Slashdot Mirror

"The functions of Honda's humanoid robot are defined as follows: An operational system that autonomously performs typical operations under known circumstances. If an extraordinary operation is required under unknown circumstances, the robot will be supported by an operator... [The P3, 1,600mm in height and 130kg in weight, features a computer unit, motor-drive system, battery and wireless apparatus inside the body section. This more sophisticated robot can achieve freer movement, go up and down stairs and push a vehicle.]

[Future Development will focus on]:

• Further dimensional and weight reduction.
  
• Improved dynamic performance.
  
• Improved operability.
  

For items 2 and 3, it is extremely important that through the evolution of hardware we achieve physical autonomy by improving dynamic performance and adaptability to wider variations of working conditions. Also important is the pursuit of studies in artificial intelligence systems, which will provide the solution for improved autonomy."

The Brains: CYC

"The Cyc product family is powered by an immense multi-contextual knowledge base and an efficient inference engine. The knowledge base is built upon a core of over 1,000,000 hand-entered assertions (or "rules") designed to capture a large portion of what we normally consider consensus knowledge about the world. For example, Cyc knows that trees are usually outdoors, that once people die they stop buying things, and that glasses of liquid should be carried rightside-up."

And of course, lots of little other things, like targeting systems, healing systems (like this article), a CNS to link these higher-level functions to the motor control systems of the robot, um.... GUNS, MISSLES, etc..

Yeah, maybe not such a good idea. Of course, if we truly believed it a bad idea, we'd work for treaties now against robotic warfare, before one of our county's governments builds these and the rest are "forced" to catch up.

That is, if it hasn't started already. Clone wars!

It's 2003. So where is he? AI has not seemed to improve much despite ambitious software projects and even games that would seem to require neural networks. Perhaps the most disappointing is the lack of much improvement in VR, with disappointing progress in input devices and 3D and other monitor technology. Voice synthesis has made some improvements though. Not bad, although it's still not HAL quality. Voice recognition seems to have matured quite a bit as well. IMO, the most significant progress has been in graphics cards with processors nearly as impressive as the main CPU. The impact this has had on games cannot be underestimated.

Scary stuff, very scary stuff... but oh, so cool at the same time. Damnit!!

Spoilers, etc.

William Gibson referred to cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination" -- millions of minds agreeing to see that which wasn't there. The Matrix has taken this to another level -- not only is the Matrix a hallucination, but the contents of the hallucination occur under the surface -- a summarization, agglomeration, and representation of the shared expectations of each observer. Can a spoon bend? Of course not, no spoon can bend. But if there is no spoon, then no spoon may bend -- the pathway is opened.

If we are shot, we die. If we attempt to jump a chasm, we will fall. If we fight the superhuman, we shall fall, for we are "Only Human". But it's beyond that. If we walk into a room, and somebody is in the room, we shall see them. If they drop a glass, it will break. If they start talking, we will hear them. The words they say will match the words we hear.

If we die in the Matrix, we die in the "real" world. If we die in the "real" world, we die in the Matrix. If you can't die, because somebody loves you, then there will be a way. There will be...hope.

How did Tank come back just in time to save Neo? All Cypher wanted to know was...did Trinity believe?

And she Did. (It's pretty clear the real world is another Matrix, a la the 13th floor. Sweet!)

The millions of rules, assertions, and consequences of Cyc become not merely descriptive, but prescriptive -- things happen because we have been convinced they already have, not the other way around.

Nowhere is this more clear than the experience of Persephone, the wife of a philandering man who wishes to experience one moment of true belief. The act is insufficient; the belief is key. "Kiss me as if I were her, expose me to a genuine truth rather than an intentionally manufactured lie." (As an interesting side note, much of love's courtship process can be thought of as a demonstration of addiction -- I _can't_ leave you, it would hurt me too much, I shall be forced to stay even through those times when others would offer something better in the short term.)

