My thought was that “can” is a way of stating your strength in a given field, relative to some standard. “I can speak Chinese like a native” is saying “My strength in Chinese is equal to the standard of a native level Chinese speaker.” “Congress can declare war” means “Congress’ strength in the system of American government is equal to the strength needed to declare war.”
Algorithmically, it would involve calculating your own strength in a field, and then calculating the minimum standard needed to do something. So an AI might examine all the Chinese dictionaries and grammars that had been programmed into it, estimate its Chinese skills, estimate the level of Chinese skills of a native speaker, and then compare them to see whether it could say “I can speak Chinese like a native.”
This is different enough from Eliezer’s solution and from what everyone else is talking about that I’d appreciate it if someone could critique it and tell me whether I made something into a primitive inappropriately, or, if I’ve missed a point, exactly which one it was and where I missed it.
I approached it similarly (as part of a more general attempt, since this is a minor use of the word), positing the “I could lift that box over there” was a comparison of the physical prowess necessary to complete the task and the amount I currently possess. In Eliezer’s formulation, this is equivalent to determining reachability with constraints, but it’s more of an example of the general procedure than an explanation of it, unfortunately. I’m glad to see that someone else was thinking similarly though.
I took a different route on the “homework”.
My thought was that “can” is a way of stating your strength in a given field, relative to some standard. “I can speak Chinese like a native” is saying “My strength in Chinese is equal to the standard of a native level Chinese speaker.” “Congress can declare war” means “Congress’ strength in the system of American government is equal to the strength needed to declare war.”
Algorithmically, it would involve calculating your own strength in a field, and then calculating the minimum standard needed to do something. So an AI might examine all the Chinese dictionaries and grammars that had been programmed into it, estimate its Chinese skills, estimate the level of Chinese skills of a native speaker, and then compare them to see whether it could say “I can speak Chinese like a native.”
This is different enough from Eliezer’s solution and from what everyone else is talking about that I’d appreciate it if someone could critique it and tell me whether I made something into a primitive inappropriately, or, if I’ve missed a point, exactly which one it was and where I missed it.
I approached it similarly (as part of a more general attempt, since this is a minor use of the word), positing the “I could lift that box over there” was a comparison of the physical prowess necessary to complete the task and the amount I currently possess. In Eliezer’s formulation, this is equivalent to determining reachability with constraints, but it’s more of an example of the general procedure than an explanation of it, unfortunately. I’m glad to see that someone else was thinking similarly though.