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3 min read Original article ↗
Abstract: We present the first class of mathematically rigorous, general, fully self-referential, self-improving, optimally efficient problem solvers. Inspired by Kurt Gödel's celebrated self-referential formulas (1931), a Gödel machine (or `Goedel machine' but not `Godel machine') rewrites any part of its own code as soon as it has found a proof that the rewrite is useful, where the problem-dependent utility function and the hardware and the entire initial code are described by axioms encoded in an initial proof searcher which is also part of the initial code. The searcher systematically and efficiently tests computable proof techniques (programs whose outputs are proofs) until it finds a provably useful, computable self-rewrite. We show that such a self-rewrite is globally optimal - no local maxima! - since the code first had to prove that it is not useful to continue the proof search for alternative self-rewrites. Unlike previous non-self-referential methods based on hardwired proof searchers, ours not only boasts an optimal order of complexity but can optimally reduce any slowdowns hidden by the O()-notation, provided the utility of such speed-ups is provable at all. (FAQ)

Gödel machine papers:
9. B. R. Steunebrink, J. Schmidhuber. Towards an Actual Gödel Machine Implementation. In P. Wang, B. Goertzel, eds., Theoretical Foundations of Artificial General Intelligence. Springer, 2012. PDF.
8. B. Steunebrink, J. Schmidhuber. A Family of Gödel Machine Implementations. In Proc. Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-11), Google, Mountain View, California, 2011. PDF.
7. J. Schmidhuber. Ultimate Cognition à la Gödel. Cognitive Computation 1(2):177-193, 2009. PDF. (Springer.)
6. J. Schmidhuber. Completely Self-Referential Optimal Reinforcement Learners. In W. Duch et al. (Eds.): Proc. Intl. Conf. on Artificial Neural Networks ICANN'05, LNCS 3697, pp. 223-233, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2005 (plenary talk). PDF.
5. J. Schmidhuber. Gödel machines: Fully Self-Referential Optimal Universal Self-Improvers. In B. Goertzel and C. Pennachin, eds.: Artificial General Intelligence, p. 119-226, 2006. PDF.
4. J. Schmidhuber. A Technical Justification of Consciousness. 9th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness ASSC, Caltech, Pasadena, CA, 2005.
3. J. Schmidhuber. Goedel machines: Towards a Technical Justification of Consciousness. In D. Kudenko, D. Kazakov, and E. Alonso, eds.: Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems III LNCS 3394, p. 1-23, Springer, 2005. PDF.
2. Section on Goedel machines on page 235 of: J. Schmidhuber, OOPS, Machine Learning, 54, 211-254, 2004. PDF. (The editors also offered to publish the entire original Goedel machine paper instead of the OOPS paper, but the latter came first chronologically).
1. arXiv: cs.LO/0309048 (2003, revised Dec 2006)