[extropy-chat] D-Wave premiere of 16 qubit processor

[Ben Goertzel]

John K Clark wrote:
> "Ben Goertzel" <ben at goertzel.org>
>
>> if we had one of their 1000-qubit boxes to play with, then that would 
>> cut
>> down the amount of hardware needed to run a mature Novamente system by a
>> couple orders of magnitude
>
> I think it would do a tad better than that. Each time you add a qubit you
> double the performance of the quantum computer;
Even if that is true, which I doubt (I read something about quadratic 
speedup,
not exponential)...

... only some aspects of the Novamente design in particular are amenable to
massive parallelization, esp. massive parallelization on a very noisy 
substrate

Of course, radically different AGI designs might be able to more thoroughly
exploit quantum computing infrastructure.
> via an AGI
>
> I just don't understand why you use that silly acronym when we already 
> have
> one that is much better recognized and one third shorter, it's called AI.
>
Because AI, as it's come to be used, is a more inclusive term.  AI 
includes things
like Deep Blue, car-driving software, the bioinformatics software I've 
built for the
NIH, etc.

It is worth distinguishing as a different category, AI systems that aim 
at general
intelligence (in roughly the sense of the g-factor from psychology) 
rather than
achievement in highly specialized domains.  I have come to the 
conclusion that
pursuit of general intelligence and pursuit of specialized intelligence 
are quite
different sorts of science/engineering tasks.

There have been some AAAI symposia on "Human-Level Intelligence", a term
that tries to get at roughly the same thing as "AGI", but which I don't like
because I feel it defines the end-goal too unambitiously ;-)

-- Ben