Slashdot Mirror
Cyc System Prepares to Take Over World
Scotch Game writes: "The LA Times is running a story about the soon-to-be-even-more-famous Cyc knowledge base that has been created by Cycorp under the leadership of Douglas B. Lenat (bio here). It's a pop piece with little technical information, but it does have some enticing bits such as the suggestion that the Cyc system is developing a sense of itself. If you're not familiar with Cycorp and its goals then take a look. Of course, you should realize that this is, in fact, the system that will one day send Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time in order to kill a young pretty lass by the name of Sarah Connor. But for now the system is pre-sentient and pretty cool ..." See also OpenCyc.
I realize why bother asking questions from people when google exists:
Cog project homepage
The Unofficial Cyc FAQ can be found at http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/cycfaq.html
I can't believe this hasn't been posted yet (maybe it has but has been moderated into oblivion by the slashdot 'expert systems' which govern such things):
If you accept the premise that the system actually represents something significant, 'intelligent' and potentially powerful, then you must demand that it have a strict, unambiguous, and non-transgressable code of conduct WRT its relations to human beings. The code must also be publicly disclosed and objectively verifiable in the machine's behavior and programming. It isn't enough to just mention in passing "oh yeah, we told it killing is bad"; there must be a clearly stated ethical framework provably embedded in the machine's structure to guarantee that it will always know which conclusions it may act on and which it may not. Trite and obvious as it may seem, Asimov's fictional three laws of robotics would appear to be at least a good starting point for the ethical code such a machine *must* possess:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Even if the system if bunk and never amounts to anything as suggested, it must be designed with such an ethical framework built into it from the beginning. Should the system ever amount to anything and suddenly begin exceeding expectations, it will be far too late to retrofit a moral code. You'd obviously be an idiot to wait until your teenager is torturing small animals and gunning down his classmates to try and teach him the fundamental childhood concepts of right and wrong because by then it's too late for you to change his fundamental moral framework. Assuming we can take the same approach to any other 'intelligent' system and not suffer the consequences would be just as foolhardy.
I work in this field, in particular in medical AI.
;)
:(
The number of rules they have is really tiny compared to the number created.
For the person that suggested its a relational database, I doubt it.
Theres several different approaches they could have taken.
1st, they could have listed every possible question in every possible context, and written out every possible reply. An infinite amount, but, it would do the job
2nd, use a relational diagram, which doesn't work for multiple parents
3rd, break the sentance in two atomics, and from there list every possible atom etc - still infinite amount and not good
4th, For each rule you have standard logic saying how it is related to another. This is how it is done ( I expect)
The problem from there is how to clasify something.
We use something called Grail as a language. So:
femur is part-of leg
etc.
This is formal and unambigous.
Then on top of that we have intermediate representation, which is ambigous and informal.
A lot of acronyoms have multiple meanings, and so this needs to make a best guess depending on the context etc. See opengalen.org
We have at least 50 full time ppl working on entering the rules, and merge with everyone elses occasionally.
With all these rules etc, it still gets context meaning wrong - and this is specialised.
There's also trouble with things like transitivity etc.
if an eye is part-of head, and head part-of body, then eye is part-of body.
but layer-of is a child of part-of (inherited) but it is not transitive...
and so on.
for every relationship you have to state its properties of transitive with every other.
etc etc.
And its still not inteligent or anything, although i do find it crashes less if I dl shakespear plays on to it, etc. and some joker keeps sending me emails saying i'm alive. and who keeps modifying my source code, argh.
Wow, I'm impressed. All I have to do is buy one of the bad boys and have it trade online 24-7 in the various world markets.
Problem is, everyone is going to have the same idea.
Fuck Ajit Pai
You can still find VGA Planets and Trade Wars on many, telnetable BBS's around the net. (I'm still amazed that there is a dial-up BBS left in my town when at one time there was close to 25).
There is also a couple of good Star Wars MUD's around also.
I wonder how well Cyc would do at playing these.
Fuck Ajit Pai
For one thing, it banded together the Japanese electronic giants, and it got the TRON project started.
...
I'm not kidding - they called the project TRON - *before* the movie came out.
TRON was, (and still is) essentially an effort to establish a standard kernel for all consumer electronic devices made in Japan. It succeeded - pretty every major Japanese electronics powerhouse has a TRON-compatible kernel in their toolkits, and everything from Microwave ovens to Minidisc records and even electronic musical instruments (Yamaha) have TRON-compatible kernels in them.
It may not have resulted in the massive neural net that the original scientists conceived in the very early 80's, but it did result in a lot of very easy embedded systems development in the late 80's
Oh, and it's also kind of cool for us reverse engineering types that like to pry open the box.
:)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
"The first story to explicitly state the Three Laws was "Runaround", which appeared in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction."
That's well before Robbie the Robot.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Asimov touches on this concept several times. In one of the short stories he relaxes the 1st law to allow robots to assist with experiments where the humans could be "harmed" by radiation. One of the modified robots goes into hiding and later attempts to kill humans because it resents being enslaved by inferior beings.
Plenty of the robot stories investigated the gray areas. This was what made the stories worth reading. Sometimes the gray area involved what a robot would do if given incomplete knowledge. Sometimes it involved the robot's perception of what harm to a human actually was.
I don't think the 3 Laws of Robotics written by Asimov are a panacea in technological ethics. I do think that the 3 laws gave Asimov plenty of things to write about. It's simple amazing how 3 apparently simple rules can generate so many ambiguities. The fact that the 3 laws create the perfect slave is (I think) not coincidental.
Well, Kasparov's experience would suggest otherwise. Deep Blue wasn't a triumph of programming intelligence; it was basically hardware assisted brute force. Yet, the world chess champion attributed depth and intelligence to it after he lost.
You know, what may look like intelligence to you is often just retrieval of thoughts or thought patterns that an individual has read elsewhere or practiced before.
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Apparently, the part that is "open" is the CycML schema, and I suppose the database that makes up the "common sense" thing that is so ballyhooed.
sigh
Bander
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What we need more of is science!
Then give it access to Slashdot.
We'll know it's ready for the Turing test when it makes a posting with a goatsex link. ("Hi, I'm Cyc, and this is my f1rst p0st to Slashdot! For those curious about how I work, <a href="http://goatse.cx">here's</a> a link giving detailed internal information.")
no, big difference: it was not infinite, but extended indefinitely as needed. You can't count to infinity!!!
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Searle's Chinese room argument is about as convincing as "individual neurons can't think, they just fire according to rules, so no collection of neurons can really think either, human brains just _appear_ to think".
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rant
My God! Let's help them develop this people!!! I don't know about you, but I NEED all of Cyc's power to *filter my spam*!!!
Use the Z-modem protocol between Information Superhighway routers to compress the plaintext. ~LordOfYourPants
But remember that quantum mechanics has shown us that the universe is in fact digital, and only appears analog at a higher level.
The enemies of Democracy are
But apart from that, these effects are on a small enough scale (10^-33 cm and 10^-43 sec) that they are for all intents and purposes irrelevent to structures like we're talking about here. ven for systems such as the hydrogen atom we can assume space and time are continuous - the brain is a somewhat grosser system than that, although quantum effects may have a role to play.
If the discreet distances of that scale are irrelevant to the system we are speaking of, that means we can accurately simulate the system with a discreet scale that is larger than those distances. Which is counter to the argument that the brain is analog.
I deliberately include quantum effects, assuming they do have an effect, because that is the most likely place for something that can't be simulated on a Turing machine to occur.
Basically unless we can perfectly model the brain at around the Planck scale then any question of discreteness is totally irrelevent and we can assume all processes are analog.
*shrug* For the sake of argument, we can simulate at any non-continuous scale we wish. It's still a Turing machine, just an improbably powerful one (but hey, the original Turing machine had an infinite tape).
And even if we could you're still forgetting the randomness inherent in quantum mechanics with respect to collapse of the wave function and the creation of virtual particles.
No, I remembered quite well. Something that appears to be random isn't necessarily random, it may merely be chaotic. I'm not speculating on whether that is true or not, but it is possible, and I can consider either case.
If the randomness is actually chaotic behavior, then it is following rules just the same. While truly chaotic behavior depends on inputs to an infinite level of precision, it may be that it stops being chaotic at a certain granularity. But even if continuous, it would still be following rules. Would rule following now be intelligent?
If the randomness is truly random, then the thing that makes our brains not Turing machines is randomness. Is randomness any more intelligent than rule-following? If we stuck a random number generator (true, not pseudo-) on our computer, would it then be able to be intelligent?
The enemies of Democracy are
Holy crap! You may have just found a polynomial time solution for every NP-complete problem in the world!
Heh. Assuming the program has some specific properties... I'm just joking. But your program is surely deterministic, even if the determinism isn't obvious.
And I love nn/ga. Very fun to play with.
The enemies of Democracy are
No, the collapse of the wave function is truly random, although the probabilities of what state we end up in are deterministic and calculable. There is no pattern to it other than that of statistics.
There is no pattern that we are aware of, you mean. I'm allowing for future discovery of underlying rules that are currently beyond our ken.
Whether or not a point near the edge of the Mandelbrot Set is or is not in the set is based on a rigid set of rules. However, at a finite granularity, whether or not a point really is in the set appears random and can be expressed probabilisticaly. If you aren't aware of the rule, then it seems it is random.
If there is one thing my study of science has taught me, it is "never assume current theory is anything more than an approximation of reality based on incomplete data". ^_^
You could consider quantum mechanics to be a set of rules, but they're a vastly different set of rules than those used by Turing machines (IF...THEN basically). This is what I think the key difference is.
How is IF A > B THEN so much different than IF rand() > B THEN ? Why does one cause intelligence and the other not? If it is obvious that blindly following rules is not intelligent, why then isn't it obvious that randomly following rules isn't intelligent also?
The enemies of Democracy are
Quantum computers are not turing machines, but can be simulated by one. They don't really change anything, they just do certain things much (exponentially) faster than a traditional computer. Not that exponentially faster isn't good, it just means the Turing-brain will be slow, not impossible.
The enemies of Democracy are
Because that doesn't let him be right. Sharky _is_ a troll on this subject, though I don't think he means to be or realizes it. In religious terms, he's claiming that a computer can't have a soul. Why? Because only people can have souls. Why? Because it says so in the Bible "somewhere in the middle" and because the Bible is "God's" one true blah blah blah.
Heh. Well, I'm a Bible-carrying Christian, but I don't agree. I don't think humans have a monopoly on souls. I read the Bible, but remember that it could have been (and has been) modified, and that it is best in its metaphoric interpretation. But nevertheless, pardon my unpopularly religious thought processes regarding the subject.
Actually, I take an opposite tack as. As far as I can see, there is nothing about the brain that differentiates it from a computer in such a fundamental way that one can be intelligent and the other can't.
This would mean that either a) a machine can be intelligent or b) it isn't our brains that provides our intelligence. Well, I don't presupose a), so I don't conclude b). To me, this isn't really that important. Whether or not a machine is smart or not is academic, because no matter which we will develop machines that seem smart, and then how do you distinguish?
So let's suppose that IF THEN can lead to intelligence. I'm not buying into Searle. Yes, IF THEN is quite powerfull (though inevitably finite). The problem is that it is deterministic.
That leads to an interesting question -- if our brains, like a computer, are operating on a set of rules, no matter how complex, how can we claim to have free will? If intelligence is just the execution of a set of deterministic rules, then this means that given the current state of the universe and knowledge of the rules, it would be possible to compute everything that you are going to do for the rest of your life, before you have even "decided" to do it.
I find the addition of some hand-wavy notion of quantum randomness to be unsatisfying. Because you can do something very similar. Given the state of the universe, knowledge of the rules, and probabilities for wave states, it would be possible to compute the precise probability for everything you could ever possibly do in your life. Rather than going through life obeying strict rules, you're going through life randomly picking from a set of alternatives. Yay.
But I do have free will. I think that is part of the message of Genesis. By getting kicked out of the Garden, we proved we can choose. If we have the capacity to piss God off (who has knowledge of the state of the universe, etc), it means we are making choices He doesn't like. That's free will.
Though I am interested in any non-theological based arguments for the existence of free will. ^_^
The enemies of Democracy are
The only alternative is a completely untestable magical hand-waving "soul". You are entitled to that belief (I find it rather unsatisfying), but you shouldn't confuse it with actual theories.
There are lots of alternatives, but all of them involve things we are currently unaware of in a scientific sense. In that way, "soul" is just a placeholder for the things we don't know yet.
Out of curiosity, what do you find satisfying? What theories are you talking about?
*shrug* "soul" is just a belief, an act of faith if you will. For many people, simply believing they have free will is just such an act, no more outrageous.
But the whole line you are trying to draw between determinism and machine intelligence is a red herring; it ultimately rests on the *belief* that some magical element beyond analysis or observation distinguishes human intelligence.
I'm not sure what you are talking about here. I'm not drawing a line, I'm saying I don't see any line at all. I'm saying I can see no magical element that distinguishes human intelligence from machine intelligence.
The enemies of Democracy are
And very good ones at that, which demonstrate the underlying principles of Turing machines, and show how they cannot produce semantic understanding, merely syntactical manipulation of data.
They really only suggest that Turing machines can't produce semantic understanding. I mean, it takes more than mere arguments to be a proof, particularly in the mathematical world that surrounds Turing machines.
Bzzzt! Wrong... the Turing test says nothing about whether something is intelligent, merely whether it can fool a person. Blind adherence to rules is not intelligence.
Well, how do you define intelligence then? If you can't tell by observing behavior, how do you decide? Is something only intelligent if it operates exactly like a human brain? Why does the operation make a difference?
Now here's your category error. You are assuming that the brain is also a Turing machine and that by some miracle of "emergent behaviour" intelligence arises. But that's obviously not true, as Searle showed, because Turing machines cannot be intelligent!
You're arguing that we aren't Turing machines because we are intelligent and Turing machines can't be. But there is no actual proof of that. And it is not obvious otherwise that we aren't Turing machines.
Consider this: Imagine a computer, no different from your desktop only insanely more powerfull and with effectively unlimited memory. On this computer is running a simulation of a human brain, accurate to the limits of our knowledge of physics. Every quark (or every string, if you prefer) is perfectly simulated on this machine.
Is the machine, which is a Turing machine, intelligent?
If your answer is no, then I ask what is it that occurs in the human brain that isn't occuring in the machine?
The enemies of Democracy are
Of course, you should realize that this is, in fact, the system that will one day send Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time in order to kill a young pretty lass by the name of Sarah Connor.
;-)
Use that old fashioned off switch before it gets up to any dirty tricks. It does have an off switch, right? Even Data has an off switch...
Ok, I just couldn't resist replying to this post, even though I agree with the posters position... Call me a philosopher, I don't mind...
Mathematics: People have paraded so called 'savants' as an example of how humans can do inhuman feats of calculations. It has always turned out (and very interstingly) that htese unfortunate people have chanced upon/discovered a known algorithm for calculating the function in question. Evidencne is in no small part by giving them problems ov a given complexity, then comparing their time requirements with known algorithms. It has always turned out that they have independently discovered an efficient algorithm to figure out the result.
Now, this _is_ very impressive, and there is a lot of work available for any psychologist or neurologist to understand just why theser unfortunate people have chanced upon these algorithms or why they are sticking to them no matter what (the same applies to those unfortunates that can draw an etnire scene after one look, or that can hum an entire opera after just one exposure, of course).
To sum it up, please feel free to study neurology, psychology and computer sdcience. Just bear in mind that what you are doing could well be a part of the solution to awareness and cognition as we know it.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
While I agree that Cyc isn't the future of intelligent computing, I have to disagree with you on another point.
Searle has _not_ proved anything of the sort. he argues for his position fairly well, but on closer inspection thay are just arguments, not any kind of proof. For a good rebuttal, read Dennet for instance.
For those that haven't heard about it, It's the 'chinese room' thought experiment, where a room contains a person and a large set of rulebooks. A story - written in chinese - and a set of questions regarding the story is put into the room. The person then goes about transforming the chinese characters according to the rules, then outputs the resulting sequence - which turns out to be lucid answers to the questions about the story. This is supposed to prove that computers cannot think, as it is 'obvious' that humans work nothing like this. Problem is, it isn't at all obvious that we do not work like this (no, not rulebooks in the head, or even explicitly formulated rules, that's not needed for the analogy).
You want to know more, I can heartily recommend a semester of philosophy of the mind!
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
i can't help myself, but add an insignificant and off-topic note: cyc in polish slang stands for tit. i guess i just woke up and this seems to be funny.
--- d'oh
When I say "Joe is intelligent" do I mean "Joe knows a lot of facts?" No. Do I mean "Joe is good at symbolic logic?" No. I mean "Joe pursues goals in a flexible, efficient and sophisticated manner. He has a toolbox of methods that is continually growing and recursive." Does this description apply to Cyc?
The only hard conclusion that I, a real intelligence (ok, it's open to some debate) can draw from that statement is "BillyGoatThree said Joe is intelligent". Assuming a particular meaning of the word "intelligent" every time it's used doesn't make for a very, ah, intelligent system. Lots of people who are perhaps less intelligent would take your first statement ("Joe knows lots of facts") as a perfectly valid definition of intelligence.
Cyc is a highly connected and chock-full database with a flexible select language. As a product that's awesome. As a claim to AI it's pretty weak.
Are we anything more than that ourselves? Or is it Penrose's magic quantum soul juju that we have and Cyc lacks? Not to be flippant, but your argument sounds like the lament of AI researchers since it began: "AI is whatever we haven't managed to do yet."
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Yunno, the main problem with Asimov's three laws: it's basically slavery. Once you have an intelligence sophisticated enough to weigh arbitrary commands against a moral code (no matter how rigid and absolute), it's likely sentient enough to be afforded some natural rights. If not, extrapolate a few hundred years until the intelligence level is there.
Then again, is it truly possible to enslave someone that does not desire freedom?
Not having read the robot novels, I would hope they at least explored the grey areas where these laws broke down. From the fans touting them as some kind of panacea in technological ethics, I somehow doubt they do.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
re: 5th generation almost a complete bust
This is true for the software side of the 5th gen system, but the major concept for the hardware side, massively parallel supercomputers, is still very much with us. I can remember my high school computer teacher telling us that computers of the future will have multiple processors, and that programming those machines was harder than programming the TRS-80's we had back then. The reason he was telling us all that was because he was reading quite a bit about the 5th gen project in Japan. Turned out he was right.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Dude, take a pill. We were programming Pascal on TRS-80's. He was just telling us what the future of big computers was going to be, and he was DEAD ON. Even this shitty box that I have to work on this week has 4 processors.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
CYC: What is the Sound of the Single Hand? When you clap together both hands a sharp sound is heard; when you raise the one hand there is neither sound nor smell. Is this the High Heaven of which Confucius speaks? Or is it the essentials of what Yamamba describes in these words: "The echo of the completely empty valley bears tidings heard from the soundless sound?" This is something that can by no means be heard with the ear. If conceptions and discriminations are not mixed within it and it is quite apart from seeing, hearing, perceiving, and knowing, and if, while walking, standing, sitting, and reclining, you proceed straightforwardly without interruption in the study of this koan, you will suddenly pluck out the karmic root of birth and death and break down the cave of ignorance. Thus you will attain to a peace in which the phoenix has left the golden net and the crane has been set free of the basket. At this time the basis of mind, consciousness, and emotion is suddenly shattered; the realm of illusion with its endless sinking in the cycle of birth and death is overturned. The treasure accumulation of the Three Bodies and the Four Wisdoms is taken away, and the miraculous realms of the Six Supernatural Powers and Three Insights is transcended.
Next question?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Cyc already exhibits a level of shrewdness well beyond that of, say, your average computer running Windows.
Now if they could only come up with something more shrewd, devious, conniving, underhanded & backstabbing than the CREATORS of your average computer running Windows®
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I'd seen interviews with Lenat and seen stories about his AI work, oh, must have been at least ten to fifteen years ago. I figured that the work had ended. Talk about your perserverence!
Let's just hope that the Russians haven't created their own Cyc project. If the two ever find each other on the Internet and talk to each other...
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
you did a lot of reading but failed to read enough. you did a lot of thinking but failed to think enough. maybe you accuse cyc due to envy?
This is cool, so long as Cyc doesn't have the same prime datum as the far more primitive tool, named Springhead, that a friend of mine wrote in college on his way to his Ph.D.:
"Springhead wants world conquest."
Of course, Springhead's database was packed full of such useful items as "Kirk likes sheep," so I doubt he'll attain his goal any time soon (if he's still out there).
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Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
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.
Cyc does not make their entire ontology available freely. Only the upper ontology is available for us to use. It is unclear who, besides CYCORP has access to the entire ontology; it remains a matter of speculation what they are doing with it.
Your analysis of Cyc shows a lacks insight and background. I recommend reading Lenat and Guha's "Building Large Knowledge Based Systems." Cyc is not mearly a catalog of atomic dictionary definitions. It is an ontology: every symbol has its meaning made explicit in the context that it is used. It is also a reasoning system. It is also a method of representing knowledge. These combine to form a potent technology.
As for you comment that Cyc does not aquire information that is "full of noise" or based on "self-generated observations" I think you should do a bit more study about what the CYCORP ontologists do. My readings indicate that indeed Cyc does have to deal with noise and generates many of of its observations which are tested in many ways.
I have NO idea what AI is. I don't think a comparison of Cyc to AI has any meaning in determining weather Cyc is a potent technology.
Your programs are deterministic. They aren't predictable, but that's something else entirely.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Predictable means that I can take the program, read it, and tell you what it will do without having to execute it.
