Jim talks with Ken Stanley about the Fractured Entanglement Representation hypothesis in deep learning neural networks. They discuss open-endedness in AI systems & evolution, the Picbreeder experiment & its significance, the objective paradox of finding things by not looking for them, comparisons between Picbreeder & SGD networks, visual differences in internal representations, weight sweep experiments, modular vs tangled decomposition, implications for creativity & continual learning & generalization abilities, Unified Factored Representation as an alternative to FER, the relationship to grokking in neural networks, scaling considerations & evidence in larger models, potential methods to achieve UFR, connections to biological evolution and DNA representation, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman

"Questioning Representational Optimism in Deep Learning: The Fractured Entanglement Representation Hypothesis" by Akarsh Kumar, Jeff Clune, Joel Lehman, and Kenneth Stanley

JRS EP137 - Ken Stanley on Neuroevolution

JRS EP130 - Ken Stanley on Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

Kenneth O. Stanley is the Senior Vice President of Open-Endedness at Lila Sciences.  He previously led a research team at OpenAI also on the challenge of open-endedness. Before that, he was Charles Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida and was also a co-founder of Geometric Intelligence Inc., which was acquired by Uber to create Uber AI Labs, where he was head of Core AI research. He is an inventor of popular algorithms including NEAT, novelty search, and CPPNs. He has won more than 10 best paper awards and his original 2002 paper on NEAT also received the 2017 ISAL Award for Outstanding Paper of the Decade 2002 - 2012 from the International Society for Artificial Life.  He is also a coauthor of the popular science book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective (published originally in the US by Springer), and has spoken widely on its subject.