It is a peculiar testament to the power of Neo, to control his beliefs so powerfully, that's he's able to expose even that aspect of his self to sheer force of will -- because he believes it's necessary, and that if he does this deed, he will receive assistance. And so it is willed.

Science has, to some extent, been defined as the study of the observable. We may hold opinions, but we may only know what we could possibly see. But this is not the limit of human imagination...we envision realities that are implausible, fantastic, astonishing...

In the Matrix, if we believe hard enough, it becomes so. Vampires are simply another belief, made flesh by a shared architecture that only acts as people believe it must.

I have little respect for those who see the Matrix as little more than a slide show of explosions interspersed with mere yammering without a point. The most important aspect of the Matrix design is that no question is rhetorical; no answers already exist. The machines lie -- they're more than happy to imply that a decision has already been made, because once that belief takes hold, it is made real. The Oracle is astonishing -- she uses the trivialities of candy and a broken jar to to establish her power in the mind of Neo. She has no need to portray herself as a kindly old woman -- but this is precisely the form that Neo might believe to be trustworthy.

And, ironically enough, if he thinks hard enough that she'll tell him the truth, she may cease to have sufficient choice in the matter. Note all the times people tell Neo he doesn't truly understand, he's fast, but they're faster, the machine can peer into his soul and hear the thoughts he considers private. In a very interesting way, we were never given an incomplete view of the way the world worked; we were always given an incomplete view of the way the worl

It's been 9 years since that critique. Since then, lots of people have been trying Cyc themselsves, and having quite a bit of success. OpenCyc is the open source version of Cyc, which differs from the commercial version mainly in that it includes a fraction of the assertions in the commercial product. I'm surprised that we haven't yet seen a community effort to create an equivalent assertion database, but I imagine it's only a matter of time.

No one, not even Lenat, expects Cyc to become the humanlike AI that sci-fi authors have written about for decades, but I think it's becoming increasingly clear that Cyc is finally beginning to prove its worth. Cyc-enabled derivative projects like CycSecure will likely become much more important in the near future, and I suspect that the next decade will vindicate Lenat's approach to creating software that we can legitmately label "intelligent".

Although mentioned in a (lone) paragraph in the article, I don't know why we haven't heard more about the Cyc project. Lenat's premise that you can't have intelligence without knowing the millions of "obvious" things about the world, aka, "common sense" seems intuitively right.

If there is contextual information enough that a skilled human (like Scotty or Geordi) would know what was being referred to, so had better computers. Furthermore, I think "within the parameters of what we can actually do" would again go without saying.

It is this kind of "common sense" that is the subject of heavy investigation by Doug Lenat's Cyc group. OpenCyc is available now. I don't doubt that there will be some evolution in these ideas over the next 100 years.

As to Asimov's laws, they only become necessary if one has full AI, so it's reasonable to suppose that the problem originally posed ('non need for humans') presupposed AI. I answered in that context. I wasn't advocating AI or not, just working with the given context. One can't both presuppose something and tell me that such a presupposition is unreasonable. Not and have a civil conversation. This will be my last reply to you on this subthread.

While I'm not sure if this will lead directly to Strong AI, it seems that having some sort of ontology would be a prerequisite (and quite useful in the short term to boot)

The project is estimated to complete somewhere around 2015. Still, already they're asking Cyc questions and sometimes getting very interesting answers. From that web page:

"At this stage, Cyc can answer only specific kinds of questions, although it answers them quickly and accurately---sometimes with surprising intuition. Given a database of sample phrases and a vague query like "Show me happy people," Cyc selected the phrase, "A man watching his daughter learn to walk."

I'm not sure what you mean. The two sentences that I quoted seem to indicate that Christopher Reeves couldn't participate in a Turing Test. Turing's insight was that performance is the only measure that we have of intellegence. His paper actually included several hypothetical ways by which performance isn't the only measure. For example, parapsychological effects: you look at a Rhine Card and ask the testee what you're looking at. If humans consistently guess better (or worse!) than computers, then the Turing Test is invalid (and a whole new field of scientific study has opened up).

