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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.

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.

• 1945: Vannevar Bush proposes Memex; ENIAC completed
• 1963: Doug Engelbart's "A Conceptual Framework"
• 1968: Englebart's "Augment/NLS" hypertext sys; Brown's HES (Nelson & van Dam)
• 1972: ZOG development begins at Carnegie Mellon (distributed hypertext)

It would seem like BT doesn't really have a leg to stand on. But we'll have to see how the US legal system views this...

If you're interested in this sort of thing, you'd can get a good feel for the existing work in the field from:

• InteractiveStory.net - Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's interactive drama/believable agent project, and obligatory huge page o'links.
• Oz - The Oz project at CMU
• Erasmatron@Robotwisdom - Jorn Barger's excellent thumbnail sketch of Crawford's writings. In most cases, Jorn's synopsis is hyperlinked to the related page on erazmatazz

Selmer Bringsjord and David Ferrucci, Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine, August 30, 1999.

Nicolas Szilas, Interactive Drama on Computer: Beyond Linear Narrative, 1999.

Antonio Furtado, Angelo Ciarlini, Plots of Narratives Over Temporal Databases, 1997.

Barbara Hayes-Roth, Robert van Gent, Story-marking with improvisational puppets, 1997.

W. Scott Neal Reilly, A methodology for building believable social agents, 1997.

IMHO, interactive storytelling is one of the most interesting cross-discipline computational problems out there.

The Unofficial Cyc FAQ can be found at http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/cycfaq.html

I read that article several weeks ago (thanks to Robot Wisdom 'blog for the link) and was left with the distinct impression that the postal workers got at least as much amusement out of it as we did, if not more. Otherwise, many of those items probably would never have been delivered.

That site links to Swish which in turn links to various demos, one of which stars a geek who looks eerily familiar.

Try http://channel.nytimes.com/2000/11/27/technology/2 7NET.html. (Props to Jorn Barger for pointing out the channel.nytimes.com backdoor.)

-jon

But I've been downloading trans-oceanic quicktimes for the past couple of hours (at 28.8) and I still think it's a hoax.

Depictions of robots in sci-fi movies have always had the problem that they skip over the 'intermediate forms' between obviously-not-human and much-too-realistically human-with-a-few-small-flaws. And as far as I can see Honda's materials commit the same sin-- where are the intermediate forms???

A real example of an intermediate form

If you see a demo that in every detail resembles a person crouched in a special suit... what does Occam's razor say you should conclude?

Why did they need to give it a humanoid torso and arms? Why do these also move exactly like the human versions? Why is the head concealed in a visor, if not to give their actor a way to look around? Why do the P3 quicktimes show only the cliched, anonymous box-with-blinking-lights inside, instead of showing off the real high-tech in the legs?

PROVE ME WRONG, PLEASE!

My page of robotics links if you're interested.

Um, will you at least put the "cellphone section" first, then... with an automatic cutoff that keeps the rest from flooding my bandwidth? ;^/

The theory here was supposed to be that you have exactly one section, that's just rendered differently for each device. As a theory that's very elegant, but as an interface in the real world it's turning out, over and over, to be a hollow dream.

McCluhan taught us in the sixties that the medium is the message-- you can't put the message in one file and the 'styling' in another. This problem with mobile devices and bandwidth is just the tip of the iceberg for CSS's fundamental wrongheadedness, imho.

The right longterm solution, I've been arguing forever, is to embed the document's styles in exactly the way WordPerfect used to do it-- with codes for BOLD and ITALIC, etc. Display devices can render those however they choose.

But in these earliest days of wireless, when every byte counts, the only way to go is optimised custom pages-- it shouldn't even be HTML, because the tags are too fat.

And when the bandwidth improves enough to handle HTML, it will work best with the same basic HTML that lynx likes. CSS just never solves any real problem along this evolutionary path!

I see this as just another top-down, ivory-tower W3C boondoggle, like XML. Those guys couldn't design a usable interface to save their lives-- look at how unreadable all their specs are! TimBL is the guy who thought up "aitch-tee-tee-pee-colon-slash-slash" for crying out loud...

Um, will you at least put the "cellphone section" first, then... with an automatic cutoff that keeps the rest from flooding my bandwidth? ;^/

The theory here was supposed to be that you have exactly one section, that's just rendered differently for each device. As a theory that's very elegant, but as an interface in the real world it's turning out, over and over, to be a hollow dream.

