Asymptotically Unambitious Artificial General Intelligence

General intelligence, the ability to solve arbitrary solvable problems, is supposed by many to be artificially constructible. Narrow intelligence, the ability to solve a given particularly difficult problem, has seen impressive recent development. Notable examples include self-driving cars, Go engines, image classifiers, and translators. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) presents dangers that narrow intelligence does not: if something smarter than us across every domain were indifferent to our concerns, it would be an existential threat to humanity, just as we threaten many species despite no ill will. Even the theory of how to maintain the alignment of an AGI's goals with our own has proven highly elusive. We present the first algorithm we are aware of for asymptotically unambitious AGI, where "unambitiousness" includes not seeking arbitrary power. Thus, we identify an exception to the Instrumental Convergence Thesis, which is roughly that by default, an AGI would seek power, including over us.Comment: 9 pages with 5 figures; 10 page Appendix with 2 figure

Numerical modelling of disintegration of basin-scale internal waves in a tank filled with stratified water

We present the results of numerical experiments performed with the use of a fully non-linear non-hydrostatic numerical model to study the baroclinic response of a long narrow tank filled with stratified water to an initially tilted interface. Upon release, the system starts to oscillate with an eigen frequency corresponding to basin-scale baroclinic gravitational seiches. Field observations suggest that the disintegration of basin-scale internal waves into packets of solitary waves, shear instabilities, billows and spots of mixed water are important mechanisms for the transfer of energy within stratified lakes. Laboratory experiments performed by D. A. Horn, J. Imberger and G. N. Ivey (JFM, 2001) reproduced several regimes, which include damped linear waves and solitary waves. The generation of billows and shear instabilities induced by the basin-scale wave was, however, not sufficiently studied. The developed numerical model computes a variety of flows, which were not observed with the experimental set-up. In particular, the model results showed that under conditions of low dissipation, the regimes of billows and supercritical flows may transform into a solitary wave regime. The obtained results can help in the interpretation of numerous observations of mixing processes in real lakes

Anisotropic damage mechanics for viscoelastic ice

We present a formulation of continuum damage in glacier ice that incorporates the induced anisotropy of the damage effects but restricts these formally to orthotropy. Damage is modeled by a symmetric second rank tensor that structurally plays the role of an internal variable. It may be interpreted as a texture measure that quantifies the effective specific areas over which internal stresses can be transmitted. The evolution equation for the damage tensor is motivated in the reference configuration and pushed forward to the present configuration. A spatially objective constitutive form of the evolution equation for the damage tensor is obtained. The rheology of the damaged ice presumes no volume conservation. Its constitutive relations are derived from the free enthalpy and a dissipation potential, and extends the classical isotropic power law by elastic and damage tensor dependent terms. All constitutive relations are in conformity with the second law of thermodynamic

A viscoelastic Rivlin-Ericksen material model applicable to glacier ice

We present a viscoelastic constitutive relation which describes transient creep of a modified second grade fluid enhanced with elastic properties of a solid. The material law describes a Rivlin-Ericksen material and is a generalization of existing material laws applied to study the viscoelastic properties of ice. The intention is to provide a formulation tailored to reproduce the viscoelastic behaviour of ice ranging from the instantaneous elastic response, to recoverable deformation, to viscous, stationary flow at the characteristic minimum creep rate associated with the deformation of polycrystalline ice. We numerically solve the problem of a slab of material shearing down a uniformly inclined plate. The equations are made dimensionless in a form in which elastic effects and/or the influence of higher order terms (i.e., strain accelerations) can be compared with viscous creep at the minimum creep rate by means of two dimensionless parameters. We discuss the resulting material behaviour and the features exhibited at different parameter combinations. Also, a viable range of the non-dimensional parameters is estimated in the scale analysis

Modelling debris flows down general channels

This paper is an extension of the single-phase cohesionless dry granular avalanche model over curved and twisted channels proposed by Pudasaini and Hutter (2003). It is a generalisation of the Savage and Hutter (1989, 1991) equations based on simple channel topography to a two-phase fluid-solid mixture of debris material. Important terms emerging from the correct treatment of the kinematic and dynamic boundary condition, and the variable basal topography are systematically taken into account. For vanishing fluid contribution and torsion-free channel topography our new model equations exactly degenerate to the previous Savage-Hutter model equations while such a degeneration was not possible by the Iverson and Denlinger (2001) model, which, in fact, also aimed to extend the Savage and Hutter model. The model equations of this paper have been rigorously derived; they include the effects of the curvature and torsion of the topography, generally for arbitrarily curved and twisted channels of variable channel width. The equations are put into a standard conservative form of partial differential equations. From these one can easily infer the importance and influence of the pore-fluid-pressure distribution in debris flow dynamics. The solid-phase is modelled by applying a Coulomb dry friction law whereas the fluid phase is assumed to be an incompressible Newtonian fluid. Input parameters of the equations are the internal and bed friction angles of the solid particles, the viscosity and volume fraction of the fluid, the total mixture density and the pore pressure distribution of the fluid at the bed. Given the bed topography and initial geometry and the initial velocity profile of the debris mixture, the model equations are able to describe the dynamics of the depth profile and bed parallel depth-averaged velocity distribution from the initial position to the final deposit. A shock capturing, total variation diminishing numerical scheme is implemented to solve the highly non-linear equations. Simulation results present the combined effects of curvature, torsion and pore pressure on the dynamics of the flow over a general basal topography. These simulation results reveal new physical insight of debris flows over such non-trivial topography. Model equations are applied to laboratory avalanche and debris-flow-flume tests. Very good agreement between the theory and experiments is established

