LordAlveric

Hello, Ken. This is Fred Mitchell, creator of RubyNEAT. Lately progress has been slow, but I am planning to enable this NEAT to run "in the cloud", as it were.

I came up with what I think could be a powerful idea, but would like to know what you think of it. What if the individual neurons of the CPPN themselves could evolve? One thing about the human brain is that it comprises many different neurons, perhaps a greater variety than any other species on this planet. Do you think this is a viable approach for NEAT? Perhaps it's been attempted already?

Thank you. Thanks for everything. And thanks for reigniting my interests in AI.

You know, in retrospective, it is clear my own life has been following the novelty search pattern. Long before I found out about NEAT, I had developed the notion of "meta-planning". That is to say, not to keep any hard and fast plans or goals per se, but to think about it at a higher level of abstraction.

But when I finally heard of searching without objectives, that struck a resonant chord with me.

Memetics, alas, has become a "still-born" science, and a colleague, Aaron Lynch, who wrote Thought Contagions is no longer with us. But he too had an influence on how I think about evolving ideas and their transmission.

Human beings, in general are novelty search agents. That is clear just by walking into any large library, and seeing the sheer volumes of volumes on the shelves about pretty much everything you can imagine.

Thanks for your insights. I need to give it more thought, but in general, if you look at nature, you have systems of evolution within systems of evolution.

My "curse" is that I come up with so many ideas, but not enough time to implement or explore them all. I am still working on the ES HyperNEAT extension to RubyNEAT, but also queuing the neural nets as s-expressions through AMQP so that evaluation can not only take place in a distributed fashion, but also in a language-agnostic manner.

I wish I could just take a break from working to work on this full-time for a few months, but alas the wife and I have to eat. :-)

So I'll give this idea some more thought. Thanks again.

Indeed it is very true. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did not set out to become the shining successes they did. They were only interested in doing something -- novel!

Interesting point you make about walking, but it also applies to language acquisition, and just about everything else having to do with growing up. Parents who try to set "goals" for their kids will most likely either wind up disappointed or have very unhappy kids. For my own kids, I encouraged exploration. I encouraged the to do their own "novelty search" without realizing what was going on. It seemed to be the best approach.

Now, saddled with learning German, I think I have to also approach it this way as well. Abandon the "goal" of learning it and just "let it happen" by exploring the language, which is kinda what I've been doing anyway.

I know the Q&A is now over here, and it's been wonderful. Thanks for doing it.