Seeding the Singularity for A.I

The singularity refers to an idea that once a machine having an artificial intelligence surpassing the human intelligence capacity is created, it will trigger explosive technological and intelligence growth. I propose to test the hypothesis that machine intelligence capacity can grow autonomously starting with an intelligence comparable to that of bacteria - microbial intelligence. The goal will be to demonstrate that rapid growth in intelligence capacity can be realized at all in artificial computing systems. I propose the following three properties that may allow an artificial intelligence to exhibit a steady growth in its intelligence capacity: (i) learning with the ability to modify itself when exposed to more data, (ii) acquiring new functionalities (skills), and (iii) expanding or replicating itself. The algorithms must demonstrate a rapid growth in skills of dataprocessing and analysis and gain qualitatively different functionalities, at least until the current computing technology supports their scalable development. The existing algorithms that already encompass some of these or similar properties, as well as missing abilities that must yet be implemented, will be reviewed in this work. Future computational tests could support or oppose the hypothesis that artificial intelligence can potentially grow to the level of superintelligence which overcomes the limitations in hardware by producing necessary processing resources or by changing the physical realization of computation from using chip circuits to using quantum computing principles.