Well, I’d say that a “general-purpose search” process is something which:
- Takes in a problem or goal specification (from a fairly broad range of possible problems/goals)
- … and returns a plan which solves the problem or scores well on the goal
Why not call this "general-purpose planning"? That seems to more directly describe what I think you're describing -- a goal specification comes in, a plan comes out. I think "search" has some inappropriate connotations to it, possibly evoking BFS/DFS/MCTS/A*/etc, whereas this planning process -- as you point out -- doesn't have to look like "babble/prune."
Although now that I've written this, "planning" imports similar unwanted connotations from the similarly titled AI subfield. Hm. I don't feel like I've produced a good enough alternative, but I still feel there's a terminological issue here. I'll just leave this comment for now.
I do want to evoke BFS/DFS/MCTS/A*/etc here, because I want to make the point that those search algorithms themselves do not look like (what I believe to be most peoples' conception of) babble and prune, and I expect the human search algorithm to differ from babble and prune in many similar ways to those algorithms. (Which makes sense - the way people come up with things like A*, after all, is to think about how a human would solve the problem better and then write an algorithm which does something more like a human.)
OK, then I once again feel confused about what this post is arguing as I remember it. (Don't feel the need to explain it as a reply to this comment, I guess I'll just reread if it becomes relevant later.)
Benito has an interesting job. Here’s some of the stuff he’s had to do over the past couple years:
Quite a wide variety!
Benito illustrates an interesting feature of humans: you can give humans pretty arbitrary goals, pretty arbitrary jobs to do, pretty arbitrary problems to solve, and they'll go figure out how to do it. It seems like humans have some sort of “general-purpose problem-solving” capability.
Now, there’s more than one part of general-purpose problem solving. There’s efficient information-gathering and model-building and updating. There’s searching for promising plans. There’s execution (or, in the organizational context, operations). A general-purpose problem-solver needs general-purpose versions of all those. But for this post, I want to focus on the “searching for promising plans” part.
First things first: what is this “search” thing, anyway?
Babble And Prune Is Not The Only Search Method
This whole post started out because I was talking about “search” (in the context of an inner alignment strategy) and it turned out that people had radically different pictures of what the word “search” means. In particular, it turned out that a bunch of people pessimistic about the strategy were picturing some variant of babble and prune: “babble” candidate solutions, then “prune” unpromising solutions, and hopefully iterate toward better and better solutions.
This is not really how humans search for promising plans. Consider, for example, a human planning a trip to the grocery store. Typical reasoning (mostly at the subconscious level) might involve steps like:
Notice that this sort of reasoning mostly does not involve babbling and pruning entire plans. The human is thinking mostly at the level of constraints (and associated heuristics) which rule out broad swaths of plan-space. The calendar is a taut constraint, location is a slack constraint, so (heuristic) first find a convenient time and then pick whichever store is closest to wherever I’ll be before/after. The reasoning only deals with a few abstract plan-features (i.e. time, place) and ignores lots of details (i.e. exact route, space in the car’s trunk); more detail can be filled out later, so long as we’ve planned the “important” parts. And rather than “iterate” by looking at many plans, the search process mostly “iterates” by considering subproblems (like e.g. finding an open calendar slot) or adding lower-level constraints to a higher-level plan (like e.g. needing to get frozen goods home quickly).
So humans’ general-purpose internal search mostly doesn’t look like babble and prune in the classic sense. It’s mostly operating on things like constraints and heuristics, abstraction, and subproblems. (There may be some babbling and pruning in there, but it’s not doing most of the algorithmic efficiency work, and we're not directly babbling and pruning whole plans.)
In fact, even classic path search algorithms (like e.g. A* search) don’t really resemble pure babble and prune on closer inspection. When using a classic path-search algorithm to e.g. find a route from LA to to Seattle, we don’t actually babble lots of possible LA-Seattle routes and evaluate them. Rather, we come up with solutions to lots of subproblems: routes between LA and various possible intermediate points (like San Francisco or Sacramento or Portland). And in the case of A* search, we use heuristics (generated by constraint relaxation) to decide which subproblems to pay attention to.