On the other hand, you could ask Chris Reeve (or a computer) to play chess with you. Either could say, "Sorry, I don't have a board handy, how about tic-tac-toe?"

As you read this, are you evaluating my competance or my performance? How do you know that I'm not really a bot from Cycorp?

I'm a contractor at NASA/Goddard. One of the areas I work in is taking remote sensed data from multiple sources and correlating it. Guess what: spatial correlation is one of the hard problems, because there are a lot of different coordinate systems in use - lat/long based on one of a bazillion different spherical/ellipsoidal models of the earth, UTM grids, weird polar-centered grids, you name it. Semantic Web labeling of the coordinate systems would help, but without deep semantic knowledge of how to meaningfully convert between the systems, you're still hosed.

Translation between two languages/systems is often straightforward. The probability of meaningful translation among N systems drops rapidly as N increases, though. The hype about the Semantic Web always ends up promising "and then we'll be able to make everything interoperate". It's the same as the early XML hype, and is bogus for the same reasons. Both of them say "all we have to do is label everything and then we can use it all", when getting agreement on the meaning of the labels is an unsolved problem.

I keep mentioning Cyc because they're one of the few groups that have been trying over a long period of time to build universal, interoperable ontologies. They've been at it now since 1984, and they haven't made a whole lot of progress because the problem is hard.

We're arguing past each other here. You think Semantic Web labeling will help a lot; I'm sceptical, based on my background in AI, among other things. We'll see which of us is right about ten years from now.

this appears to me to be the the best role for a "benevolent virus" (in this case, more of a network scanner/meta-virus, as actual infection is not necessary) - by detecting possible routes of infection/actual infection on a system, and warning that system of possible/actual infections.

This sounds something like CycSecure.

I can't vouch for the efficacy of CycSecure -- I only know what I've read here and a few other places -- but it seems like an free software version of this tool would be a big step towards continuous security for non-expert users.

There are exceptions; people are trying to make magical leaps over some percieved barrier, usually self-awareness. The cyc project works along those lines.

By and large, though, AI research occurs in little steps, and most of those steps are like this one. There is a need for a good understanding of what works and what doesn't work for smaller tasks before we're going to solve the bigger problems. What you seem to call "Cognitive Imitation" I would often call "Trying to understand cognition".

In other words, when it comes to "AI", these things tend to be really heavy on the "A" and really light on the "I".

I'd like to hear of an approach that you think is light on the "A" and heavy on the "I".

This just won't happen, though. CYCORP is a company that is seeking to capitalize off of the decade-and-a-half of R&D by productizing the CYC inference engine and knowledge base in a variety of applications. Even though CYCORP has a 15+ year head start in creating the knowledge-base, publishing the code for "peer-review" would be inviting competition, maybe by someone with deeper pockets (Microsoft? Oracle? IBM?).

Wallace's comments on CYC are interesting, considering that CYC is on a whole other level than ALICEBOT in term of scope and complexity. I've been following Lenat's work since the early 1980s. Based on my understanding of ALICEBOT and CYC, comparing them is like a rubber-band powered plane to a 747 - both fly, but one is toy, and the other a tool.

You know, I'd be *VERY* interested in seeing a head2head interview between Wallace and Lenat. Can Slashdot make that happen?

...anactofgod...

What do you think of efforts to "create" AI by collecting huge amounts of information, such as the Mindpixel and Cyc projects?

Prevention is another way to help secure a network, rather than simply detection.

CycSecure from Cycorp the makers of OpenCyc, the AI reasoning system, helps prevent attacks by using an AI engine to simulate attacks on your network to identify problems.
It's worth looking into.

Prevention is another way to help secure a network, rather than simply detection.

CycSecure from Cycorp the makers of OpenCyc, the AI reasoning system, helps prevent attacks by using an AI engine to simulate attacks on your network to identify problems.
It's worth looking into.

"But confident as he is that Cyc is about to emerge as a truly intelligent machine, Lenat is thinking hard about the responsibilities programmers have to ensure the software works exclusively to humans' advantage.

