From: Ben Goertzel To: "Jeffrey E." <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2015 01:15:57 +0000 I think that "learning language like a baby" is a fantastic and important research area ... I'm just not (at this moment) seeing how to boil it down into a crisply-defined *challenge* that neatly gauges incremental progress .... "Doing X" is straightforward to measure from a challenge-problem context, whereas "Learning X" is harder to measure in a challenge-problem context, because eager competitive contestants can always program most of X into their system and then make their system kinda-learn the rest.... Diamandis's X-Prize Foundation has asked me for help with formulating an AGI X Prize multiple times over the years, and I never had anything great to suggest for precisely this reason. Of course a prize for "achieving human level AGI" would make sense-- but that's such a big achievement that if you get there, the prize will be the least of your worries anyway! It's measuring incremental progress in a rigorous and cheating-proof way that's so tricky... About how babies learn language. Clearly it's a lot about embodiment and social interaction, right? You may have read Tomassello, "Constructing a Language"? (not AI, cognitive science, but good...) ... And I think rich perceptual stimuli and some degree of motoric affordances are important. So to really emulate or understand learning language like a baby, I suspect it's necessary to go robotic (though, certainly, not necessarily HUMANOID-robotics). Joscha may disagree on this point, I'm unsure.... The point is you need a rich stream of perceptual data, whose interrelationships can ground the interrelationships between linguistic constructs; and you need actions to be taken based on this perceptual data, to give grounding for the structure of sentences (which is action-based at the base, with the VERB at the center of the sentence, etc.). In theory this could all be done in