So what is search, if not (as Ivan Vendrov recently put it) “enumerating possible actions and evaluating their consequences”? Well, I’d say that a “general-purpose search” process is something which:
The “evaluation of consequences” thing is relevant, but it’s not really about the internal operations of the search process. Rather, “evaluation of consequences” is the defining feature of whether a search process is doing its job correctly: to tell whether the search process is working, use the problem/goal specification to evaluate the consequences of the plan generated, and see whether the plan solves the problem or scores well on the goal.
Note that “general-purpose search” still does not include all the pieces of general-purpose problem solving; there’s still things like gathering information, building and updating models, execution of plans, or recognizing when plans need to be updated. But it does include the planning part.
Also note that a general-purpose search process need not solve all possible problems, or even all compactly-specifiable problems; that would be NP-Hard (almost by definition). It does need to handle a broad range of problems, ideally in some realistic environment.
Retargetability and Recursive Structure of Search
One key feature of a general-purpose search process is that it’s retargetable: because it can take in any problem or goal specification from a fairly wide class, we can retarget it by passing in a different problem/goal. For example, a path-finding algorithm (like A*) can take any start and end point in a graph.
Retargetability plays well with the recursive structure of search. When finding a route from LA to Seattle, for instance, we look for routes from LA to Sacramento or San Francisco. Those subproblems are themselves search problems, and can themselves be solved with the same path-finding method: just pass LA and Sacramento as the start and end points, rather than LA and Seattle. More generally, with a retargetable search process, we can recursively call the same general-purpose search process with different inputs in order to handle subproblems.
Later on, when we talk about why one might expect general-purpose search to eventually show up in trained ML systems, that sort of recursion will be one big piece.
Heuristics and Generality
In practice, in order to search efficiently, we tend to need some kind of heuristics. In physical-world pathfinding, for instance, a useful heuristic is to try to reduce Euclidean distance to the goal. However, that heuristic isn’t useful for all problems; Euclidean distance isn’t very useful as an heuristic for e.g. moderating online debates.
If we need heuristics for efficient search, and heuristics are specialized, how is general-purpose problem-solving a thing? Do we need to learn a whole new set of heuristics every time our task changes at all? Obviously not, in practice; most of the things on Ben’s list were things he only did once, but he nonetheless did a decent job (I know this because I’m one of his users). But then how do we achieve generality while relying on heuristics? Two main paths:
General-Purpose Generators Of Heuristics Are A Thing
Probably the best-understood heuristic-generator is problem relaxation.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say I’m planning a trip to the grocery store. My planning problem has a whole bunch of constraints: I need to have enough time, I need to be at the right place, can’t let the frozen goods melt, the car must have enough gas, etc, etc. As a first pass, I ignore (a.k.. “relax”) most of those constraints, and only pay attention to a few - like e.g. having enough time. That narrows down my solution space a lot: there’s only a few spaces in my calendar with enough time. I pick a time slot. Then, I start to add other constraints back in.
The “relaxed” problem, in which I only worry about the time constraint, acts as an heuristic for the full problem. It helps me narrow down the search space early on, and focus on plans which at least satisfy that one constraint. And because it only involves one constraint, it’s relatively easy to solve the relaxed problem.
More generally, the steps of problem relaxation are roughly:
Another example, this time from path search: if we’re solving a maze, we can relax the problem by ignoring all the walls. Then the shortest path is easy: it’s a straight line from the start to the end, and its length is Euclidean distance. We can then use Euclidean distance as an heuristic while exploring the maze: preferentially explore in directions which have shorter Euclidean distance to the end. In other words, preferentially explore directions for which the relaxed problem (i.e. ignoring all the walls) has the shortest solutions.
Problem relaxation probably isn’t the only heuristic generation method, but it’s relatively well-understood mathematically, and it’s an existence proof. It shows that general-purpose generators of heuristics are a thing. We should expect to see such heuristic-generators used inside of general-purpose search processes, in order to achieve generality and efficiency simultaneously.
Heuristics Tend To Depend On The Environment, But Not On The Objective
The previous section talked about two heuristics:
Notice that both of these heuristics are very environment-dependent, but not very goal-dependent. If my time is very scarce, then picking a time slot first will be a good heuristic for planning all sorts of things in my day-to-day life, from meetings to vacations to workouts to a trip to the movies to some quiet reading. The heuristic does depend on “the environment” - i.e. it would be less useful for someone whose time is abundant - but it’s relatively goal-agnostic.