Nucleate pool boiling investigation on a silicon test section with micro-fabricated cavities

The basic mechanisms of nucleate boiling are still not completely understood, in spite of the many numerical and experimental studies dedicated to the topic. The use of a hybrid code allows reasonable computational times for simulations of a solid plate with a large population of artificial micro-cavities with fixed distribution. This paper analyses the guidelines for the design, through numerical simulations, of the location and sizes of micro-fabricated cavities on a new silicon test section immersed in FC-72 at the saturation temperature for different pressures with an imposed heat flux applied at the back of the plate. Particular focus is on variations of wall temperature around nucleation sites

Experimental pool boiling investigations of vertical coalescence for FC-72 on silicon from an isolated artificial cavity

In this study bubble growth from an isolated artificial cavity micro-fabricated on a horizontal 380 µm thick silicon wafer was investigated. The horizontally oriented boiling surface was heated by a thin resistance heater integrated on the rear of the silicon test section. The temperature was measured using an integrated micro-sensor situated on the boiling surface with the artificial cavity located in its geometrical centre. A resistive track was used as the sensor, which when calibrated, exhibited a near-linear behaviour with increasing temperature. To conduct pool boiling experiments the test section was immersed in degassed fluorinert FC-72. Bubble nucleation, growth and detachment at different pressures were observed using high-speed imaging. Coalescence was observed at the boundary between the isolated bubble and interference regimes. The occurrence of vertical coalescence was found to be more frequent, with increasing wall superheat and decreasing pressure. The equivalent sphere volumes of two bubbles before and after coalescence were evaluated from area measurements. It was observed that the second nucleated bubble is always smaller than its predecessor. The vapour generation appears not to stop during coalescence as the volume of the merged bubble was typically 5-18% larger than the sum of the bubble volumes just before coalescence

MDL Convergence Speed for Bernoulli Sequences

The Minimum Description Length principle for online sequence estimation/prediction in a proper learning setup is studied. If the underlying model class is discrete, then the total expected square loss is a particularly interesting performance measure: (a) this quantity is finitely bounded, implying convergence with probability one, and (b) it additionally specifies the convergence speed. For MDL, in general one can only have loss bounds which are finite but exponentially larger than those for Bayes mixtures. We show that this is even the case if the model class contains only Bernoulli distributions. We derive a new upper bound on the prediction error for countable Bernoulli classes. This implies a small bound (comparable to the one for Bayes mixtures) for certain important model classes. We discuss the application to Machine Learning tasks such as classification and hypothesis testing, and generalization to countable classes of i.i.d. models.Comment: 28 page

Mass Density Fluctuations in Quantum and Classical descriptions of Liquid Water

First principles molecular dynamics simulation protocol is established using revised functional of Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (revPBE) in conjunction with Grimme's third generation of dispersion (D3) correction to describe properties of water at ambient conditions. This study also demonstrates the consistency of the structure of water across both isobaric (NpT) and isothermal (NVT) ensembles. Going beyond the standard structural benchmarks for liquid water, we compute properties that are connected to both local structure and mass density uctuations that are related to concepts of solvation and hydrophobicity. We directly compare our revPBE results to the Becke-Lee-Yang-Parr (BLYP) plus Grimme dispersion corrections (D2) and both the empirical fixed charged model (SPC/E) and many body interaction potential model (MB-pol) to further our understanding of how the computed properties herein depend on the form of the interaction potential

A hierarchy of avalanche models on arbitrary topography

We use the non-Cartesian, topography-based equations of mass and momentum balance for gravity driven frictional flows of Luca etal. (Math. Mod. Meth. Appl. Sci. 19, 127-171 (2009)) to motivate a study on various approximations of avalanche models for single-phase granular materials. By introducing scaling approximations we develop a hierarchy of model equations which differ by degrees in shallowness, basal curvature, peculiarity of constitutive formulation (non-Newtonian viscous fluids, Savage-Hutter model) and velocity profile parametrization. An interesting result is that differences due to the constitutive behaviour are largely eliminated by scaling approximations. Emphasis is on avalanche flows; however, most equations presented here can be used in the dynamics of other thin films on arbitrary surface