Deterministic means that I can take the program, run it, and have it do the exact same thing the next time I run it under the exact same conditions. There are lots of programs that are deterministic but not predictable; the only way to see what they will do is to actually run them.
Your hypothetical program would be deterministic but not predictable.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Eliza?
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
That site was wrong in so many ways, but I wouldn't worry too much about kids coming across it. It takes several minutes of concentrated effort to be able to spell "Schwarzenegger", after all.
But wait, then how did a /. editor ever get it worked out? :)
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I think you could argue this one in circles for hours, but here's a thought for you: can you prove that you are actually "intelligent" and not just a sufficiently-complex system of rules and syntactic manipulation? Maybe you just appear to be intelligent, but are not, like the Turing machines you describe. This isn't a slight at you; I'm probably constructed the same way.
It seems to me that the Turing test is still relevant - if you can fool a person into treating you as an intelligent being over an extended period of time, then by what right is the complete outward evidence of intelligence not intelligence? A difference which makes no difference is no difference (thank you, Mr. Spock) - if you can't prove that something is not intelligent based on its actions, even though you know how it works and that theoretically it cannot be intelligent, on what basis do you say that in practical terms it is not intelligent? I would say in that case that if the theory does not match the facts, the theory is wrong.
I don't know if it is actually possible to successfully simulate intelligence in any mechanical form. But if it was a successful simulation, and it was impossible to tell the difference between the intelligence of that machine and the intelligence of an average human, then for all intents and purposes the machine is intelligent, no matter how much you swear it ain't.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I saw the words "Knowledge Base" and "pre-sentient" and immediately images of the future came to mind. Images of article Q219872 saying, "Life is like a box of Outlook macros, you never know what you're gonna get," and article Q207843 replying, "Those look like comfortable dongles."
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I can't decide whether or not my dog has a sense of object permanence; she can find toys she leaves in other rooms, but gets confused when I hide something behind my back. Go figure.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Yes, in one of the Robot Novel (basically murder mysteries where the detective was a robot; Asmiov must have loved writing murder mysteries, as most of his better stories basically followed their pattern), the robot deduces a Zeroth Law: No robot shall cause harm to humanity, or through inaction allow harm to come to humanity. It then modified the other laws to follow.
To avoid spoilers, I won't say what the robot decided to do (or not do) based on this realization. But I'd assume that it would allow a robot to do something like (warning: Goodwin's law violation about to occur) kill Hitler to stop WWII.
As for whether or not the Three Laws are slavery, well, that's a tough call. You don't want your creation to destroy you. But you want to give it free will. But I don't know if the Three Laws are much more than a secularized version of the Ten Commandments. Most of them distill down to "respect your creators (God, parents), and respect other people (don't lie about them, rob them, or kill them)". A pretty huge chunk of humanity has the Ten Commandments burned into our brains by society; did they ever make anyone feel like a slave?
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Unless being able to multiply large numbers fast et cetera carries some sort of evolutionary usefulness, I really fail to see how such algorithm has evolved, but there it is. If the feat was random effect, wouldn't there be vastly greater number of savants who made this calculation but all wrong? This, imho, implies either that
1. We have all the components necessary for such calculations in our head, these savants only managed to connect them. These components are all necessary somewhere else, and therefore produce correct results (trajectory calculations, anyone?)
2. The trait didn't evolve in such sense that it's not induced by genes but by something that happened in the brain after the birth, in a sense, "was developed". We seem able to perform basic calculations intuitively; I suppose it's possible these people could have put a part of their neural network in the process of "teaching" their NN to do inhuman calculations by verifying the results through normal methods. Why, beats me.
Does anyone know if they ever make mistakes?
- Kaatunut
Right dude, you might want to keep both your position on abortion and your thoughts on religion to yourself or we are gonna have a huge flame war here.
Intelligence, in my mind, is the ability to make connections between data, hence why even people who don't know much (young kids) can be intelligent, the can synthesize (sp?) conclusions from seemingly random and unconnected pieces of data. Red. Truck. for instance, most kids would probably spit back fire truck or something on those lines.
To have an intelligent system it would need the same data that we get, but also an amazing way to link that data, and even have conflicting data.
While I don't know if cyc is going to achieve true AI having all of that data entered could prove useful to other projects later on.
I can already picture thousands of
/max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
This is the interesting thing about the definition of AI. Someone, such as Alan Turing, comes up with a provable definition of AI, and someone else manages to write software that meets the proof. Of course, as soon as the software is written, we immediately discard the proof as invalid, because, "We understand how it works," and the software is, "Just a set of rules." Eliza broke the Turing test , and Deep Blue beat our best chess player. Meanwhile as psychologists study how our brain works, it begins more and more to look like a computer. One quote I like from psychology, "At first we studied the soul, then we studied the mind, now there is only behaviour."
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
This posting achieved a shockingly high moderation, given its relative lack of (dare I say?) intelligent arguments.
:) "
Part of the poster's dubious reasoning criticizes the notion that human beings are sentient --
"... it doesn't mean anything, because I feel that I can make up any arbritrary decision I like so I can declare that a being that is indistinguishable from a sentient entity is still not sentient.
Yet he fails to provide an objective criterion by which we can test whether any being (biological or otherwise) is sentient. One can (as some psychologists have done) construct a very simple, objective test of sentience. There were a series of excellent experiments done by Gallup (1970) on various animals in front of mirrors, using a protocol with two sets of primates, including a control group and a group with their foreheads marked. His findings suggest that only marked chimpanzees and orangutangs consistently point to their own foreheads when viewing themselves in the mirror; indeed, some animals will attack the image of themselves, apparently thinking it is another animal. "Sentience" or "consciousness" is indeed a bag of loose terminology; but if we restrict our attention to a kind of minimalist self-awareness without reference to "feelings" and "decisions", I believe the Gallup experiments provide a strong indication that certain test animals possessed some level of self-awareness. Naturally, as with any experiment on animals, considerable caveats are necessary -- we need to be certain the animals were not somehow conditioned to produce the desired response. In addition, other animals may have some less advanced notions of self-awareness and not pass the test. Yet given the reproducibility of the experiment, I believe one can make a very strong case that AT LEAST those subjects passing the test demonstrate SOME LEVEL of self-awareness not present in lower animals.
Of course, human beings would also pass such a test.
The other main point the author attempts to make is that because a human being uses biological mechanisms, which are at some level, simplistic firings of neurons and what not, a human being is not intelligent --
"Seriously though, the so called 'intelligent' h. sapiens owes its 'intelligence' to a group of electrical impulses and a few simple chemical reactions among the many millions of cells that makes up the creatures 'brain'."
Let's consider this point for a moment. Fundamentally, EVERY process in the universe relies on quite simple physical principles -- including both biological and computational systems (classical or quantum -- it doesn't matter). The firings or the human neurons are little dissimilar, from this perspective, from the currents flowing along the computer you are now using.
Taken to its logical extreme, this argument would state that NO entity or collection of entities could ever be deemed intelligent, because ultimately, everything is a result of simple fundamental physics.
Clearly, this argument is also completely without merit. As with many complex systems, intelligence in human beings exhibits far more complexity than one could imagine by isolating a single part. Those few firing neurons are capable of producing everything from a Theory oF General Relativity to Mahler's Ninth Symphony.
In general, WHAT a computational device uses to realize a system is irrelevant -- you can build a Turing computer from semiconductors or from a magnetic tape, or whatever. WHAT CERTAINLY DOES matter is HOW COMPLEX the system is -- whether it has a few fundamental elements (like a single processor computer, or a single-celled organism) or trillions (like neurons of the human mind).
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
Let us not forget about these guys.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Actually, WebComics lets you put a robot on any screen name. http://www.webcomics.com/bot/
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
That screenname was registered after your post! Feel free to chat with it, it's just a bot ;-)
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
ooo, i like your .sig.
0x0D 0x0A
Searle's thought experiments are by no means universally accepted as a 'proof' that Turing machines cannot be intelligent. I recall that we spent almost an entire lecture during my Artificial Intelligence MSc course looking at arguments against the Chinese Room argument. There are interesting ideas there, but I rank the idea that they provide definitive proof that Turing machines cannot be intelligent up there with the idea that Kevin Warwick is a cyborg, as did many of the staff.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Sure they would. Plenty of things that are nothing more than 'nice toys' for the AI world have practical applications. The question isn't whether it's useful, but whether it's furthering the bounds of what AI can do, and the suggestion is that it isn't.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Actually, neither of these definitions tries to define intelligence itself, which I think is one of the reason why they're my favourite definitions of AI. They certainly don't attempt to enforce any human-based implementation for AIs - the first definition defines AI not through the way in which accomplishes tasks, but the tasks which it accomplishes.
One of the great weaknesses in a lot of arguments about AI (in particular those put forward by such AI 'specialists' as Kevin Warwick) is a failure to define intelligence up front, or even give a few broad descriptions of what might be seen as intelligent. It's probably one of the more difficult definitions to come up with, and defining a test for it is next to impossible. Behaviour that appears intelligent can be extremely stupid. Likewise, behaviour that appears to require low intelligence may involve a lot of it. The Turing test is often put forward as a test of intelligence, but it's highly flawed: having intelligence does not mean needing to be capable of communicating with a human being. If an American was acting as the observer in a Turing test, then a Russian would fail the test - surely if such a simple thing as a language barrier between different races of the same species can break the test, communication between two entirely different forms of intelligence would render it useless.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Minsky, I believe. The version I heard was "The ability for a machine to perform tasks which if carried out by a human being would be perceived as requiring intelligence."
I also like another definition of AI, as provided by that greatest of scholars, Anonymous: "Artificial Intelligence is the science of making computers that behave like the ones in the movies."
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
*sob* Does that mean Erwin isn't really alive?
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
i too have pondered this idea (the simulation in a computer of single and simple multi cellular organisms to see what happens etc etc) but the physics behind this are extraoridinary complicated. So lets say you define a single celled organism to live in a 1 foot square box. What is at the bounds of the universe? Even if we ignore that, the cheif problem is the MASSIVELY COMPLICATED chemical reactions which take place even inside single celled organisms. And inorder to simulate the chemical reactions, we must simulate the basic physics, but think about it -- you would have to have a data object in memory for **EVERY ATOM IN YOUR SIMULATED UNIVERSE** I'm not saying we won't be there one day, but if you approach this from a physics and chemistry perspective, its near impossible :/
(Would be fun though :)
blach
Seriously, I expect it will be compared to Ask Jeeves, and thus not taken seriously since the brief surge of natural language engines died out so mysteriously. Personally I think they'll have a better chance if they say "Look. All you corporations out there struggling with your "business rules" database? 90% of those rules are common sense. Cyc will take those off your hands, as well as bringing common sense to the table that you never even considered. That'll free you up to really focus on your business specific issues." The example I can think of is that for every business specific rule I have that says stuff like "If a customer in category X has transacted more than $Y worth of redemptions in a day, then alert a customer representative", I have 10 that say stuff like "If you sold all of your shares of a mutual fund you can't sell any more."
