Keith Duggar: evaluation

Transcript context

…We we discovered this incredible book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned and it's got this butterfly on the front cover. And the reason Kenneth put the butterfly on the front cover is there was this phylogeny which was created by Pick Breeder which was basically a cross between Tinder and Flickr where you log in and you you select 2 images that you like and you breed them together. And behind the scenes, it's using the neat algorithm which is a way of evolving neural network topologies. So essentially, the the topologies of of the 2 CPPN neural networks are mixed together and you get a new image. And a CPPN is is simply a neural network which has a broader array of activation functions. So trigonometric functions like sine and and, you know, cosine and whatnot. And it also takes an input of an x and a y and also a couple of other things. And it has an output of a hue, a saturation and a luminance. So if you wanna generate an image with it, you just basically enumerate a bunch of pixel values and it's resolution independent which is quite cool. So you can like make very high resolution images or low resolution images. And and it would just generate you an image of something. It might be skull or an apple or whatever. And yeah. So essentially, the whole system is you could humans could supervise this breeding process. And when you looked at the phylogeny, even though the humans weren't looking for anything in particular, so you you you got these weird intermediate steps that did not resemble the amazing thing that was discovered. But what's interesting is that amazing things were discovered in surprisingly few steps. It's really fascinating on on so many on so many levels. I think, you know, I highly encourage people to to check out the neat paper and and Pick Breeder and a lot of related things. I think and you you pointed this earlier. The crux of the the difficulty is alright. Cool. We did pick breeder. We got a skull and a butterfly and lots of other things. But I don't need a skull and a butterfly. And I I actually I need something that that generates, you know, I don't know, knights helmets or or or dragonflies. Like not butterflies, dragonflies. And and therein is the crux of the problem because we did this open ended cool thing and I mean part of the, let's say, downside of an open ended search is you don't know where you're gonna end up. And I think in in the interview, you know, Kenneth referred to this, like, cone of inevitability. Right? Where where as as you progress further and further along the the, let's say, the the time dimension or the step dimension of evolution, where you end up becomes less and less certain. And the crux of the problem is how can we do open ended evolution, in such a way that we end up with the things that we need? Like, we need something that detects school buses and something that finds, you know, pedestrians in the crosswalk and something that can generate movies about samurai. And, you know, like, there are things we we need. And so there's this this this conflict, right, between we do have goals. Like, we do have certain goals. We need to protect pedestrians and and monitor school buses and like whatever else. So we do have these kind of goals and yet we wanna try and achieve them with open ended evolution. You know? I know. It's such a it's such a paradox that, you know, you you you find what you need when you're not looking for it. Even there are so many forms of deception in open ended search. This deception word is is very interesting. And it's it's all about what you think you want isn't actually what you want. Right? And even you just said now, we want school buses to be safer. And there are many discoveries in the search space that would make school buses obsolete. In fact, YouTube is now it's completely taken over Hollywood, you know, if if you're trying to be a a traditional filmmaker. You don't make any money anymore because everyone's watching it here on YouTube. But my god, YouTube could be out of business in in a few years. We could easily discover something that what that wipes YouTube away. So it's about this epistemic gap between what we really want and what we think we want.…

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