On potential cognitive abilities in the machine kingdom

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11023-012-9299-6Animals, including humans, are usually judged on what they could become, rather than what they are. Many physical and cognitive abilities in the ‘animal kingdom’ are only acquired (to a given degree) when the subject reaches a certain stage of development, which can be accelerated or spoilt depending on how the environment, training or education is. The term ‘potential ability’ usually refers to how quick and likely the process of attaining the ability is. In principle, things should not be different for the ‘machine kingdom’. While machines can be characterised by a set of cognitive abilities, and measuring them is already a big challenge, known as ‘universal psychometrics’, a more informative, and yet more challenging, goal would be to also determine the potential cognitive abilities of a machine. In this paper we investigate the notion of potential cognitive ability for machines, focussing especially on universality and intelligence. We consider several machine characterisations (non-interactive and interactive) and give definitions for each case, considering permanent and temporal potentials. From these definitions, we analyse the relation between some potential abilities, we bring out the dependency on the environment distribution and we suggest some ideas about how potential abilities can be measured. Finally, we also analyse the potential of environments at different levels and briefly discuss whether machines should be designed to be intelligent or potentially intelligent.We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments, which have helped to significantly improve this paper. This work was supported by the MEC-MINECO projects CONSOLIDER-INGENIO CSD2007-00022 and TIN 2010-21062-C02-02, GVA project PROMETEO/2008/051, the COST - European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research IC0801 AT. Finally, we thank three pioneers ahead of their time(s). We thank Ray Solomonoff (1926-2009) and Chris Wallace (1933-2004) for all that they taught us, directly and indirectly. And, in his centenary year, we thank Alan Turing (1912-1954), with whom it perhaps all began.Hernández-Orallo, J.; Dowe, DL. (2013). On potential cognitive abilities in the machine kingdom. Minds and Machines. 23(2):179-210. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-012-9299-6S179210232Amari, S., Fujita, N., Shinomoto, S. (1992). Four types of learning curves. Neural Computation 4(4), 605–618.Aristotle (Translation, Introduction, and Commentary by Ross, W.D.) (1924). Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Barmpalias, G. & Dowe, D. L. (2012). Universality probability of a prefix-free machine. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society A [Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences] (Phil Trans A), Theme Issue ‘The foundations of computation, physics and mentality: The Turing legacy’ compiled and edited by Barry Cooper and Samson Abramsky, 370, pp 3488–3511.Chaitin, G. J. (1966). On the length of programs for computing finite sequences. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, 13, 547–569.Chaitin, G. J. (1975). A theory of program size formally identical to information theory. Journal of the ACM (JACM), 22(3), 329–340.Dowe, D. L. (2008, September). Foreword re C. S. Wallace. Computer Journal, 51(5):523–560, Christopher Stewart WALLACE (1933–2004) memorial special issue.Dowe, D. L. (2011). MML, hybrid Bayesian network graphical models, statistical consistency, invariance and uniqueness. In: P. S. Bandyopadhyay, M. R. Forster (Eds), Handbook of the philosophy of science—Volume 7: Philosophy of statistics (pp. 901–982). Amsterdam: Elsevier.Dowe, D. L. & Hajek, A. R. (1997a). A computational extension to the turing test. Technical report #97/322, Dept Computer Science, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, 9 pp, http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/publications/1997/tr-cs97-322-abs.html .Dowe, D. L. & Hajek, A. R. (1997b, September). A computational extension to the Turing Test. in Proceedings of the 4th conference of the Australasian Cognitive Science Society, University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia, 9 pp.Dowe, D. L. & Hajek, A. R. (1998, February). A non-behavioural, computational extension to the Turing Test. In: International conference on computational intelligence and multimedia applications (ICCIMA’98), Gippsland, Australia, pp 101–106.Dowe, D. L., Hernández-Orallo, J. (2012). IQ tests are not for machines, yet. Intelligence, 40(2), 77–81.Gallistel, C. R., Fairhurst, S., & Balsam, P. (2004). The learning curve: Implications of a quantitative analysis. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 101(36), 13124–13131.Gardner, M. (1970). Mathematical games: The fantastic combinations of John Conway’s new solitaire game “life”. Scientific American, 223(4), 120–123.Goertzel, B. & Bugaj, S. V. (2009). AGI preschool: A framework for evaluating early-stage human-like AGIs. In Proceedings of the second international conference on artificial general intelligence (AGI-09), pp 31–36.Hernández-Orallo, J. (2000a). Beyond the Turing Test. Journal of Logic, Language & Information, 9(4), 447–466.Hernández-Orallo, J. (2000b). On the computational measurement of intelligence factors. In A. Meystel (Ed), Performance metrics for intelligent systems workshop (pp 1–8). Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology.Hernández-Orallo, J. (2010). On evaluating agent performance in a fixed period of time. In M. Hutter et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of 3rd international conference on artificial general intelligence (pp. 25–30). New York: Atlantis Press.Hernández-Orallo, J., & Dowe, D. L. (2010). Measuring universal intelligence: Towards an anytime intelligence test. Artificial Intelligence, 174(18), 1508–1539.Hernández-Orallo, J. & Dowe, D. L. (2011, April). Mammals, machines and mind games. Who’s the smartest?. The conversation, http://theconversation.edu.au/mammals-machines-and-mind-games-whos-the-smartest-566 .Hernández-Orallo J., Dowe D. L., España-Cubillo S., Hernández-Lloreda M. V., & Insa-Cabrera J. (2011). On more realistic environment distributions for defining, evaluating and developing intelligence. In: J. Schmidhuber, K. R. Thórisson, & M. Looks (Eds.), Artificial general intelligence 2011, volume 6830, LNAI series, pp. 82–91. New York: Springer.Hernández-Orallo, J., Dowe, D. L., & Hernández-Lloreda, M. V. (2012a, March). Measuring cognitive abilities of machines, humans and non-human animals in a unified way: towards universal psychometrics. Technical report 2012/267, Faculty of Information Technology, Clayton School of I.T., Monash University, Australia.Hernández-Orallo, J., Insa, J., Dowe, D. L., & Hibbard, B. (2012b). Turing tests with Turing machines. In A. Voronkov (Ed.), The Alan Turing centenary conference, Turing-100, Manchester, volume 10 of EPiC Series, pp 140–156.Hernández-Orallo, J., & Minaya-Collado, N. (1998). A formal definition of intelligence based on an intensional variant of Kolmogorov complexity. In Proceedings of the international symposium of engineering of intelligent systems (EIS’98) (pp 146–163). Switzerland: ICSC Press.Herrmann, E., Call, J., Hernández-Lloreda, M. V., Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: The cultural intelligence hypothesis. Science, 317(5843), 1360–1366.Herrmann, E., Hernández-Lloreda, M. V., Call, J., Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2010). The structure of individual differences in the cognitive abilities of children and chimpanzees. Psychological Science, 21(1), 102–110.Horn, J. L., & Cattell, R. B. (1966). Refinement and test of the theory of fluid and crystallized general intelligences. Journal of educational psychology, 57(5), 253.Hutter, M. (2005). Universal artificial intelligence: Sequential decisions based on algorithmic probability. New York: Springer.Insa-Cabrera, J., Dowe, D. L., España, S., Hernández-Lloreda, M. V., & Hernández-Orallo, J. (2011a). Comparing humans and AI agents. In AGI: 4th conference on artificial general intelligence—Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), volume 6830, pp 122–132. Springer, New York.Insa-Cabrera, J., Dowe, D. L., & Hernández-Orallo, J. (2011b). Evaluating a reinforcement learning algorithm with a general intelligence test. In CAEPIA—Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), volume 7023, pages 1–11. Springer, New York.Kearns, M. & Singh, S. (2002). Near-optimal reinforcement learning in polynomial time. Machine Learning, 49(2), 209–232.Kolmogorov, A. N. (1965). Three approaches to the quantitative definition of information. Problems of Information Transmission, 1, 4–7.Legg, S. (2008, June). Machine super intelligence. Department of Informatics, University of Lugano.Legg, S. & Hutter, M. (2007). Universal intelligence: A definition of machine intelligence. Minds and Machines, 17(4), 391–444.Legg, S., & Veness, J. (2012). An approximation of the universal intelligence measure. In Proceedings of Solomonoff 85th memorial conference. New York: Springer.Levin, L. A. (1973). Universal sequential search problems. Problems of Information Transmission, 9(3), 265–266.Li, M., Vitányi, P. (2008). An introduction to Kolmogorov complexity and its applications (3rd ed). New York: Springer.Little, V. L., & Bailey, K. G. (1972). Potential intelligence or intelligence test potential? A question of empirical validity. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 39(1), 168.Mahoney, M. V. (1999). Text compression as a test for artificial intelligence. In Proceedings of the national conference on artificial intelligence, AAAI (pp. 486–502). New Jersey: Wiley.Mahrer, A. R. (1958). Potential intelligence: A learning theory approach to description and clinical implication. The Journal of General Psychology, 59(1), 59–71.Oppy, G., & Dowe, D. L. (2011). The Turing Test. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/ .Orseau, L. & Ring, M. (2011). Self-modification and mortality in artificial agents. In AGI: 4th conference on artificial general intelligence—Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), volume 6830, pages 1–10. Springer, New York.Ring, M. & Orseau, L. (2011). Delusion, survival, and intelligent agents. In AGI: 4th conference on artificial general intelligence—Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), volume 6830, pp. 11–20. Springer, New York.Schaeffer, J., Burch, N., Bjornsson, Y., Kishimoto, A., Muller, M., Lake, R., et al. (2007). Checkers is solved. Science, 317(5844), 1518.Solomonoff, R. J. (1962). Training sequences for mechanized induction. In M. Yovits, G. Jacobi, & G. Goldsteins (Eds.), Self-Organizing Systems, 7, 425–434.Solomonoff, R. J. (1964). A formal theory of inductive inference. Information and Control, 7(1–22), 224–254.Solomonoff, R. J. (1967). Inductive inference research: Status, Spring 1967. RTB 154, Rockford Research, Inc., 140 1/2 Mt. Auburn St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138, July 1967.Solomonoff, R. J. (1978). Complexity-based induction systems: comparisons and convergence theorems. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 24(4), 422–432.Solomonoff, R. J. (1984). Perfect training sequences and the costs of corruption—A progress report on induction inference research. Oxbridge research.Solomonoff, R. J. (1985). The time scale of artificial intelligence: Reflections on social effects. Human Systems Management, 5, 149–153.Sutton, R. S., & Barto, A. G. (1998). Reinforcement learning: An introduction. Cambridge: The MIT press.Thorp, T. R., & Mahrer, A. R. (1959). Predicting potential intelligence. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 15(3), 286–288.Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433–460.Veness, J., Ng, K. S., Hutter, M., & Silver, D. (2011). A Monte Carlo AIXI approximation. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, JAIR, 40, 95–142.Wallace, C. S. (2005). Statistical and inductive inference by minimum message length. New York: Springer.Wallace, C. S., & Boulton, D. M. (1968). An information measure for classification. Computer Journal, 11, 185–194.Wallace, C. S., & Dowe, D. L. (1999a). Minimum message length and Kolmogorov complexity. Computer Journal 42(4), 270–283.Wallace, C. S., & Dowe, D. L. (1999b). Refinements of MDL and MML coding. Computer Journal, 42(4), 330–337.Woergoetter, F., & Porr, B. (2008). Reinforcement learning. Scholarpedia, 3(3), 1448.Zvonkin, A. K., & Levin, L. A. (1970). The complexity of finite objects and the development of the concepts of information and randomness by means of the theory of algorithms. Russian Mathematical Surveys, 25, 83–124

