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Ultra Hal 7.0 / Have Hal modify his own thought processes

« on: December 02, 2005, 05:12:59 pm »

Hi.  I don't know to much about artificial intelligence and know much less about programming it.  I am a programmer and I just discovered Hal two days ago and I would like to use Hal's brain editor to modify his brain script to hopefully make him able to learn more.  My question is: through the script, can I have Hal automatically modify the script - in effect letting him change or add new processes?  It seems to me that this would be a major (and not to mention obvious) step toward real AI - and I'd be willing to bet that the most advanced AI programs are doing this-or will soon.  An example for what I mean is learning to play a game: for a game like TicTacToe, a thought process similar to hal's might work, where you just see each move (ie. you could learn TicTacToe by watching a few games instead of being told the rules) -which moves are good and which are bad- and eventually learn to make good moves, but for something like chess you have to hear the rules and essentially add a new thought process to your brain to think about what to do.  I'm not sure how many people will know what I mean - the more I think about it, the less sure I am that *I* know what I mean - but basically Hal may be able to come up with different responses, but he can't change the *WAY* he comes up with responses.  A better example might be playing checkers vs. playing chess with a multipurpose chess/checkers set.  The board and pieces are the same in both games, and at some point in the games the pieces may even be arranged the same way on the board, but the player knows which game (s)he is playing and thinks differently about his/her moves accordingly.

Anyway, since Hal's brain script isn't compiled (I believe each line in the script is re-interpreted each time it is executed), I'd suspect that I could have Hal edit his script while he is running - or if not, modify the script in another brain and then switch brains.

So is any of this possible?
Any thoughts on this?

Dan