McCluhan taught us in the sixties that the medium is the message-- you can't put the message in one file and the 'styling' in another. This problem with mobile devices and bandwidth is just the tip of the iceberg for CSS's fundamental wrongheadedness, imho.

The right longterm solution, I've been arguing forever, is to embed the document's styles in exactly the way WordPerfect used to do it-- with codes for BOLD and ITALIC, etc. Display devices can render those however they choose.

But in these earliest days of wireless, when every byte counts, the only way to go is optimised custom pages-- it shouldn't even be HTML, because the tags are too fat.

And when the bandwidth improves enough to handle HTML, it will work best with the same basic HTML that lynx likes. CSS just never solves any real problem along this evolutionary path!

I see this as just another top-down, ivory-tower W3C boondoggle, like XML. Those guys couldn't design a usable interface to save their lives-- look at how unreadable all their specs are! TimBL is the guy who thought up "aitch-tee-tee-pee-colon-slash-slash" for crying out loud...

It's based on a book published by G Spencer Brown, the mathematical logician (Laws of Form).

Simson Garfinkel wrote an eye-opening backgrounder that explores this question. A quote:

Cargill says he thinks companies have stopped sending people to meetings because they realize that the General Assembly's Advisory Council Committee merely rubber-stamps what Berners-Lee wants to do.

It's just basic design common-sense that you don't create top-down 'standards' groups who dictate the rules of human factors without ever testing the standards, and without having the slightest understanding of what human-factors is all about.

I have an old rant about this.

Let's see: Memepool and RobotWisdom spring to mind... Also ArsTechnica, Kuro5hin and KernelTraffic (which isn't only about the kernel; the Samba summaries are also very good).

Nuh-uhn.

Even Finnegans Wake has grammatically well-formed sentences underlying its puns.

I've been collecting ideas under the name DecentOS

Briefly: HyperCard + emacs + Netscape + Frontier + ResEdit (Mac)

...it all got started when Robot Wisdom picked up the link off my site... That's scary, the kind of media power Jorn has to put a meme into circulation.

Racter, alas, wasn't the breakthrough it was claimed to be. The sentences and word choices were done by computer, but the database that produced the sentence structure and word database (with heavily preselected word connections for "strangeness") was built by a man with a highly idiosyncratic style to begin with, and as in the Brutus.1 case, there was more useless output thrown away than we'll ever know. The public software probably wasn't capable of generating the stories in the book.

Read Jorn Barger's Racter FAQ.

It's probably going too far to call it a hoax, but there certainly was more hype than substance here.

I don't know about tech support, but I know that many men treat women quite different in topics of conversion where gender should not be an issue. A few years ago my e-mail name was "Helenize", and folks therefore assumed me female. I got replies that began "Listen here lady..." and were filled gender biased belittling remarks. (We'll ignore the dozens of pathetic pickup attempts.)

The accidental experience really opened my eyes.

Regards,

Tim

FWIW, "Helenize" is a word James Joyce used in Ulysses, as in "Helenize it."

I just recently started doublechecking those old numbers using FAST's 200M-page index... so far the rankings are still pretty comparable.

Well, I think they're good ...
Robot Wisdom and A&L Daily

One of the best and most varied weblogs I've come across, and updated multiple times daily. He pulls "headlines" from various newsy-fungible sites and follows it with a section of reviewed material, covering everything from anthropology, to pop music, to Linux, to web-design, using pull-quotes to highlight what he found interesting. He surfs Slashdot and points to good stuff here. I probably check out 1/2 of the links, and a good number of the sites end up on my permanent bookmark list. It's all informed by a philosophy grounded strongly in state-of-the-art AI concepts.

Robot Wisdom Weblog

These days I get most of my web reading from links on weblogs of one kind or another - I'd personally count Slashdot as a weblog. I read Ars Technica, Scripting News, Robot Wisdom and Tomalak's Realm, and I'm on Haddock which has several great links every day.

NTK is often listed as a weblog, innaccurately - it's a weekly mag. But it's completely brilliant. Subscribe.

Also, h2g2.com (The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy, online) has, amongst its many fab features, the ability for users to create their own weblogs on their homepages, with forums hanging off each entry. Worth a look, and I'm not just saying that 'cos I work there.

Let's get those attributions right!

Peter