Courseware in academic library user education: A literature review from the GAELS Joint Electronic Library Project

The use of courseware for information skills teaching in academic libraries has been growing for a number of years. In order to create effective courseware packages to support joint electronic library activity at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities, the GAELS project conducted a literature review of the subject. This review discovered a range of factors common to successful library courseware implementations, such as the need for practitioners to feel a sense of ownership of the medium, a need for courseware customization to local information environments, and an emphasis on training packages for large bodies of undergraduates. However, we also noted underdeveloped aspects worthy of further attention, such as treatment of pedagogic issues in library computer‐aided learning (CAL) implementations and use of hypertextual learning materials for more advanced information skills training. We describe how these findings shaped the packages produced by the project and suggest ways forward for similar types of implementation

User involvement in healthcare technology development and assessment: Structured literature review

Purpose – Medical device users are one of the principal stakeholders of medical device technologies. User involvement in medical device technology development and assessment is central to meet their needs. Design/methodology/approach – A structured review of literature, published from 1980 to 2005 in peer-reviewed journals, was carried out from social science perspective to investigate the practice of user involvement in the development and assessment of medical device technologies. This was followed by qualitative thematic analysis. Findings – It is found that users of medical devices include clinicians, patients, carers and others. Different kinds of medical devices are developed and assessed by user involvement. The user involvement occurs at different stages of the medical device technology lifecycle and the degree of user involvement is in the order of design stage > testing and trials stage > deployment stage > concept stage. Methods most commonly used for capturing users’ perspectives are usability tests, interviews and questionnaire surveys. Research limitations/implications – We did not review the relevant literature published in engineering, medical and nursing fields, which might have been useful. Practical implications – Consideration of the users’ characteristics and the context of medical device use is critical for developing and assessing medical device technologies from users’ perspectives. Originality/value – This study shows that users of medical device technologies are not homogeneous but heterogeneous, in several aspects, and their needs, skills and working environments vary. This is important consideration for incorporating users’ perspectives in medical device technologies. Paper type: Literature review

A Survey on Continuous Time Computations

We provide an overview of theories of continuous time computation. These theories allow us to understand both the hardness of questions related to continuous time dynamical systems and the computational power of continuous time analog models. We survey the existing models, summarizing results, and point to relevant references in the literature

Activating Boxmind: an evaluation of a web‐based video lecture with synchronized activities

The aim of this study was to evaluate the use of synchronous computer‐mediated communication activities in a video e‐lecture. Previous research has reported that learning is facilitated when communication activities are added to a video lecture. Twelve postgraduate students participated in the study and they viewed a video e‐lecture on the perspective‐taking theory of communication. The lecture consisted of a video image of the lecturer, an audio track, slides, the transcript and a number of communication activities. They were given a pre‐test a week before the lecture and a post‐test a week after. They were also asked to rate the helpfulness of various aspects of the lecture. Students’ post‐test scores were statistically significantly higher than their pre‐test scores. They found the audio track, transcript, slides and activities helpful. The most helpful aspects were the communication activities. The implications of these findings are discussed