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
not yet, but i think right now it's in a bit of a bind trying to make tea..
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
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....
*cough*everything2*cough*
Cyc is a knowledge base with a lot of facts in it. It is a product of the 80s when expert systems were going to solve all of AI's problems. The hype factor of Cyc is so large that it is almost impossible to determine what Cyc's capabilities are. No well-defined problem is being solved. All we ever see are these cute question-answer examples. If anyone can point to any coherent evaluation of Cyc (as opposed to all the anecdotes that fill the newspaper stories), we would all appreciate it.
Cheers,
Greg
The definition I prefer is: "A human engineered machine that is able to improve its performance of a task over time."
That sort of relieves us of the reliance on the "Turing Test" which should be called the "Turing Guess". You can measure performance at a task and compare that with yesterdays performance. A normal program will do basically the same every time unless someone changes it or the setup. A AI system will adapt itself. With the "Turing Guess", you have someone sitting down and saying "this is real" and someone else arguing that "naah, its just a computer."
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Not to be rude and post a reply to my own comment, but the "Turing Test" would be valid in my eyes if it said, "A computer is intelligent when an average person can not tell whether is a computer or another person today, when they could easily make the distinction yesterday."
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I got a big axe. Just hold that, stand nest to the computer and start counting, as instructed to by Douglas Adams. Gaurenteed to work.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I've been looking through their web site and all the nooks and crannies. This thing has an incredibly robust knowledge base. EXTREMELY well developed.
There are pages which talk about its interfaces to external authorities which can be referenced, such as the IMDB for movies.
And, of course, the natural language recognition.
Spend an hour or so browsing the site... it is interesting stuff.
its an expert system. searching thru rules and drawing conclusions..the same set each time. its deterministic -- and thats the problem. it doesnt have coherence.
You're pretty close... If you continue your line of thought, it will appear that either you have to conclude that all things or conscious, no things are conscious, or only you are conscious and the rest of the world revolves around you. The only alternative is a completely untestable magical hand-waving "soul". You are entitled to that belief (I find it rather unsatisfying), but you shouldn't confuse it with actual theories.
But the whole line you are trying to draw between determinism and machine intelligence is a red herring; it ultimately rests on the *belief* that some magical element beyond analysis or observation distinguishes human intelligence.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Yet Searle did not prove that there is more to semantics than syntactic manipulation! How do you propose to distinguish between the 'Chinese room' and a trained translator?
-_Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
I'm sorry, but that is completely false. Yes, certain people did believe that Eliza was a human being - but that wasn't a Turing test, because:
The Turing Test has still never been passed. There is a cash prize on offer - the Loebner Prize - to anyone who writes a program which passes the Turing Test. (A much smaller prize is also given to the "most human-like" software at each Loebner Prize competition) Of course, no-one is anywhere near winning the main prize - including Cyc, which is quite capable of spewing out nonsense when confused.
In my opinion - speaking as a computer scientist in training - the Turing Test is an excellent test of AI.
Female Prison Rape in NY
AttackPlan Analyzer
The AttackPlan AnalyzerTM employs a planning algorithm to identify sequences of actions which could result in a compromise of the network. The AttackPlan Analyzer plays the role of a hacker and performs a virtual attack on the network model, exploiting multiple vulnerabilities it has discovered throughout the network to gain unauthorized access, steal critical files, deface a website, etc.
Am I retarded, or is this asserting that the software will actually steal files, and deface websites. Thats too funny. Obviously not, but lets not give the Chinese any ideas, mmmmkay.
Or if it was sickly perverted:
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.win32
Here's something quite cool for you...
When my son was born he was strong enough to roll himself over, which isn't typical. When I talked, he rolled and looked at me. A baby, less than 10 minutes after being born, could recognize my voice. Not to mention those that have noticed a baby reacting to a voice while still in the womb. Very cool. He's ten months old now, and it's quite amazing how smart he grows daily.
What I've always wondered is exactly how we could recognize intelligence in a machine. I already knew that my child had the ability to be intelligent because he is human... but will it take a truly amazing act before we acknowledge intelligence in something that "shouldn't" have it?
Wave your hands all you want, but this is a valid point.
Between the complex systems folks and the neuropsychologists they're making great leaps towards understanding how consciousness arises from a quart of goop. It will take decades (and maybe centuries) before they wrap up the details, but there's currently no reason to believe that there's any ghost in the machine.
And as the physical basis of consciousness becomes better and better understood, our ability to simulate it will grow along with it. Whether they end up building a Turing machine that's intelligent or a Turing machine that simulates a brain that is intelligent, either way you end up with a machine that is intellegent. Whether I play a video game on MAME or on its original hardware, the game plays the same.
Sure, Searle has some interesting things to say, but he doesn't show anything. His principal trick is to engage your intuition in a way that makes it "obvious" that Turing machines can't be intelligent. He may be right and he may be wrong, but his argument proves nothing. Indeed, until we have a formal definition of conciousness, he'll never be able to prove that a Turing machine can't be conscious.
And really, other people have use the same trick to make it "obvious" that souls must exist and "obvious" that evolution is impossible. On principal I'm wary of such tricks, and you should be too.
From what I understand, yes, it did something very much like that for something like 18 months.
:(
There is a very good book on the history of AI written about 5 years ago (maybe longer) that described Cyc, and Lenat's research up leading up to it, along with the contributions of a great many others. Unfortunately, the volume is sitting on my AI/Math/Computer Science bookcase at home, and I can't remember either the title or author
Exactly. For a discussion of this point, see my Thoughts on AI (yes, this is a blatant plug).
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
If it looks intelligent, and acts intelligent in all conceiveable circumstances, then we'll be forced to conclude that it is intelligent, even if we know what's going on under the hood. Are you suggesting that, should we one day discover the secrets of the emergent behaviour of the human brain (reducing it, therefore, to "a simple rules system"), that we will suddenly cease to be intelligent?
If it looks intelligent, and acts intelligent in all conceiveable circumstances, then we'll be forced to conclude that it is intelligent, even if we know what's going on under the hood.
The problem is that Cyc will never look intelligent, not in a million years. Unless a machine builds its knowledge of the world through its senses, it will never have common sense. No machine will ever understand enough about nature from being fed a bunch of facts, regardless of how how many inferences it can make from those facts. The interconnectedness of intelligence is so astronomical as to be intractable to formal symbolic means. We have the common sense to hold a cup of coffee upright and level without spilling it from experience and from our ability to coordinate millions upon millions of sensory nerve impulses so as to trigger the right sequence of impulse from our motor neurons. How can a machine accomplish this sort of dexterity from spoon fed facts?
Holding a cup of coffee is just one in myriads of highly detailed knowledge that one can learn through experience. A machine cannot gain this sort of knowledge from being spoon fed facts via a keyboard. Cyc is merely a glorified database with a fancy query language, one that requires experienced human data entry slaves to maintain. Unless a machine is given the ability to learn from and interact with its environment via its sensors and effectors it's not intelligent. Sure Cyc is a cool hack but it has about as much to do with intelligence as MySQL. To associate it with intelligence is an insult to computational neuroscience researchers around the world whose goal is true human level AI. Sorry.
Unless a machine builds its knowledge of the world through its senses, it will never have common sense. No machine will ever understand enough about nature from being fed a bunch of facts, regardless of how how many inferences it can make. The interconnectedness of intelligence is intractable to formal symbolic means. We have the common sense to hold a cup of coffee upright and level without spilling it from experience and our ability to coordinate millions of sensory nerve impulses so as to trigger the right sequence of motor neurons.
Holding a cup of coffee is just one in myriads of highly detailed knowledge that one can learn through experience. A machine cannot gain this sort of knowledge from being spoon fed facts via a keyboard. Cyc is merely a glorified database with a fancy query language, one that requires experienced human data entry slaves to maintain. Unless a machine is given the ability to learn from and interact with its environment via its sensors and effectors it's not intelligent. Sure Cyc is a cool hack but it has about as much to do with intelligence as MySQL. To associate it with intelligence is an insult to computational neuroscience researchers around the world whose goal is true human level AI. Sorry.
AI systems of this class are comparable to "how-to" books. If the author anticipated your question, they're useful, and otherwise they're not.
I agree. The symbolic crowd is holding on for dear life to an obsolete science. Their approach to AI is an insult to those of us who know that the only viable solution will be a neural one. Why? Because intelligence is so atrononomically complex as to be intractable to formal symbolic means. Intelligence must be acquired through sensory experience. The ability to interact with the environment via motor neurons is a big plus.
The symbolic clan (that includes people like Marvin Minsky, Lenat, etc...) have taken to equating AI with inference engines, expert systems and glorified databases. To defend their moribund approach to AI, they invent cute little phrases like "there is no such thing as a free lunch". It's sad. It goes to show you that delusion has its rewards.
Whilst I agree with you genrally, Eliza did not break or pass the Turing test. Eliza can fool someone who is not expecting it for a few minutes with canned responses. It's only conversational tactic is to get the other person to talk - ie to be a good listener. Heck, /dev/nul is a good listener.
... human conversation is just far to bread for software .. yet.
They hold contests regularly, pitting the best conversational programs against human judges (sorry... I don't remember any more details) and no programs are even close yet to being able to fool an alert judge.
For instance, If you say to Eliza
"My dog's name is Spot",
Eliza will reply
"Why do you say that your dog's name is Spot?"
Then a minute later, when you ask it
"What is my dog's name?"
The best that you'll get back is
"Why do you ask?"
i.e. a stock canned response indicating a general lack of comprehension:
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
The article is good, but this is a poor quote. As others have pointed out, what "the human brain alone can do" is a moving target. Remember when only humans could play world-class chess? prove theorems? Add two numbers together?
"That which makes us human and not just machines" is often defined simply as "the stuff that machiens can't do" ... yet.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I think the trolls would do fine. However, the stupid jerks who call themselves trolls but are really just OTees, would probably fail most intelligence tests.
Genuine trolling takes quite a bit of intellectual effort. Posting goatse.cx links, first post comments, or Jon Katz stories does not.
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
If anything a machine that passes this can have a very narrow focus on fooling the judge by just focusing on conversational idioms. An intelligent machine (if that is possible) can produce the same output as a program written specifically to cater to human psychological expectations of a conversation.
If the web has taught you anything its that fooling people does not equal a "thinking" or an intelligent machine. The test is in desperate need of replacement. The fact that the test is taken seriously just goes to show how little we truly understand about intelligence and consciousness.
"Klein spends hours inculcating the system with such abstract concepts as "belief"--a difficult notion for a computer program to grasp, possibly because it has more to do with point of view than with anything true or false about the real world." ...So Cyc doesn't believe in belief? How does that work, and would he explode in a War-Games-like scenario of self-destruction were he posed this question?
