{"id":1028,"date":"2011-03-06T01:22:51","date_gmt":"2011-03-06T09:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agi-conf.org\/2011\/"},"modified":"2011-03-06T12:47:25","modified_gmt":"2011-03-06T20:47:25","slug":"abstract-aaron-sloman","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/agi-conf.org\/2011\/abstract-aaron-sloman\/","title":{"rendered":"Abstract: Aaron Sloman"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Title:<span style=\"font-weight: normal;\"> The biological bases of mathematical competences: a challenge for AGI<\/span><\/h2>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Evolution produced many species whose members are pre-programmed with  almost all the competences and knowledge they will ever need. Others <em>appear<\/em> to start with very little and learn what they need, but appearances can  deceive. I conjecture that evolution produced powerful innate  meta-knowledge about a class of environments containing 3-D structures  and processes involving materials of many kinds. In humans and several  other species these innate learning mechanisms seem initially to use  exploration techniques to capture a variety of useful generalisations  after which there is a \u201cphase transition\u201d in which learnt  generalisations are displaced by a new generative architecture that  allows novel situations and problems to be dealt with by reasoning \u2014 a  pre-cursor to explicit mathematical theorem proving in topology,  geometry, arithmetic, and kinematics. This process seems to occur in  some non-human animals and in pre-verbal human toddlers, but is clearest  in the switch from pattern-based to syntax-based language use. The  discovery of non-linguistic toddler theorems has largely gone unnoticed,  though Piaget investigated some of the phenomena, and creative problem  solving in some other animals also provides clues. A later evolutionary  development seems to have enabled humans to cope with domains that\u00a0involve both regularities and exceptions, explaining \u201cU-shaped\u201d language  learning. Only humans appear to be able to develop  meta-meta-competences needed for teaching learnt \u201ctheorems\u201d and their  proofs. I\u2019ll sketch a speculative\u00a0theory, present examples, and propose a research programme, reducing the \u2018G\u2019 in AGI, while promising increased power in return.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Title: The biological bases of mathematical competences: a challenge for AGI Evolution produced many species whose members are pre-programmed with almost all the competences and knowledge they will ever need. Others appear to start with very little and learn what they need, but appearances can deceive. I conjecture that evolution produced powerful innate meta-knowledge about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1028","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agi-conf.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agi-conf.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agi-conf.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agi-conf.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agi-conf.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1028"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/agi-conf.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1061,"href":"https:\/\/agi-conf.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1028\/revisions\/1061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agi-conf.org\/2011\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}