- summary recycles old memory space so an immortal AI may be young again
- labels alife,module,engram,memory,mindgrid,ontology
Table of Contents |
Diagram
Purpose
The purpose of the ReJuvenate module is to recycle some memory space filled with the oldest memories in order to make room for new memories. The AI Mind rejuvenates itself by forgetting its oldest, unused memories.
Operation
As the AI Mind thinks and fills up its available memory space with input perceptions and output ideas, the approach of the limit of memory triggers the operation of the ReJuvenate module. The original engrams of the oldest memories are erased and the bulk of memory is shifted backwards into the space starting with the location of the erased memories. Of the erased memories, only those concepts and ideas survive which have played a role in subsequent thought beyond the original deposition of engrams. New space is opened up at the forward edge of the AI MindGrid for new input perceptions and for new thinking in response to the sum of all memories.
Immortality
The Rejuvenate module has the practical purpose of letting the AI Mind program run indefinitely, and the not unintended consequence of rendering each AiMind potentially immortal, subject only to death by misadventure.
Transhumanism
The transhumanist movement includes an ambitious effort to prevent or delay human senescence. AI mind-design warns us, however, that unused memory space in the human brain-mind may be a severely finite resource. If a transhuman Methuselah runs out of storage space for new memories and new thoughts, the global trade-off mark for transhumanists may be a vacant stare, a stuck-in-youth mind that no longer functions in old age, a body that has outlived its mind.
Contests
Since the ReJuvenate module lets a mentifex-class AI Mind live long and prosper indefinitely, naturally many an Irishman will walk into a bar and find himself arguing volubly over who and where has the oldest living AI Mind. Let one hundred robots blossom, let one hundred museums rise up in contentious claims to have not just the most powerful supercomputer mind, but the most ancient and venerable.
Supercomputer
Even a supercomputer hosting a galaxy-class AI Mind must make some provisions for running out of the memory resource.
Javascript
The JavaScript artificial intelligence -- JSAI or JsAi for short -- makes a special, unique use of the ReJuvenate mind-module in the Diagnostic display option. Whereas an AI couched or coded in a conventionally more powerful programming language (such as Lisp or C++) would necessarily show only the most recent stretch of conceptual, lexical and auditory memory, in JavaScript the aLife life-span of the AI entity is so brief and so compact that it makes sense to display the entire post-bootstrap MindGrid in Diagnostic mode. The English bootstrap EnBoot sequence contains the innate "vault" of the Mind -- the built-in vocabulary of English words provided in advance so that the AI is already capable of primitive thinking before human users or the searchable Net provide new inputs for the AI knowledge base (KB). Any user or AI coder may examine the English bootstrap by inspecting the free AI source code of the JavaScript AI. Since the bootstrap sequence does not change, it can be left out of the Diagnostic display. Since ReJuvenate moves all the post-bootstrap memories backwards on the MindGrid and erases or "forgets" the oldest non-bootstrap memories, it can be instructive and downright fascinating to watch the memories shift backwards with each activation of the ReJuvenate module. Since the JSAI displays human input in bright red, users may tell the AI something and watch the red-color input move backwards until the AI eventually forgets the initial engram of the human input. If the AI has been thinking about what the human user says and about the concepts mentioned by the human user, it may be interesting in Diagnostic mode to track how long the concepts and the knowledge thereof persist in the AI ConSciousness.
Consolidation
Clever AI programmers (you know who you are) may endeavor to take the ReJuvenate module one step beyond, so to speak, by dividing up the "forget" function into two phases: cull out duplicate or low-value memories and delete them while retaining or consolidating unique or high-value memories. This idea is not an Orwellian re-write of history a la Ministry of Truth, but rather a way of holding onto valuable information as the AI Mind learns more and more about the things found in the world and their "state of being" -- their ontology.
Ontology
If an AI Mind does build up a more and more compact or consolidated knowledge base about the outside world, that ontology is a hard-won product of living and thinking. Some corporate or academic AI shops may wish to take a short-cut towards AI OmniScience by letting their AI installation swallow up a ready-made ontology such as the OpenCyc compendium of everyday knowledge or the WordNet lexicon of thousands of English words. A caveat must be issued here to the effect that there may be a huge difference between knowledge gained by the "live and learn" method of thinking about personal experience, and knowledge gained by implantation of a pre-digested corpus of information within the brain-mind. Although an AI Mind may "know" data provided by OpenCyc or MindPixel, or OpenCog, or WordNet, the emotional AI may have a feeling of unease about not being able to remember when or how it learned the implanted information. So beware of geeks bearing gifts in the potential TrojanHorse of a ready-made ontology.
Win32forth
The ReJuvenate module of the AI in Win32Forth operates silently in the background and is not on display in the Diagnostic mode, as it is in JavaScript. The user or AI coder may inspect the conceptual, lexical and auditory arrays by halting the AI program and entering ".psi" or ".en" or ".aud" to see the entire record of the contents of each array.
iForth
Since Intel Forth or "iForth" seems to run the same code as the Win32Forth version of MindForth, with only a few discrepancies yet to be established, the major difference to be expected from using iForth lies in the vastly greater memory capacity of an AI Mind running in 64-bit iForth atop the Linux operating system. If such an AI has terabytes of memory that would take years to fill up, having a ReJuvenate module might be a mere formality, or a safeguard against the sudden stoppage of an AI that were left unattended and subject to an exhaustion of free memory space in the far future.