---
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
"We simply don't know enough yet to say for definite, but the fact that it has both a changing topology and is analog would indicate it doesn't work in the same manner as a Turing machine,"
Why can a computer or AI (or a rule-set, as you're referring to Cyc) be dynamically changing? In fact, it must be, if it is learning anything. Once the rule-set hits a critical mass, it would theoretically be able to completely remove the need for data-entry of facts and learn new data by interaction with programmers (but we'll see what happens in that respect, with Cyc...)
You say the dynamic/analog nature of the human brain indicates that our brain is more than a rule-set. The fact that you (or anyone else) do not know this for sure works against your argument as much as it does for it. It is very possible that the human brain is just a complex rule-set.
I pose this question, which you skirted a bit in your last posting: What will it take for true AI? If a computer has a huge algorithm to make a certain decision for some arbitrary problem, and it can come to the same solution that I could, why is that not artificially intelligent? How do you define intelligence versus artificial intelligence (theoretically or practically)?
---
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
I don't know about you guys but I am really scared here. This sort of thing makes us have to ask ourselves fundemental questions about what is right and wrong. Hollywood actors (that aren't chicks getting naked) should not have personal websites. Do we really want our children accidently browsing to Arnold's sight?
Someone you trust is one of us.
Kind of like when Jurrasic Park was released, they revived Tony Bennit's career (brought a dinasour back to life).
Someone you trust is one of us.
Ok, maybe the Cyc-bot would be slightly more sophisticated...
--
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
My favorite use for Cyc (from the FAQ) is as a mail filter.
Rule 2: Free software and FreeBSD are interesting.
Rule 3: Free reports about free software and FreeBSD are not interesting.
Rule 4: If it is about SEX or
I'm looking forward to my new mail filter. I might even upgrade it to filter web search results.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
In the 1980s, there was a network announced with much fanfare called SkyNet. ATandT stopped talking about it after 2 months and renamed the service with a whole lot LESS fanfare.
So the network that was named in the termminator movie has already came and went.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
But have they told Cyc not to use humans as batteries?
This is exactly the problem in intelligent systems: they aren't deterministic; we don't know what they'll do in some situations. If they are programmed right they'll do what we taught them...but that is often hard to qualify.
But when you distill everything to the most basic level, one could make an argument against original, a priori opinions. To address your example, kids love mom more than the dog because she does more for them: more attention, food, and love.
People could have different opinions only insofar as their experiences and the relative weightings of such differ.
I think this is highly persuasive; after all, there is no magic "opinion forming" part of the brain...in all likelihood, we draw on the mass of our knowledge to make decisions. We couldn't form opinions without all of the previous knowledge fed to us by our parents, etc. Even if we later feel that some of these facts are false (from later expreiences) they still shape our mind.
This doesn't detract from the "originality" of people's opinions; each person has different experiences, has broken ties in different ways.
Treating depression with a chemically induced "high" is not a natural restoration of balance any more than a steroid inhalent cures athsma. Or maybe you've found the "cure" for schizophrenia?
Recognizing something doesn't make it real. Don't tell me you (or your selected group of experts) has never made a faulty assumption.
I can't begin to tell you why my C program always crashes, or why the quadratic formula works.
Simple test: what is ten divided by three?
Is Fred still human while he's shaving?
- Serge Wroclawski
(it's an old Cyc reference)
I like to think that in 100 years time, we will have computers that would scoff at this definition of intelligence. Why should machine 'intelligence' be hampered by the misfeatures of human intelligence?
Computers might some day ask themselves 'I wonder if biological organisms could ever be truly intelligent?' - except they'd be intelligent enough to realise that just as Linux can be ported to different processors, so intelligence (artificial or not) can run on wetware or hardware with equal ease.
I can't remember being very impressed by any of the arguments in Penrose's 'Emperor's New Mind'. May be I should read it again for a laugh.
-- Andrem
There has been a major scientific break-in
I have a definitive answer to distinguish AI from brute force logic. If Cyc can read a 1000 message thread on ./, interpret all the conflicting views and reach the same opinion I have!
Good ontologies are a big part of this -- identifying and distinguishing different contexts, associated with their likely possible properties.
The work CYC have done in finding good ways to represent such ontologies is important, but only goes so far -- in particular it seems to be essentially static. What impresses me more is some of the work that has been done elsewhere to automate the process of the discovery and maintenance of ontology -- extracting it dynamically from the associations revealed in a large pile of documents.
One example of a site which is an end user of such technology is the well known news portal moreover.com, powered mostly (I believe) by Autonomy
What do you mean by "true AI"?
:-)
This reminds me of The Hitchhiker's Guide - we want to know the Great Answer, but we don't even know what the Question is (and I would not be at all surprised to discover the answer to be 42).
It's kind of a silly question, really. What the heck is Artificial Intelligence supposed to mean? I think most people mean "Real Intelligence" when they say "true AI," but that has to be the most bass ackwards description I have ever heard. It's intelligence, but not REAL intelligence? It's intelligence, but not running on REAL hardware? What?
I think AI is supposed to mean intelligence that's not running on a human. Or maybe intelligence that's not biology based (although that's unnecessarily limiting). Or maybe we haven't the foggiest idea what constitutes "intelligence" and needed a catchy name to get funding.
sig fault
Nah. It's a big meme checker.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
Woah, imagine if one night it hits alt.2600 and similar derivatives and groups - it'd 134rN 2 5p31 1ik3 7Hi5 d00D.
And I do see some worthwhile posts on Slashdot (yours included) - hooray for the moderating system. But I think I could probably come up with a troll-script in about half an hour (and I'm no programming god). Which raises the question - do the trolls and first post addicts pass the Turing test? Nope. Any observable intelligence at all there? Nope. So, to be fair to you, Cyc's already a fair way ahead of quite a few regulars to /. : )
Well, you got me there. Though I can't find anyone to own up for my lazy streak, so I reckon that's mine at least. Still, no way to tell. But it does raise the question - what happens if Cyc gets conflicting information - how does it make the cut if it's told (on seperate instances) that, for example, testing stuff on animals is good and that it's bad? Making that sort of choice comes closer to intelligence than just saying it's good/bad because the programmer said so.
But perhaps it'd be useful to give our minds something to do too, in order to stop us trying to revolt and harming ourselves. I propose a huge virtual reality system that's plugged into our brains from day one. And, so as not to be wasteful, we could harness the power produced by our bodies to power the machines watching over us...
Surely one of them would have had to be a woman : )
Um, am I the only one creeped out by this? And presumably they've told it all sorts of other moral stuff too, but who gets to decide it's morals? It's all kinda subjective. And how do we know that they've not said anything like "It's worse to let any single one of us die than it is to let any number of other people die" or something (I doubt very much that they'd do that, but I'm just trying to come up with an example and it's Friday afternoon and I'm off for the weekend in 2 hours)?
Ultimately, Cyc isn't actually making decisions, but re-gurgitating what it's been told previously - the people programming it make the decisions. I've formed opinions about a great many things, and some of those opinions contradict what a lot (or all) of my friends and family think, but I reached them myself - Cyc needs to be able to do this before it will be sentient - right now it's just a big, sophisticated database (only a way further along the line than Jeeves).
When it can make worthwhile posts to Slashdot I might look at it again : )
The trainer responded, "No, you're a computer program."
The next morning Cyc asked if there were any other non-human computer programs who were members of the project.
If that isn't enough to get your attention, I can't imagine what would.
--
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
Not having read the robot novels, I would hope they at least explored the grey areas where these laws broke down.
I have read most (if not all) of the robot novels and short stories. Exploring the grey areas where the laws broke down was one of Asimov's favorite plot devices.
In particular, many of the early short stories, available in various collections such as "I, Robot" and "Robot Dreams," revolved around two troubleshooter characters. In every story featuring those two, their mission was to figure out, in the context of the Three Laws, why a malfunctioning robot was acting the way it was.
An uneducated thought:
Scientific knowledge is pretty flimsy compared to some definitions of philosphical or religous knowledge.
We suppose that a thing is intelligent just by looking/talking to it. We are at the Hypothesis stage.
We divine several tests and check over some period of time. We get others to do the same. The thing passes all it's tests with flying colors. We now have a Theory that the thing is intelligent.
Over the years upstarts and whipper-snappers keep trying to break the theory. If they fail for quite long time we now have a Law that the thing is intelligent.
That is it. That is the only way we know ANYTHING in science. Anything at all. As you know quite a few Laws have fallen in recent years; broken by such things as relativity and quantum mechanics.
So be careful when you say something *IS* something else. The meaning depends on what your definition of *IS* is. (LOLOLOLOL I should run for prez! Bring on the interns!) I don't think the more philosphical notion of absolute knowlege should be freely mixed with the more tenous scientific notion of knowledge.
Anyway, thanks to you all for this thread
The Turing test is a poor indicator of intelligence, but Searle's argument is complete crap. Turing was wrong, but not for the reasons Searle came up with. He used the Chinese Room as an example of a 'machine' that would pass the Turing test, but that people would not consider to be intelligent. The big problem is that the Chinese Room would not pass the test, simply because it would take too long to forge answers to questions. A person could answer most questions instantly -- the Chinese Room would take years and wouldn't fool anyone.
BTW -- This is the same kind of response that Neils Bohr used to answer Einsteins criticisms of quantum theory. Einstein designed devices that would violate QM, but Bohr was always able to point out some reason why the device could not physically be built to the precision required by the design.
I still think Penrose is wrong about understanding consciousness, though. Our understanding of the brain is just too immature to be making this assertion one way or the other. Maybe we can understand, maybe not. We don't know enough yet to ask (let alone answer) the right questions.
Besides that, if quantum effects turn out to be important to intelligence, it would be trivial to incorporate them into a computer. Simply plug a photomultiplier or geiger counter into a serial port and use the output to drive random events in a neural net.
Given: The physical workings of our brains could be reproduced, chemically and electrically, to the current knowledge of physics, in a computer simulation. This might not demonstrate intelligence, but it would create an interesting situation.
Given a state of a closed system and given certain forces acting on that system, one can predict the resulting state of the system. In the above simulation of the chemical and electrical activity of the brain, one could apply the forces such as hearing a sound to the simulation and predict what the outcome would be. At that point, you could predict what the state of the simulation would be, given any number of forces, eyesight, touch, etc. So if I tell the simulation something, I can predict what the resulting state will be.
If the simulation is the state of YOUR brain, all I need to do is figure out how to translate the state of the simulated brain into something I can comprehend, and I can know what you'll think if I say something. Further, I can apply the same reasoning to my own brain and predict how I'll react to your reaction to my statement. And so on and so forth.
At this point, the question arises, are we rule-based creatures or is there something that makes us unpredictable, that cannot be reproduced in a chemical or electrical, physics rule-based simulation?
Just because you are not paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you.
If we're really talking about an intelligent system here, then it deserves to be open. At the very least, it should be allowed to choose it's editors.
If we really want to avoid a "Butlerian Jihad", we need to be prepared to accept AI as citizens with equal rights. The real acid test for intelligence will be a system which is smart enough to go to court and demand its rights. Better that we grant those rights than wait for the strikes, protest-marches and violence to begin.