"HAL killed the ['2001'] crew because it had been told not to lie to them, but also to lie to them about the mission," he observes. "No one ever told HAL that killing is worse than lying. But we've told Cyc.""

You can get the google cache of the original article here , or the PDF version from the Cyc Website .

Actually, it seems to me it knows a thing or two about Hacking

Cyc's corporate page has links to many recent news articles, the OpenCyc project, and other stuff of potential interest.

Cyc's corporate page has links to many recent news articles, the OpenCyc project, and other stuff of potential interest.

The first announcement of this can be found here.

Anyway, there is a related open source project for anyone interested.

Cycorp can be found here.

Cycorp's home page.

OpenCyc is the open source version of the project, due to be released in July 2002.

The artificial intelligence FAQ mentions this project.

An interview with founder Doug Lenat.

A dissenting view from 12 years ago, by Christopher Locke.

My brother is programmer for Cycorp Doug Lenat's
company. They make other interesting things too like

CycSecure an AI based program to examine network integrity. Its great that they made it to slashdot

check them out here

**NOTE: this is a shameless plug :)

My brother is programmer for Cycorp Doug Lenat's
company. They make other interesting things too like

CycSecure an AI based program to examine network integrity. Its great that they made it to slashdot

check them out here

**NOTE: this is a shameless plug :)

OpenCyc.org the open source cyc website and Cycorp the commercial website.

(anonymous karma whoring -- whoo hoo)

Cycorp web site

OpenCyc

Sourceforge project

The dictionary/definition approach was already tried by the CYCorp. Reading their papers one gets an impression of the complexity involved as well as the potential--when it will finally be working. After the computer is able to understand a text translation should be easy.

Up to then I used Google on my homepage.

I don't see any concrete information on what it does to summarize stories...is it using something like Cyc? Does it just have some heuristics for picking out the important parts of paragraphs?

Also, who else thought "neuro-linguistic programming" for at least a moment when they saw "nlp"?

I wonder what happened to Open Cyc, seems to have stalled.

Actually, Doug Lenat and Cycorp , who were mentioned in the article, seemed to be expecting just that - if you think Mr. Lenat beleives the claims that he has made. And whether or not he turns out to be correct, he seems to be a very smart man.

My take (and I am certainly no expert) is that Mr. Lenat is a theorist and he sees no theoretical problem to acheiving his goals. This leaves him with an engineering problem which he consistently underestimates. I know I have essentially that problem often, although on a much smaller scale.

Back to AI, you can add the fact that AI seems to be defined differenly by every person you speak to. This is another factor which can cause estimates on when the vapor will materialize to vary greatly. Some would even say AI had already arrived in 2001.

Natural language processing has come a long way in just the last couple of years. Astonishingly effective applications such as Sinope Summarizer are freely available; I can only imagine what an organization with the motivation and resources of the IB, NSA, FBI or CIA might have. I'd feel somewhat disappointed if their software weren't vastly superior to anything I've seen.

I'd imagine it might be based on Cyc or a similar dark project, and might achieve a 97% or better success rate at identifying questionable messages, with very few false negatives.

Assuming a billion emails a day, and five million of them being questionable, I'd suspect such a system could cull that number down to a few thousand—if the target messages were truly that few in number. As a matter of fact, I'd suggest that if sufficient computing power were available, to skip the keyword-scanning filter entirely, since such communications might be carried on with an alternate vocabulary substituted for hotbutton terms. Finding those messages requires more language processing intelligence than Carnivore would seem to have currently.

We certainly will be heading this direction. Doug Lenat is building the infrastructure, and Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast is demonstrating the state of the art.

What person who has entered the field of AI hasen't been a devout fan of Asimov. His writings on the positronic mind have changed teh way we look at AI Look at the Cyc project Half of the ppl that work there are philosophers.

In that context, voice recognition is just one more way of getting input. And I think that what's needed is not just one more way of getting input. What we need is for computers to have an increased level of understanding of the Real World.

