Introduction

'A is A' - Ayn Rand

Monsters Inc. was an entertaining film and like so many others of its genre, it allowed us, for a time, to enter a world that never really existed. To the computers that generated the images, the world doesn't exist either, it is just so many 1's and 0's. But those bits got transformed into a language we could all understand; a world we can feel, fear and predict. Our eyes similarly take a cryptic stream of bits and somehow too create a world we can feel and predict. If you close your eyes and imagine entering your kitchen to get soda, you must surely have created a 3D world to navigate. As you re-open your eyes, just how are those dancing 2D patterns you see converted into the 3D virtual realities in your mind? ^1-

In the virtual world, when a princess kisses a frog it turns into a prince. The real world does not work that way. For general AI to solve real world problems, its thinking needs to be bound by real world behaviors. All significant phenomena in the real world exist in three dimensions, or can be expressed as such. The common language describing computers, bicycles and brains is that of their 3D material existences animated over time (A is A). Further, derivative concepts such as math, stock markets, software and emotion can similarly be bound. If a concept cannot be described in three dimensions over time, it is quite likely false. Like the frog above, it may exist only in some virtual domain. ^2-

The real world cannot violate the laws of physics, logic or axioms to enter a fantasy world - frogs to princes. But the virtual can. It can be bound or unbound. But when bound to physics, it can accurately simulate reality. This has important consequences for AI.

Finally, the real world is bound by time. The virtual is not. It can run time backwards and forwards and at any speed. It can also accept time discontinuities, freezes and gaps. The virtual can predict events in reality before they have even happened! It can represent the now, the future or the past. It's when the real and the virtual are mixed, that the magic really begins.

Deep Blue

To many, the victory of deep blue - a mere computer, over the smartest chess genius alive was both disconcerting and also raised hope of a new dawn for AI. But in the end it didn't really amount to much. Politicians still got elected, deep blue got de-commissioned and most computers still act more like glorified calculating machines than thinking people. The fact one such calculator beat the smartest guy in the world at chess was just a freak anomaly. Just how Deep Blue beat Kasparov I will explain. Though a much more important question, I should think, is - Just how could Kasparov, hope to beat a computer?

Deep Blue operated primarily on just one of the three pillars of intelligence - time travel. I'll explain. The important aspects of a chess game can be simulated quite perfectly in a computer. At any given instant of real time, the game will, obviously, be in its current real state. Deep blue took that state as its starting point. It made predictions, grading each outcome as far into the future as time and resources would permit. Its final move was thus calculated to have the greatest probability of success. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Virtual Reality

Deep blue simulated a world very different from our own, But there are simulated environments in software labs, movie studios and military compounds all around the world that are very much more like our own. The fact that virtual worlds will soon become quite convincing and compelling is taken much for granted these days. It is only seen as a matter of time before the accuracy of simulations can completely fool the expectations of our senses. This will form the 2nd pillar of intelligence.

The humble earth worm

An earth worm doesn't know much about "pillars of intelligence'', but it represents one all the same. It has no ability for virtual time travel, no machinery for creating virtual environments, but it can surely feel the real world around it; the resistance of soil; the drying heat of the sun; the injury from a bird predator - and act accordingly. It might be argued that such a simple organism, which presents evidence of feeling, is in fact demonstrating basic reflexive responses to stimuli - like a thermostat. So when I say feel, what perhaps I should have said is the ability to discriminate within the flow of sensory inputs, that which it considers good from that which is bad. In other words, it has a sensorimotor system linking the real world to the virtual. These then: virtual time travel; virtual reality and an information bridge to reality, I present, are the three pillars of intelligence.