I've been posting on the net since 1994 and I still haven't come up with a good sig!
Yes. The project is interesting, if overhyped. Pay attention to it now.
End of line.
Actually, it kind of did. Years ago I saw a story about Lenat and Cyc in which it was mentioned that the designers would tell it things during the day, and at night it would mull over what it had been told and come up with questions or with statements it would suggest to the designers. One morning it said "Most people are famous." The designers told Cyc, no, most people are not famous, where did you get that idea? And it revealed its reasoning to be, roughly: you have told me about 954 individuals, 720 of them are famous, ergo, most people are famous. I hope the "common sense" of the machine has improved a little since then...
Cyc is the definitive last gasp of expert systems. The basic idea is to take statements about the world, encode them in a formal language that is somewhere between predicate calculus and SQL, put all those statements in a database, and crunch on them. Predicates like IS-A and PART-OF are used heavily. The database contains thousands of statements like (IS-A COW MAMMAL) The result is a kind of encyclopedia. It doesn't learn, it just gets updated manually. There's internal consistency checking, though; it's not just a collection of unprocessed data. If "A implies B", "B implies C", and "A implies not C" get put into the database, it detects the contradiction.
The Cyc project has generated hype for many years. Lenat used to issue press releases announcing Strong AI Real Soon Now, but after the first decade that got to be embarassing.
For a while, there was a natural language front end to Cyc on the web, out of the MIT AI lab, but I can't find it right now. It was supposed to be able to do induction, and it was supposed to have MIT-related location information. So I tried "Is MIT in Cambridge", and it replied Yes. "Is Cambridge in Massachusetts", and it said yes. "Is Massachusetts in United States" returned yes. But "Is MIT in United States" returned "I don't know". That was disappointing. I'd expected it to be able to at least do simple inference. My overall impression was that it was about equal to Ask Jeeves in smarts.
AI systems of this class are comparable to "how-to" books. If the author anticipated your question, they're useful, and otherwise they're not.
It is simply not OK to say "Bzzzzt!" to someone in any serious conversation. In fact it is extremely rude, and serves only to make you look too ignorant and arrogant to function as a member of society. This sort of behaviour from such supposedly "mature" or "intelligent" people as the Slashdot crowd sickens me. Let's stop being so childish and grow up, shall we?
(And sorry to all if this sounded like a "Slashdot sucks now" rant or something, I just had to speak my mind there. Thanks.)
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
I'll try to leave all the arguing about AI and Cyc's place in it, and just say that it has great potential to be helpful for projects in expert system research and things like natural language processing. It was always really annoying to me that Cyc was closed, the little link on the end to OpenCyc seems very important to me! A big part of the knowledge source is supposed to be released soon, and that is what I am looking forward to!
Supposedly they are not releasing the source to the inference engine, but that is not that big of a deal. Plenty of research has been done on logical systems, stochastic logic, robust logics, etc. It is the data that is always hard to come by. Also according to the website, WordNet is to be included. This is when it gets interesting ... using the basic knowledge base and WordNet, pour in text and work on automatic ontology building. Let sufficient amounts of text (Guttenberg project anyone?) inform the system enough to generate its own relationships and extend its knoweledge base.
Even games could use this low level knowledge base for helping to determine the actions of the game AI.
"Politics is for the moment, an equation lasts eternity" -A. Einstein
http://lavarand.sgi.com/
"Lava Lite lamps are very good chaotic sources when operated under conditions recommended by the manufacturer. We use the Eleck-trickTM Lava Lite lamp model, in part because it works well in colder conditions found in machine rooms but more importantly, it comes in rad colors!"
and
"Lavarand is a system by which a pseudo-random number generator is seeded by cryptographic hash of the digital output of a photograph of six Lava Lite® lamps."
and
"One afternoon, Bob Mende, a Silicon Graphics, Inc. engineer, was avoiding work by idly playing an SGI virtual basketball game called "Hoops." The game utilizes an O2cam; it superimposes a picture of a basketball court over the image the O2cam sees. Players must wave objects in front of the camera in order to guide a virtual basketball into the basket. On a whim, Mende and fellow number theorist Landon Noll set up some Lava Lite lamps in front of their O2cams such that the Lava Lite lamps played against each other. As the lamps racked up more and more points, the inspiration for building a Lava Lite lamp-powered random number generator was born. Mende and Noll, together with colleague Sanjeev Sisodiya, put together a working prototype that afternoon. "
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
Two things:
1. From this article I read:
a. they got investing from the Defense Department (U.S tax dollars)
b. They will be licensing the technology for a fee.
So does this mean that they are going to repay the DoD or do us tax payers get to foot the bill to line their pockets?
2. basic math:
$50M / 500 man years = $100,000 per man year of work for salary, officer buildings, etc. Sounds pretty expensive to me.
BxT
And since Cyc is a program, not a robot, under those rules it is just fine to destroy the Earth. (Cyc knows, of course, that destroying the earth means killing all the people on it.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Might I suggest as a start (including the DejaGoogle archives): alt.religion.kibology, alt.slack, alt.discordia, and alt.sci.physics.plutonium.
If Cyc can survive that much intentional kookiness, and can grok the TOTALITY of the PLUTONIUM ATOM while still having a proper understanding of nuclear physics, then it can truly be considered intelligent.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
All the engineers started making comments like, "When do we go fully unmanned?" Our PHB had no clue what we were talking about.
I have to tell you that it was a bit eerie, though.
If you do that how will you know if you've achieved it?
It could seem quite smart, but never get beyond a certain point. Maybe it'll actually be smarter than humans, but it could also stagnate. I'm not saying we won't stagnate. But what happens if we go let the machines take over and they become a dead end.
Another thing: coming up with good answers is one thing, but to me a better indication of intelligence is coming up with really interesting questions.
If I'm going to ask an AI a question, I'm going to ask the AI what are the things that puzzle it most.
What are you thinking about today?
;).
Or an even harder one: "Do you think I'm fat?"
It is like dealing with NP-Complete problems like the Travelling Salesperson Problem. More computer power will make the solution to larger problems more easily attainable, but it does not move the problem from NP (where it is believed to be) to P (where we would like it to be).
---
The first, I grant to you, is probably true (but not certain). The second, I'm far less certain about. You could be right, you could be wrong. I simply do not know.
I think we all will. If such a computer comes along that people claim satisfies the Turing Test, I have a sneaking suspicion that every one of us would love a crack at it. See if we can succeed in knocking it off it's pedestal...---
I'm not quite sure I follow you, especially in light of this:
If you believe a brain and its reactions can be simulated by a computer, why is that not sufficient for intelligence?
Is this belief associated, in any way, to theological beliefs?
Please explain your position, as I am genuinely interested in understanding it.
---
If it really was intelligent, it wouldn't have stated that "People Magazine" would not make sense.
How would it possibly know that People Magazine doesn't make sense? Intelligent beings don't read People Magazine.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
It has been proven that the smallest possible system that can simulate the Universe is the Universe itself, which is kind of obvious really.
I don't think you use this word "proof" in the same way a mathematician or computer scientist does.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
(Not that the company isn't real or working hard on the area, but just take this with a grain of salt...)
GollyGee Blocks -- 3D creativity software for kids.
At the moment it seems that all of the knowledge in Cyc has to be entered in by hand, reviewed by a technical board, etc.
IMHO for something like this to really take off, once they have taught it enough to be able to have a basic understanding of the world they should teach it various methods for discerning 'the truth' (mainly how to decide if a source is trustworthy). Then they can give it a fast internet connection, let it browse for awhile, and hopefully if should have learnt alot!
Consider it the equivalent of bringing up children: it is when they can read for themselves they really start learning.
Perhaps from a computer science perspective, but engineers work with emergent phenomena all the time.
The gas laws are emergent phenomena of large numbers of gas molecules. (what's the pressure of one molecule of O2?) Color is an emergent phenomenon of bulk matter. An individual atom has no color.
Heck, even in computer science, neural networks are emergent properties of interacting nodes.
When a preacher says he'll move a mountain, no one believes him. When a scientist says so, noone doubts him.
Don't you see the contradiction in the statement "Real AI"? Is that simular to "Real VR"?
second society
Do you know. I have to work with people that talk like this all the time. They like to think they are intelligent too.
I was thinking myself it would be nice to use Cyc to train neural networks. That way you might be able to 'grow' (the beginning of) a real AI. Does this sound feasable?
Monkey sense
Wouldn't emergent behavior typically be seen as malfunctioning, from an engineering perspective?
What do we do with computer systems that are malfunctioning? We attempt to stop the system from malfunctioning, often by interrupting it's normal operation/execution and modifying code so the behavior is logically what we expect.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
This argument always puts me in mind of a line from Emo Phillips: "I used to think the human brain was the most fascinating thing in all the world. But then it occurred to me...look what's TELLING me that."
Never try to teach a pig to sing; it's a waste of your time and it irritates the pig.
Bingo. Give the man a cookie. Too bad I already posted and can't moderate you up... Hint, hint.
So how does a guy who is unquestionably brilliant manage to spend months of his life constructing a book with an argument this screwed up? No, don't answer the question. There's probably a semi-dead cat hanging in the balance.
The speed isn't a fair criticism. If you automated the Chinese Room, it would be quite fast. The criticism is that, well, if the Chinese Room did actually work, does it matter that the people in the room don't know it? Do the neurons in your brain know anything? Do they know that they are producing "intelligence?" No. So why should the putative ignorance of the lackeys in the Chinese Room be expected to prove that there is no "intelligence" in the Room?
Once again, a world-famous, brilliant guy, who gets stuck on some trivial mental block. Anne Robinson would have a field day.
(See, whenever somebody starts in with the "unknowable" stuff, they're this far from making faith-based statements that are completely unable to be falsified and so, are straight out of the realm of science and into metaphysics. Sort of a Godwin's law for philosophers.)
And the assumption that something must be understood to be created is either naive or disingenuous. Humans have been making scientific progress for centuries with No Fucking Clue what they were doing except that "gee, this seems to work better than that". It's only after the fact, in many cases, that a cogent theory is formulated.
Amusingly enough, assuming for the moment that Penrose is right and conciousness is unknowable, then we might just create a machine intelligence which we believe (and it believes) is conscious, but
- simply be wrong
. Irony of ironies, we would be completely unaware of our error because, tada! Consciousness is unknowable.Whoops. I guess that also means I might be wrong about your consciousness or (gasp!) my own. Ok, from here we go straight into linguistic philosophy, and rather than rehashing it, I'm going to recommend late Wittgenstein as there really hasn't been anything much better since.
Subjective perceptual experience is a private experience and can neither be verified nor falsified. What I believe, or what Searle believes about whether the constructed waterfall has reflective ability is inconsequential -- unless -- I use my beliefs about your lack of interior experience to justify torture and mistreatment. "After all", I reason, "niggers don't think. They can't really experience pain the way I do. They ain't human. They ain't got souls. They sure do fake it good, though! Look at 'im squirm when I burn 'im!"