Given that Cyc's project has apparently failed to live up to its original claims of producing genuine childlike intelligence by slowly building up all of the information a child has, and has since spawned into a commercial product, why should one believe AI will fare any better? How do their approaches differ? It seems particularly problematic for AI, as a company, that Cyc has released their OpenCyc project to the community.

Bob

There is no contest at all, the brain wins. However in this particular game the computer has the advantage. First of all let's go over how it operates. The computer takes a brute force/god's eye view of the game, using rules it creates a set of all possible moves and recursively evaluates these sets of possible moves until it finds a winning condition. This is really easy to program, I can do it so can you the only thing we don't have is a massively parallel supercomputer kicking around to evaluate 21 moves in advance every second for us. What makes the computer better than a brain in this domain is that the rules are known so the game is finite - it's a combination problem, a set of all possible states exists.
But, this isn't how the brain operates. A brain on the other hand deals with incomplete, unknown or outright false information and must construct a system that operates without knowing the rules or even what information is even relevant to solving a problem. The problem with the real world is that it is chaotic - the combination of problems grows in such a way that to evaluate all possible combinations for even one move would take more time than has already passed since the big bang. I'm exaggerating a little with the previous sentence but it is the central issue. So to deal with this influx of information the brain has to find ways to reduce the sensory information into important features which can then be used to drive higher order logics (in the AI sense, not mathematical sense). Strategies for condensing raw information include Baysian logic, Fuzzy logic, and Common sense. The greatest area of research in the future is in extending Cyc, with something not quite like Expert Systems but along the same lines - contextual knowledge. Contextual knowledge is simply constraining the possible choices from moment to moment by following scripts or stories. An example might be 'How to make a cup of coffee'.
So to sum it up, yeah it can beat me at chess but ask it to make me a cup of coffee and I win :)

Just saying it doesn't make it so -- got any references or should we just take your word on it?

Right today, computers do many things that were entirely the province of human intelligence a decade ago: they play chess at the highest levels, recognize speech, translate text (more or less), conjecture and prove mathematical theorems -- and they can read and summarize your typical business document.

And there are certainly a lot of promising projects that look like they might bear fruit, see eg Douglas Lenat's CYC. If CYC does what it's supposed to, then it would be artificial intelligence.

What evidence do you have for your case?

... announced that a greatly expanded version of the Cyc® Common Sense Knowledge Base will be made available in open access form under the name OpenCyc. In addition, Cycorp will, for the first time, provide the Cyc Inference Engine and a suite of tools for creating knowledge-based applications. OpenCyc 1.0 will be released on July 1, 2001.

It will be interesting to see exactly what they release in the way of tools to go with their inference engine, and what languages they are written in (or, support interfaces to) - and I am also curious to know what the licensing terms may be.

Ah well, we've got less than two weeks to wait - and then we'll know....

The only reason this story is getting printed is because Steven Spielberg's AI movie is coming out soon, and his studio is trying to drum up interest in the subject.

The coincidence is neat, but this story is important in itself, at least for a significant proportion of AI researchers.

Doug B. Lenat is one of the guys who gave me the AI "vvirus". I remember reading an old book about the "first generation" of AI, and of all the things I saw in it none impressed me nearly as much as Lenat's Eurisko. It was a kind of modern fairy tale for the little boy that I was at the time.

Cyc was mentioned in that book as a "long-term project". I remember visiting their website once, and thinking how all this definitely looked like the ultimate vaporare story.

In itself, Cyc is simply a continuation of Lenat's previous work, that is, a monumental, "new generation" expert system. It is to traditional expert systems what the internet is to telegraph : it does basically the same things, but the technical difference lead to a qualitative leap. It is neither intelligent (it was not designed to pass the standard Turing test) nor "conscious" (it knows about itself, but just as much as a Java class that can do introspection). But when it comes to practical applications about analyzing abstract data and drawing abstract conclusions, it can crush the competition any time.

Bloody hell, they've finally done it. Yes, this is important. Don't let the journalists' hype fool you: this guy is worth your attention, and you might pretty well hear about him again over the next few years.