Similarly, I can use Euclidean distance as a heuristic for finding road-trip routes between a wide variety of start and end locations. There are environments in which it’s a terrible heuristic, but for road-trip planning it works decently for most start/end points.
Here’s a visual example which I love, an heuristic for path-finding in a maze from an old post:
Maze-specific, but it’s useful for a wide variety of start/end points.
The pattern: heuristics tend to be environment-dependent but relatively goal-agnostic.
Why would such a pattern apply?
One way to frame the answer: an environment typically includes a bunch of stable constraints, shared across problems in that environment. In our universe, the laws of physics are all constraints, human laws are all constraints, I can only move around so fast and carry so much, I only have so much time and money, my interfaces with other people/things only have certain knobs to turn, etc. And instrumental convergence means that it will very often be the same few constraints which are rate-limiting. So, insofar as we generate heuristics via constraint relaxation, we’ll get environment-specific but reasonably goal-agnostic heuristics.
Another way to frame the answer: natural abstraction. Most far-apart chunks of the world only interact via relatively low-dimensional summaries; the rest of their interaction is wiped out by noise. So, optimizing those low-dimensional summaries will be a common heuristic across a wide range of goals within the same environment.
Side Note: Cached Solutions Are Not Heuristics (But Are Another General-Purpose Search Trick)
Another general-purpose search trick which someone will probably bring up if I don’t mention it is caching solutions to common subproblems. I don’t think of this as an heuristic; it mostly doesn’t steer the search process, just speed it up. But it is a useful and common trick for improving efficiency. And we should expect it to speed up search over a wide variety of goals within the same environment, insofar as instrumental convergence applies in that environment. Instrumentally convergent subproblems come up over and over again for a wide variety of problems, so caching solutions to those subproblems is a general-purpose search accelerator.
Revisiting The Risks From Learned Optimization Arguments
We’ve now talked about how general-purpose search Is A Thing. We’ve talked about how general-purpose heuristics (and other general-purpose search tricks, like caching) Are A Thing. And we’ve observed that these things show up in humans. But why do they show up in humans? And should we expect them to show up in ML, or in intelligent aliens, or in other evolved/trained/selected agenty systems?
Key Idea: Compression Is Favored By Default
In general, evolved/trained/selected systems favor more compact policies/models/heuristics/algorithms/etc. In ML, for instance, the fewer parameters needed to implement the policy, the more parameters are free to vary, and therefore the more parameter-space-volume the policy takes up and the more likely it is to be found. (This is also the main argument for why overparameterized ML systems are able to generalize at all.)
The outer training loop doesn't just select for high reward, it also implicitly selects for compactness. We expect it to find, not just policies which achieve high reward, but policies which are very compactly represented.
At the same time, assuming the system encounters a wide variety of problems in its training environment, it needs generality in order to perform well. But compactness means that, when possible, it will favor generality using a smaller number of more general pieces rather than a larger number of more specialized pieces.
So things like general-purpose heuristics, general-purpose heuristic generators, and general-purpose search are exactly the sort of things these systems should favor (assuming the architecture is expressive enough, and the environment varies enough).
That’s basically the argument for inner agents from Risks From Learned Optimization:
On top of all that, the recursive nature of search - the fact that recursively searching on subproblems is useful as a search technique - favors a retargetable general-purpose search process, as opposed to a hardcoded optimizer.
Takeaways
It seems like a lot of people have a picture of “search” as babble and prune. They correctly notice how inefficient babble and prune usually is, and conclude that it probably won’t be selected for in trained ML systems.
But there’s a more general notion of general-purpose search. It’s a process which takes in any problem or goal from a wide class, and returns a plan which solves the problem or achieves the goal. That’s the sort of search we expect to see show up in trained systems. The key property is that it’s retargetable: the search process can take in a wide variety of goals. That retargetability is selected for due to the recursive structure of search: recursively running search on subproblems is a widely-useful technique, and that technique can be encoded much more compactly with a retargetable search process on hand.
In order for that search to run efficiently, while still maintaining generality and compactness, it will probably need to either generate heuristics in a general way, or leverage goal-agnostic (but possibly environment-specific) heuristics. Both of those are plausible options: problem relaxation is an existence proof of general-purpose generators of heuristics, and the shared constraints of an environment (plus natural abstraction and/or instrumental convergence) offer a source of goal-agnostic heuristics.
Some strategic upshots of all this: