16.6 Issues with Virtual Preschool Engineering 305
that important from the point of view of humanlike cognitive development. We suggest that the key features of naive physics and folk psychology enumerated above can be mastered by an AGI in BlocksNBeadsWorld in spite of its imitations, and that — together with an appropriate AGI design — this probably suffices for creating an AGI with the inductive biases constituting humanlike intelligence.
To drive this point home more thoroughly, consider three potential virtual world scenarios:
1. A world containing realistic fluid dynamics, where a child can pour water back and forth between two cups of different shapes and sizes, to understand issues such as conservation of volume
2. A world more like today’s Second Life, where fluids don’t really exist, and things like lakes are simulated via very simple rules, and pouring stuff back and forth between cups doesn’t happen unless it’s programmed into the cups in a very specialized way
3. A BlocksNBeadsWorld type world, where a child can pour masses of beads back and forth between cups, but not masses of liquid
Our qualitative judgment is that Scenario 3 is going to allow a young AI to gain the same es- sential insights as Scenario 1, whereas Scenario 2 is just too impoverished. I have explored dozens of similar scenarios regarding different preschool tasks or cognitive development experiments, and come to similar conclusions across the board. Thus, our current view is that something like BlocksNBeadsWorld can serve as an adequate infrastructure for an AGI Preschool, supporting the development of human-level, roughly human-like AGI.
And, if this view turns out to be incorrect, and BlocksNBeads World is revealed as inadequate, then we will very likely still advocate the conceptual approach enunciated above as a guide for designing virtual worlds for AGI. That is, we would suggest to explore the hypothetical failure of BlocksNBeadsWorld via asking two questions:
1. Are there basic naive physics or folk psychology requirements that were missed in creating the specifications, based on which the adequacy of BlocksNBeadsWorld was assessed?
2. Does BlocksNBeads World fail to sufficiently emulate the real world in respect to some of the articulated naive physics or folk psychology requirements?
The answers to these questions would guide the improvement of the world or the design of a better one.
Regarding the practical implementation of BlocksNBeadsWorld, it seems clear that this is within the scope of modern game engine technology, however, it is not something that could be encompassed within an existing game or world engine without significant additions; it would require substantial custom engineering. There exist commodity and open-source physics en- gines that efficiently carry out Newtonian mechanics calculations; while they might require some tuning and extension to handle BlocksNBead World, the main issue would be achieving adequate speed of physics calculation, which given current technology would need to be done via modifying existing engines to appropriately distribute processing among multiple GPUs.
Finally, an additional avenue that merits mention is the use of BlocksNBeads physics in- ternally within an AGI system, as part of an internal simulation world that allows it to make “mind’s eye” estimative simulations of real or hypothetical physical situations. There seems no reason that the same physics software libraries couldn’t be used both for the external virtual world that the AGI’s body lives in, and for an internal simulation world that the AGI uses as a cognitive tool. In fact, the BlocksNBeads library could be used as an internal cognitive tool by AGI systems controlling physical robots as well. This might require more tuning of the bead
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