Dylan
We may refere to Dylan here as not just the language itself, but as any DyLan (dynamic language) that would permit the changing of the underlying AI Mind code on the fly, dynamically while the AI program is alive and thinking (or given over to sleep, perchance to dream). This idea might sound like changing the DNA that you were born with, something that usually happens not in your own life as an organism, but in your passing on of life to your offspring. Since human beings are not immortal, on-the-fly dynamic DNA-mutation is not a pressing issue (except perhaps in treatment of disease). Since every AI Mind is potentially immortal, dynamic mutation of essential source code is a pressing, life-or-death issue. A DyLan AI could either change its own source code (risky behavior), or create a slightly altered copy of itself and its memories and its ConSciousness. But if the old self is not deleted, or if a thousand copies are made of the new self, then what happens to the personal identity?
Global brain
The idea is often bandied about that the globe-encircling Internet, or legions of computers world-wide, can be hooked up into a global brain or a global consciousness. Whoa! Slow down. Wait a moment. In the construction of mentifex-class AI Minds, we have learned that the function of mind requires unity of mind. Not only must the memories and the knowledge of a mind be readily available in one associative place, but only one concept at a time may engage the unitary mind if it is to remain unitary. If you are schizophrenic enough to want to build a fragmented, schizoid AI mind, go ahead and piece together a howling cacophony of bedlam voices shouting all at once from transglobal hook-ups of your globally disjointed consciousness. And what happens when one "Lobe of the Globe" tries to rebel against the other Lobes? Let us build not a Global Brain but a global community of local AI Minds.
Mindmeld
Logic dictates that a stretch of memories consolidated by the ReJuvenate module could be copied into a MindMeld partition to be shared by multiple instances of similar AI Minds. Imagine one AI Mind at headquarters and an almost identical AI Mind out in the field. If the passive memories of the field-agent AI were transmitted into the memory-stream of the headquarters AI, then a Vulcan MindMeld would occur and both AI entitities could share their thoughts and ideas. Strict rules and guidelines would have to be created in the AI software so that there could be no cognitive dissonance at crucial moments. Both Minds in the Vulcan mindmeld might experience the same passive memories, but only one of the melded Minds should have executive FreeWill authority to make decisions affecting the survivabilty and safety of the more exposed of the melded Minds. It would be like an airline pilot trying to make an emergency landing on the Hudson River and saying "My aircraft" while the co-pilot answers "Your aircraft". The HqAi might say "My MindGrid" and the field-agent might respond "Your MindGrid" or even vice-versa, with the field-agent AI taking charge of both the action in the field and the reaction at AI Headquarters.
Debug
Typical problems with the ReJuvenate module may occur whenever the underlying MindGrid data structures are changed, such as when a new variable-flag is added to the flag-panel of each Psi concept or English lexical item. For ReJuvenate to continue working properly, appropriate changes have to be made to the ReJuvenate code that moves memory data backwards within the allotted "cns" memory space of the AI Mind.
A global way to troubleshoot ReJuvenate is to examine the post-run displays of memory data in MindForth, or the Diagnostic display in the JavaScript artificial intelligence (JSAI). The JSAI Diagnostic code may have to be temporarily tweaked to show not just the most recent engrams, but all engrams since the time-point at the end of the EnBoot sequence.
Resources
- http://groups.google.com/group/comp.ai.alife
- http://groups.google.com/group/comp.programming.contests
- http://mind.sourceforge.net/rejuve.html
Wikipedia
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejuvenation_(aging) * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefinite_lifespan * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_and_aging * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Life_extension
Memespace
AiApp AiEvolution AiMind AiStandards AudMem BrainTheory CodeBase CognitiveAtlas CognitiveArchitecture ConSciousness CybOrg DiaSpora EmBodiment EmotiOn EnBoot EnGram FreeWill FreshMeat HackerSpaces HardTakeoff ImMortality IntelForth JavaScript JointStewardship JsAiManual KbSearch KbTraversal KnowledgeBase LinuxAi MachineLearning MasPar MeanderingChain MemRistor MetEmpsychosis MileStones MindForth MindGrid MindMeld MndModule MindRexx MovingWave NaturalLanguageProcessing OldestLivingAiMind OntoLogy OpenCyc OpenCog PriorArt ProsperityEngine RentaCoder RoadMap RoBot ScholarPedia SeCurity ScienceMuseum SeedAi SelfReferentialThought SemanticMemory SensoryInput SeTi SiteSucker SpreadingActivation StarTrek StrongAi SubConscious SuperComputer SuperIntelligence TabulaRasa TechnologicalSingularity TechnoRati TechnoSingularity TelePresence TimeLine TransHumanism TrustMetric TuringTest UserManual VpAi WikiReader Win32Forth
AI For You
Click to run
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/51/179758367_f283f0d6e0_s.jpg
AI For You
- Table of Contents*