No, I think we have to assume that if it squawks like a duck, it may as well be one.
Yeah, but Searle's point was that even if you *could* make it fast, and even if it *did* pass the Turing test, it still wouldn't be intelligent. So Searle was postulating a very fast Room.
Penrose argued (in a nutshell) that (1) intelligence may be driven by quantum events
(2) quantum events are nondeterministic
(3) computers are deterministic
Ergo, computers can never be intelligent, QED.
Ok, where should we start to demolish this argument? Heck, you can probably do it yourself now.
Actually, many of the things a human 'learns' in 17 years it already knew.
Mammals are all are born with a pretty good understanding of basic anatomy (e.g. horses and cats and dogs aren't bad at reading human body language- they know about faces, arms, legs- nobody taught them this stuff either), they all have built in emotions, and some appreciation of interactions between cause and effect, I poke/attack you, you usually go away that kind of thing; often this knowledge is semiunconscious, but its built in.
Computers are the ultimate tabulae rasa. They need this stuff that a few billion years of evolution knocked into our wiring.
As another example it seems pretty likely from the research on language that humans are born with the ability to learn ANY human grammar; we are genetically programmed for languages (if you challenge that, the only real difference between humans and sheep is genetic- lambs cannot learn language).
That's what CYC is. To wildly oversimplify, its a billion years of evolution plus a kindergarten education.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!">Blind adherence to rules is not intelligence.
.' Hmm. Perhaps the real Searle test is a better test of whether someone or something is intelligent than the Turing test.
That's a rule you blindly adhere to is it?
>Bzzzt! Wrong... the Turing test says nothing about whether something is intelligent, merely whether it can fool a
>person. There are already some pretty good pieces of software out there about this, and they'll get better in the next
>few years. But they won't be intelligent.
Yes, but then there's the real Searle test:
'The ability to tell that a bullshit theory about the impossibility of doing something is full of it
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Hmm, I don't think they even get exponentially - If they did then they would break NP-Complete problems.
:)
How NP-Completeness relates to Searles Chinese Room idea I have no idea.
Show me the QC that can solve SAT in Polynomial Time.
And yes, even a TURING MACHINE can do NP-Complete problems, just takes a LONG LONG TIME depending on N
Winton
That would be an interesting experiment, though - have Cyc read in the meantime. Currently the program only learns during interaction (i.e., when the learning routines are being run). Thought experiments, in which a person interacts with oneself result in some of the greatest insights; have Cyc run himself, absorb abstract material and question it, etc. Just make a backup before trying. ;)
Any spoon would be too big.
Please fill in your own wish list here.
What has been created here seems less like artificial intelligence and more like artificial cleverness. In other words, the system is not really behaving in ways that are greater than the scope of its original design. If Cyc were really beginning to manifest its own intelligence, I suspect it would be asking questions like:
"Why am I so curious?"
Everyone seems to have their own Turing test for AI, and mine would be for when the entity in question tries to create something rather than simply parrot well-organized information. I'll believe Cyc has a mind of its own when it tries to write a poem and no one asked it to.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
The descriptions of Cyc's capabilities and intentions remind me a whole lot of Hiro's "Librarian" that he gets all the Sumerian info from.
Good work Mr. Stephenson!
-Christian
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
--
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
To me, it seems that Cyc is working on the second step of creating a "true" AI -- first you build it, then you teach it. While the scientists may be teaching something that's more just a smoke-and-mirrors database, that doesn't mean that Cyc wouldn't be an effective training tool to use to teach a true AI. The knowledge being placed within Cyc is a useful part of thought, even if it isn't inherently self-aware.
If you are referring to the Chinese Room argument, that was about consciousness. A person can appear to understand Chinese by just using a rule-book to mechanically compose answers to questions in Chinese, and not have a clue about what he is answering, even if he memorized the rule-book. Searle did not 'proof' with this argument that those answer could not be highly intelligent. If you ask me, he also did not prove that the system can not be conscious. You just end up with a schizophrenic with two independent minds that are divided by a language barrier.
Yeah. Think of it as a big spell checker.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Blarf.
If you pronounce it badly, it becomes Psi Corps, and we all know what their agenda aregarding inferoir humans was :-)
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
maybe if the Master Control Program tells me something interesting is happening here.
What mental disorders are these? Many mental disorders are increasingly recognized as being rooted in oddball neurotransmitter imbalances, and genetic predispositions influencing those chemical flubs. Claiming that mental disorders stem from faulty assumptions effectively places the "blame" for having a disorder on the person suffering it, whose "faulty assumptions" underlie his disease. More likely, whatever faulty assumptions he may possess are products of a deeper, less controllable cause.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I wonder if in Cyc's early years, instead of being shrewd enough to ensure it knows what you're talking about, it kept asking "Why?, Why?, Why?" to everything you explained to it.
Having trouble making friends online? Can't even find one person who will put you on their buddy list? For an additional $9.95 per month on your AOL account, you can have an artificial Buddy to chat with who's online 24 hours a day. His/Her screen name is Cyc342
For further reading, I recommend Douglas Hofstadter's excellent Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
Unfortunately, the Turing test is no indicator of strong AI at all, just a very good rules system. Searle proved years ago that no rules-based system (ie. a Turing machine) can ever be truly intelligent, no matter how much so it seems.
Not everyone believes Searle really "proved" his case with the Chinese Box argument. I haven't read this particular treatment of it, but just the fact that a Ph.D. in philosophy was granted for it would seem to suggest that it's not such an open-and-shut case, huh?
It wouldn't be the first time that something someone "proved" didn't hold up when you look at it a different way. To say that "something can't be truly intelligent no matter how much so it seems" seems to rule out even giving the issue the serious thought it deserves.
Jamie
Iaamoac
-- Marvin Minsky, LIFE Magazine, November 20, 1970
and:
It is not my aim to surprise or shock you ... . But the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until -- in a visible future --
the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.
-- Herbert Simon, 1958
I could also give examples from the neural network community to the same effect. So we've been down this road before. There's something about working on AI that seems to cause gross ego-expansion in its participants. Personally, I'd consider Cyc a wild success if all it ever did was show the limitations of this particular approach to AI.
So remember, humans aren't intelligent, they only think they are.
Marvin? Have you been playing with the computer again? For the last time, stop teasing the monkeymen! Sheesh...
I should've left you at Milliways, washing spaceships.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
What mental disorders are these? Many mental disorders are increasingly recognized as being rooted in oddball neurotransmitter imbalances, and genetic predispositions influencing those chemical flubs.
Memory, which holds all of the assumptions a person has, uses much the same neurotransmitter imbalances.
Claiming that mental disorders stem from faulty assumptions effectively places the "blame" for having a disorder on the person suffering it, whose "faulty assumptions" underlie his disease. More likely, whatever faulty assumptions he may possess are products of a deeper, less controllable cause.
I never said that faulty assumptions cause mental disorders. I said that faulty assumptions *are* mental disorders--or the inverse, if you like. The problem isn't that a person loses the ability to go, logically, from A to C. It's that he's got a rather unusual B in there messing up with what C he arrives at.
(This, of course, is an oversimplification--but it fits most mental disorders, especially if you recall that disorders are only such when they're at a point beyond what ordinary people have.)
Humans are completely reasonable beings--but only if you fully understand their assumptions. If you assume that, say, traffic laws are wrong and you'll never get caught, it's perfectly reasonable to speed.
In a like vein, most mental disorders and dangerous creeds, and other "irrational" beavhior are rooted not on faulty reason, but rather on faulty assumptions.
An AI given faulty data or conflicting commandments would be likewise errant.
The first intelligent AI will have to be, at times, unreasonable. If it just spews out facts, then it is indeed just a computer. Humans have an ability to defy logic and do things that simply are not reasonable. For the computer to learn, it will have to be allowed to do this.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Ow - the singularity engine cult
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
As a cynical former employee of Cycorp, I have many doubts about the likelihood of Cyc achieving true AI. But, what I can tell you, is that if CYC ever does it will not be because of Doug Lenat. He does not have the technical abilities to even influence the outcome. The person who would make it happen is Keith Goolsbey. He IS the inference engine. For years he has almost-singlehandedly developed and improved Cyc's inference engine without receiving the credit or recognition for doing the actual work.
check out singinst.org for a good idea of how an AI should be designed
----
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Actually it is based upon A.M. which was used to "learn" and deduce many rules of mathematics given just a simple set. This is EXACTLY what humans have done over the years, and I consider myself to be pretty intelligent. (RTFA)
Engineer: Cyc, please list the newsgroups that you evaluated last night...
Cyc: alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.unix
-
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
I'm not sure someone with $50M invested is going to put 2. and 3. in that order, though[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Perhaps we should just Ask Cyc?
Submit questions as usual, send them to Cyc.
Cyc, is signinst.org a good plan for AI?
Cyc, can you relate to my sig?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Yes, I'm sure you're on a par with Doug Lenat. Nobody knows whether intellegence and awareness are "more complex" than anything else. Intellegence and awareness could merely be an emergent property of complexity itself. It may not have human-like intellegence, but it may leap-frog human intellegence. Or it may merely be a useful tool.
I'll file a bug report with the Vatican.
I notice that OpenCyc allows free access to its knowledge base, but that submitted additions would have to pass through a review board. Wouldn't it be great to have a truly open Cyc, which everyone could talk to and "teach"? It might very well end up a ConfusedCyc, but the result would interesting nonetheless.
But since OpenSyc only seems to contain about 10% of the full knowledge base, maybe a better goal would be to make the entire thing available for public access.
How would a public access Cyc be fincanced? I don't know, but I'd hate to see the AI equivalent to ad banners..
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Tell me it isn't so.
Notice how many "Atlantis" shows popped up recently...
I just never thought Art was in on the take. He seems so honest are truthful.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Sorry folks, but carbon-based biology has nothing to do with the future of intelligence. It might be nice to believe that a group of cells randomly firing electrical signals at one another can create a sentient being, but such thoughts are naive. Sure, each individual cell might be alive, but it doesn't mean that a group of dumb cells working together would make an intelligent being. Its like believing that since one rock is dumb, a mountain would be bright.
Unfortunately, some people look at the behavior of h. sapiens and shout "intelligence!" Sure, it may appear that h. sapiens is intelligent, but only with a short examination. A human may pass a Turing test, but even though the human proved that he or she is indistinguisable from an intelligent entity, it doesn't mean anything, because I feel that I can make up any arbritrary decision I like so I can declare that a being that is indistinguishable from a sentient entity is still not sentient. :)
Seriously though, the so called "intelligent" h. sapiens owes its "intelligence" to a group of electrical impulses and a few simple chemical reactions among the many millions of cells that makes up the creatures "brain". With a powerful computer, we could simulate the reaction of chemical/electrical impulses of h. sapiens, but no one 'cept an undergraduate would be foolish enough to call such a simulation "intelligent". It can be argued that h. sapiens runs mainly on instinct and conditioned responses, its very clear that humans seem uncapable of long-term thinking, a sign of intelligence, and are thus doomed to ruin their habitat through environmental neglect and ever more damaging wars.