Thomas Miconi

Read the third point, from the overview on their website.

- Cyc can notice if an annual salary and an hourly salary are inadvertently being added together in a spreadsheet.

- Cyc can combine information from multiple databases to guess which physicians in practice together had been classmates in medical school.

- When someone searches for "Bolivia" on the Web, Cyc knows not to offer a follow-up question like "Where can I get free Bolivia online?"

(1) CYC is one of the few survivors of the "A.I." speculative bubble of the mid-1980s. Though this bubble was not as large as the recent InterNet bubble, there was a lot of hype. The US computer industry feared it would lose the "A.I. war" against Japan's "Fifth Generation Project". This project was going to build an intelligent supercomputer using expert systems. It was almost a complete bust.

(2) A major contention behind CYC is that so-called "expert systems" will be useful once they pass a certain level of critical knowledge, particulary incorporating trivia called "common sense". Most early expert systems were very small and narrow, with just a few hundred or thousand pieces of knowledge. They frequently broke. CYC is a thousand times large than most other expert systems with a couple million chunks of knowledge.

(3) One of the more interesting parts of CYC is its "ontology". You could think of it is a giant thesarus for computerized reasoning. What is the best way of doing this? Previous examples are the philosophers' systems of categories descended from Aristotle and the linguists' meaning dictionaries called thesarii. CYC uses neither of these because they are not useful for computerized reasoning. It developed its own exlucidating hidden human assumptions of space, and time, and object, and so-on. The CYC ontology is publically available on the net at the cyc web site . The ontology is much more sophisticated than a mere web of ideas (called semantic net in A.I. jargon). It has a web, it has declarative parts like Marvin Minky's frames. It has procedural parts, or little embedded programs for resolving holes and contradictions. Again this is on the web site.

How I long for this movie not to be retarded. But frankly, I'm skeptical about the capacity of Hollywood to deliver a story about AI that actually treats the subject with any sensitivity to the field. It's clear from the trailers that the kind of AI we're talking about here is more than that taught in undergrad CS courses and used commonly in games. They're trying to tell a story about an intelligence that at the very least passes the Turing test, and supposedly much more.

Trouble is, the conception of AI taught in CS courses is largely still the 1970's version that resulted in projects like cyc. The metaphor of "brain as computer", or a set of inference rules governing a vast filing cabinet of brute facts. Peruse the work of leading contemporary cognitive scientists however, and you'll see a very different picture of intelligence. For one, there has been a deep shift in emphasis from the view of mind as disembodied thinker, to a view that takes embodiment and real activity in the world to be an indespensible constituent of what we recognize as intelligence. Intelligence isn't just thinking logically and drawing correct conclusions (and in fact humans often don't), but it consists in activity, social interaction, language, tool use, care about one's projects, and a myriad of concrete behaviors. Interestingly, a highly similar sea change occured in philosophy from Descartes' Meditations to Heidegger's Being and Time (1926), where the former is an analysis of the human mind that works by gradually removing everything "external" and material, and the latter begins with and resolutely holds to the self's doings and cares in the world throughout the analysis, even to the point of coining a new term to describe the human self, dasein, "there-being".

I worry then that the trailer suggests that the same kind of AI is responsible for smart houses and a robot capable of all things human.

For a bunch of great links, see: Minds, Machines, and Metaphysics

I find it strange that this Scientific American article talks about the Semantic Web, AI, Agents and Ontologies and yet makes no mention whatsoever of the largest knowledge-base of commonsense information - Cyc.

The Cyc knowledge base was founded by Dr. Lenat in 1984 at the government funded consortium that was located in Texas to help U.S. companies compete with Japan. Lenat and his colleagues have spent the last 17 years creating a vast store of knowledge. I haven't really heard much of what has happened to Cycorp in the industry and have been expecting it to make it into products at some point so I was really happy to see the press release on Cyc.com but yet why didn't Tim at least give a passing mention to the ground-breaking research that Lenat has already done in this vein of AI?

