Find a proof of whether P=NP, given only mathematical knowledge available on Wikipedia.
Create translations of these English novels, science textbooks, and postmodern literary journal articles into Japanese, with each translation receiving a METEOR score greater than some human expert’s.
Win at least 9 out of 10 games of Starcraft II against a single “Insane”-level AI opponent.
I see at least two serious problems with your approach.
The shortest program for finding a proof or disproof of P=NP is very short. I could write it down for you. It is also very slow, of course. If we add a time constraint to the task, then it is quite possible that the shortest program is just a print statement containing the proof itself.
A more serious objection is that there is no reason to believe that the shortest program solving these three tasks will be useful for you if you want to use it for a fourth task. It seems reasonable to conjecture that you will have to change only a few bits of this program if you want to modify it for a fourth task. But—seeing the unbelievably obfuscated code -- you will have absolutely no idea which bits to change. Even if I take your mention of UFAI literally, you will have no idea which bits to change to solve the TakeOverTheWorld task.
A more serious objection is that there is no reason to believe that the shortest program solving these three tasks will be useful for you if you want to use it for a fourth task.
It could be rather handy if the fourth task involves, say cryptography.
This is actually an undecidable question. If you say find me the shortest program that does ‘x’ for sufficiently complex x, there will be shorter programs that output nothing forever, but which cannot be proved to halt, due to the halting problem. This can be fixed by imposing resource constraints on the program or saying “make it as short as you can”, if the AI understands such things. Presumably, if you input this request as stated, the AI would tell you it could not solve it and nothing more, so other posters should keep this problem in mind.
2 seem to not be necessarily easily specified (what humans mean by “translate” is complicated and differs from person to person. Consider translating poetry or puns. Or translating “this sentence would be difficult to translate into Japanese” (due to Douglas Hofstadter). I’d also be worried about a sufficiently smart UFAI embedding something clever if it was allowed to give that much output data that people would be widely exposed to.
METEOR is intended precisely to specify a meaning of “translate” that maps non-horribly to human intuitions about it. It’s imperfect, granted, but WrongBot is not ignoring the problem.
An AI capable of embedding something into text that cleverly hacks human minds ought be able to understand vague requests, and ought not need humans to pose it questions in the first place.
“this sentence would be difficult to translate into Japanese”
この文は日本語に翻訳しにくい
Even babelfish gets that one right.
Admittedly there are other levels of formality and synonyms that could be used for difficult, but there are other sentences in English meaning the same thing as well.
Missing the point. The sentence’s nature changes when translated. Once it is in Japanese the sentence doesn’t make any sense. So something is lost in the translation.
Incidentally, Hofstadter ran into precisely this issue when the French edition of GEB was being written. In GEB he uses the version “This sentence would be very difficult to translate into French.” The problem then became what to do in the French version. They made instead a French sentence which declares itself to be difficult to translate into English.
For a UFAI:
I see at least two serious problems with your approach.
The shortest program for finding a proof or disproof of P=NP is very short. I could write it down for you. It is also very slow, of course. If we add a time constraint to the task, then it is quite possible that the shortest program is just a print statement containing the proof itself.
A more serious objection is that there is no reason to believe that the shortest program solving these three tasks will be useful for you if you want to use it for a fourth task. It seems reasonable to conjecture that you will have to change only a few bits of this program if you want to modify it for a fourth task. But—seeing the unbelievably obfuscated code -- you will have absolutely no idea which bits to change. Even if I take your mention of UFAI literally, you will have no idea which bits to change to solve the TakeOverTheWorld task.
It could be rather handy if the fourth task involves, say cryptography.
This is actually an undecidable question. If you say find me the shortest program that does ‘x’ for sufficiently complex x, there will be shorter programs that output nothing forever, but which cannot be proved to halt, due to the halting problem. This can be fixed by imposing resource constraints on the program or saying “make it as short as you can”, if the AI understands such things. Presumably, if you input this request as stated, the AI would tell you it could not solve it and nothing more, so other posters should keep this problem in mind.
2 seem to not be necessarily easily specified (what humans mean by “translate” is complicated and differs from person to person. Consider translating poetry or puns. Or translating “this sentence would be difficult to translate into Japanese” (due to Douglas Hofstadter). I’d also be worried about a sufficiently smart UFAI embedding something clever if it was allowed to give that much output data that people would be widely exposed to.
METEOR is intended precisely to specify a meaning of “translate” that maps non-horribly to human intuitions about it. It’s imperfect, granted, but WrongBot is not ignoring the problem.
An AI capable of embedding something into text that cleverly hacks human minds ought be able to understand vague requests, and ought not need humans to pose it questions in the first place.
“this sentence would be difficult to translate into Japanese”
この文は日本語に翻訳しにくい
Even babelfish gets that one right.
Admittedly there are other levels of formality and synonyms that could be used for difficult, but there are other sentences in English meaning the same thing as well.
Missing the point. The sentence’s nature changes when translated. Once it is in Japanese the sentence doesn’t make any sense. So something is lost in the translation.
Incidentally, Hofstadter ran into precisely this issue when the French edition of GEB was being written. In GEB he uses the version “This sentence would be very difficult to translate into French.” The problem then became what to do in the French version. They made instead a French sentence which declares itself to be difficult to translate into English.