My impression is that an overarching algorithm would allow the agent to develop solutions for the specialized tasks, not that it would directly constitute a perfect solution. I don’t quite understand your position here – would you mind elaborating?
There are many problems to be solved. Each problem may or may not have regularities to be exploited. Some regularities are shared among many problems, like Bayes structure, but others are unique. Solving a problem in reasonable time might require exploiting multiple regularities in it, so Bayes structure alone isn’t enough. There’s no algorithm for exploiting all regularities in all problems in reasonable time (this is similar to P≠NP). You can combine algorithms for exploiting a bunch of regularities, ending up with a longer algorithm that can’t be compressed very much and doesn’t have any simple core. Human intelligence could be like that: a laundry list of algorithms that exploit specific regularities in our environment.
My impression is that an overarching algorithm would allow the agent to develop solutions for the specialized tasks, not that it would directly constitute a perfect solution. I don’t quite understand your position here – would you mind elaborating?
My position goes something like this.
There are many problems to be solved. Each problem may or may not have regularities to be exploited. Some regularities are shared among many problems, like Bayes structure, but others are unique. Solving a problem in reasonable time might require exploiting multiple regularities in it, so Bayes structure alone isn’t enough. There’s no algorithm for exploiting all regularities in all problems in reasonable time (this is similar to P≠NP). You can combine algorithms for exploiting a bunch of regularities, ending up with a longer algorithm that can’t be compressed very much and doesn’t have any simple core. Human intelligence could be like that: a laundry list of algorithms that exploit specific regularities in our environment.