I find it strange that this Scientific American article talks about the Semantic Web, AI, Agents and Ontologies and yet makes no mention whatsoever of the largest knowledge-base of commonsense information - Cyc.

The Cyc knowledge base was founded by Dr. Lenat in 1984 at the government funded consortium that was located in Texas to help U.S. companies compete with Japan. Lenat and his colleagues have spent the last 17 years creating a vast store of knowledge. I haven't really heard much of what has happened to Cycorp in the industry and have been expecting it to make it into products at some point so I was really happy to see the press release on Cyc.com but yet why didn't Tim at least give a passing mention to the ground-breaking research that Lenat has already done in this vein of AI?

A separate, commerical common sense project is called CYC. It's been going since 1984 but is just starting to scratch the surface of the encyclopedia. It's incredible how dependencies can get you: for instance, you can't program what an aardvark is without also going into what it means to be a mammal, the geography of Africa, basic anatomical pieces, and behavioral traits -- all of which have their own dependencies, and so on. (Don't quote me on that though, "dependencies" probably isn't the right word.)

Here is the link to CYC, an interesting read about knowledge representation. It's also pretty timely, since they are about to release some of the project after 17 years of development. Might make a good story.

By the way, how many people posting now are from Australia? My sympathies for any other -500 students whose homework also kept 'em up tonight.

--------------------------------

A separate, commerical common sense project is called CYC. It's been going since 1984 but is just starting to scratch the surface of the encyclopedia. It's incredible how dependencies can get you: for instance, you can't program what an aardvark is without also going into what it means to be a mammal, the geography of Africa, basic anatomical pieces, and behavioral traits -- all of which have their own dependencies, and so on. (Don't quote me on that though, "dependencies" probably isn't the right word.)

Here is the link to CYC, an interesting read about knowledge representation. It's also pretty timely, since they are about to release some of the project after 17 years of development. Might make a good story.

By the way, how many people posting now are from Australia? My sympathies for any other -500 students whose homework also kept 'em up tonight.

--------------------------------

These are both just open versions of The CYC Project. I have serious doubts about a project like this working, but if anyone *does* get it working, they'll end up doing it first. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they're going to *release* anything to the public anytime soon.

However, I'd rather try to gather money to buy out/opensource cycorp than re-implement everything they've done in the past 16 years; they have a huge knowledge base already built, and a lot of code, and CYC can already do some interesting reasoning. (I know there isn't much there, but read what articles you can find; it's fascinating stuff)

And only using yes/no facts for data is just stupid; the computer needs to do some reasoning, and have some structure, otherwise, it would all just take too long! That's about as stupid as 'the table method' in AI. Even simple AI's can't necessarily be represented like that, so I hope there's more to it that I just missed.

...and for those people who think computers inherently will never be able to reason: go home; you aren't welcome here. I'll argue with your facts, but I won't cater to your prejudices.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The people at Yahoo had once aspired to at some ontological smarts to their search engine. There was an article some years back in wired that talked about how Yahoo had hired some of the people from Cyc Corp. to help them develope an ontology. I remember that one of them was the co-author of BLKBS ("building large knowledge based systems").

This seemed like exciting news to me at the time but Yahoo was then, and remains now, more of a "dewie decimal system" than an ontology.

When is Slashdot going to make its archives accessible?

Perhaps an Idea Futures claim may be in order that says "Deja, Inc. will make its full archives accessible sooner than will Slashdot." It sure would be nice to be able to write a present day article and link back to comments/articles in the Slashdot archives.

Over a year ago there was a post on Slashdot about the origin of Deja News and its plausible connection to the NSA. That post is no longer accessible via the web. Deja, Inc., having started in the "Echelon II" building within walking distance of top NSA spook Bobby Ray Inman's MCC and its linguistic data mining spin-off Cycorp in Austin is a story to which comments in this article might like to link if we are to discuss the value of the 1981 Usenet archive in context of the larger problem it is trying to solve:

How to decentralize control of history.