "just right"
engineering to be "complex", except perhaps in a pedestrian sense. For
me, "elegant" and "complex" are at the opposite ends of the descriptive
spectrum when talking about software.

-James Rogers
 jamesr@best.com