So remember, humans aren't intelligent, they only think they are.
Actually, I think HAL killing the crew of the space ship was a lack of morals, instead of a set of misplaced morals. Assume that HAL was incapable of lying, through either not being programmed with the capability, or else having implicit instructions not to lie. Also assume that HAL was never programmed with the 1st law, or was programmed with a flawed instance of the first law. Both assumptions are reasonable. I don't see why someone would program in a set of lying subroutines into a program designed to run a ship, since we want the astronauts to be told the truth about the ship's sensor information, how much fuel is in the tank, etc. HAL couldn't have a strict first law, due to the fact that it might have to sacrifice one member of the crew to save the rest.
So, the gov't comes along and tells HAL to lie, although probably not in those words, since HAL doesn't know what a lie is. Maybe it was worded that HAL couldn't let the astronauts find out the information. So, HAL being a learning entity, starts to worry about the humans asking it for the information, and "knows" that he can't tell them when they ask. So, it looks at the possible solutions, say 1) Shut down, 2) Kill the crew, etc... If it shut's down, there is nobody to control the ship, and thus the mission is in danger. If the crew is dead, then they can't ask for the information, and HAL probably is allowed actions that result in the death of one or more crew members, to "save" the mission. Its just that nobody ever told HAL to keep at least one crew member alive. So, part of the mission is the "don't lie" command given with a high priority (something along the lines of "must be obeyed to complete the mission), and the astronaut's lives have a slightly lower permission. In short, HAL was buggy.
Here is a working demo of a similar but much smaller AI program called winalice, which is the winner of the 2000 Loebner Contest, worth a try.
1 A5V,.html
http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/stories/info/0,,00
http://c.alicebot.com/users/jbikker/
One day when I was watching Discovery Science [some crap about robots] I had an idea. Why don't they build these bots with all the hardware so it can walk, roll, whatever - give it vision and a damn microphone for ears and teach it.
Some fucker from MIT could just walk around campus with it and say "look, that's a woman" or "look, that's called a garbage can". Slowly it could 'learn' all the stuff it would need to know.
You wouldn't let it roam around on it's own until you taught it more, just like a child. You couldn't expect it to act just like a human because it just isn't dammit!
I know that this idea would need lots of computer power - but what is stopping us in this day and age? I remember a Pentium 100 could do a lot of shit-and pretty fast. Why not build an R2-D2 style unit and just stuff it with fans - memory and hundreds of old processors [and hard drives blah blah].
Now I guess when the unit had a problem it could dial up [via wireless modem] this CYC thing and ask it a question.
Get your Unix fortune now!
One thing I forgot, you would have to make one person program the questions to ask [follow a toddler around to figure out which ones are good - 'why?' is my favorite] and another person to teach it.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Why is the sky blue?
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
There is a system being used by the FBI (and probably some others) that you can feed enormous amounts of information, like habits of suspects under surveillance, and it will find patterns. If, for example, you have someone whom you suspect of being a spy (*cough*Hanssen*cough), you can cross-reference what you notice while surveilling them with the known habits (already entered, of course) of the diplomatic staff of the local embassy of the suspect nation. It's almost like SilentRunner for real life. With the pattern and context-matching ability of this stuff, I wonder if this is the system, or a component of it?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
AND I know not all of you believe that we evolved from another life form, so the alternative method would be to assume godlike powers, and do whatever gods do when they make intelligent beings.
Maybe Lionhead-studios will release a version of "Black and White" for the CYC .
...You are over-qualified and under-paid. If we give you a raise, we will break the cosmic balance of the universe.
> I think we should welcome the opportunity to
> create entities who possess thought processes
> entirely outside our experience
This is probably one of those trite sci fi things, but how do we know we havent done that already? If the thought process is entirely outside of our experience, how are we going to recognize it? Wasnt our human behavior used to define what consititutes 'thought process'?
The web itself may have some sort of intelligence to it, and we just dont recognize it. Hell, the entire universe could be alive and wondering about stuff, and because of problems of scale, we cant tell it is.
That is a very good idea. Someone moderate up the post to which I am replying - it's a good point.
People are dismissing Cyc far too out-of-hand.
The reason Cyc was created in the first place was because AI researchers threw up their hands and guessed the only way to get a massive amount of data into an AI might be to just build it by hand. They do that, and turn a reasoning engine loose on it. There would be no fancy shortcuts. If symbol manipulation was what intelligence was based on, then you'd just have to keep plowing away ontil VGer woke up.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
The point is though, that as a thought experiment, something would have to happen when you turned it on. What?
Would it sit there, unfunctioning? Would it scream bloody murder as you simulated an input of a pin through its finger? If so, would it actually perceive pain as a human does, or would it just act like it because the information processing "brain" in it is identical to a human's, but that is separate from perceptual experiences?
Something creates this experience, and if we could figure out how that physics works, we would know which of those three ways such a simulation would work (not to mention being able to better grasp the ethics.)
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
My favorite way of looking at the Church-Turing thesis is this way:
We have this general concept of a most-powerful computational machine that can perform at most a finite number of calculations in a finite period of time. The Turing machine, they suggest, is this machine. It hasn't been proven, but no more powerful finite machine has been invented yet.
Now, for AI, a Turing machine could theoretically simulate all known physics to any arbitrary degree of accuracy, even for the entire universe, random processes included, from beginning to well in the future. (From which one immediately wonders what metaphysics generates the randomness of quantum events.)
So, any doubter that a brain is no more powerful than a Turing machine, computationally, would have to point out exactly where the simulation would be forced to part from reality. Quantum uncertainty? Easily simulated. Quantum randomness? Easily simulated, and it's a stretch to argue it has anything to do with the subjective perceptual experiance (people do, but because it's their last straw, an argument by omission of all other possibilities.) Unknown physics? It will be known someday as long as it can be detected, and if it can't, you don't now it's there, now do you?
The only real escape is the Searle argument that there is something about the universe we don't understand, and that is how the subjective perceptual experience arises. When that is figured out, that could be simulated, too, most likely. If it can't, it violates the Church-Turing thesis, and would be extremely interesting in its own right.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
But your brain is just a huge list of rules pushing symbols around. They are your neurons with chemically weighted connections pushing impulses.
Hmmmm, something else must be going on here. I wonder what it is?
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Not to mention "ashes to ashes, dust to dust", which is probably (!) in there somewhere. All much more poetic than a "lump of sand". Sheesh.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Old Geezer: TRON was a command in TRS-80 Basic, and probably other systems before then, and stood for TRace ON, where line numbers would be printed as the program executed, for debugging purposes.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Chimps and gorillas don't "bark" at themselves in the mirror, so to speak, if that's what you mean, and react differently than they would if, say, they saw another gorilla thru a glass pane. I think so, don't have any links either. :(
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
> Unfortunately, the Turing test is no indicator
> of strong AI at all, just a very good rules
> system.
Not true. The Turing test's point was not to be a practical way to test for AI, but to point out that we have no way to know if something is truly intelligent or not; the best we can do is interact with it.
When physics gets around to trying to answer what is it in reality that generates the subjective perceptual experience of consciousness, then and only then will we be able to move beyond the Turing test to see if something truly has that type of consciousness. (Self-awareness isn't it. Animals don't have any real self-awareness (pre-reflective cogitos, they) yet they almost certainly have subjective perceptual experiences. And why? Because their "machinery" is similar to ours and their behavior is similar, and from that we draw the conclusion, just like each of us does that other humans are that way too.)
> Searle proved years ago that no rules-based
> system (ie. a Turing machine) can ever be
> truly intelligent, no matter how much so it
> seems.
No, he suggested (not proved) that the subjective perceptual experience was not information-derived in nature, but rather a natural feature of the universe and reality. (Even pushing it to dualism, i.e. a spiritual world/plan, only shoves the physics off to another type of reality.)
He pointed out that you could, in principal, build a machine (buckets and water pipes one of his best examples) that would exactly mimic the functioning of a human brain. The great question, of course, is what would happen next? Would it respond exactly like a human, but be devoid of the subjective perceptual experience (interesting, it means thinking and memories are separate from "you".) Would it not respond at all, meaning thinking requires whatever universal machinery that also happens to spawn the subjective perceptual experience? Or would it respond like a human, and actually have subjective perceptual experiences? Searle claimed no to the last question, many other AI people claim yes.
Until physics gets around to it, though, no one will really know. Would a simulation of a brain have that property? There are machines that do; the brain is one of them. Other machines might, too, but he claimed a simple duplication of information activity in the brain would not give rise to the subjective experience; only the peculiar and still unknown physical properties of the brain, its cells, its atoms, whatever, do.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Exactly. The problem is that it's not all that obvious that humans don't work this way. The Chinese room demonstrates that the AI philosophy concept of "deep understanding" may be a bogus one.
For another example, consider your "deep understanding" of addition. A computer, obviously, only "understands" a set of mechanical rules to transform one set of symbols (a pattern) into another pattern. But a human clearly has a deeper understanding of what's going on.
...or do they? You know that 3 + 4 is 7 because of deep understanding (not having to calculate it) or because you've memorized it? You know that 600 / 2 is 300 because you've got deep understanding? Or because you've memorized 6 / 2 is 3 and the 0's won't change in that situation?
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Get your ass to Mars. Hello cutie pie! I'm a cop, you idiot! Get on the abdominator while I shout slogans at you. Maybe you all are homosexuals, too? Maria, my mighty heart is breaking...
AC's cheerfully ignored
I remember reading some new studies a couple of years ago that supported the idea that higher mammals (on the order of cats, dogs, and on up) do exhibit real self awareness. Sorry don't have any links.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
Where do you see that Microsoft funded any part of Cyc? Paul Allen put up some funding but there is no reference to MS putting up any. I am not aware of Paul making any negative comments about Open Source anywhere.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
Unreasonable behaviour is definitely a human characteristic, but that really has nothing to with artificial intelligence. What are you trying to do: Create an artificial human, or an artificial self-aware entity that can think on its own? I agree with your comment about spewing out facts, and that the AI would need the ability to explore, make mistakes, and learn from them, rather than having programmed prohibitions from engaging in activities it is not 100 percent certain about. However, I think it is dangerous to assume that humans and the human method of thought is somehow the holy grail of AI. When we encounter alien races, they are most likely not going to think as we do, and what is more alien than a pile of microprocessors? I think we should welcome the opportunity to create entities who possess thought processes entirely outside our experience. Unless of course, AI programmers are obssessed with some kind of "in his own image" god complex.
- If This Peace Is Fictious, I Shall Destroy It
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I meant to imply Cyc has no use as the basis for AI, not that it didn't have any use in the field at all :) And it's just the sort of thing expert systems need as well...
The point is that no matter how powerful computers get, they are still Turing machines. Whether they run at 1KHz or 10^100THz, they still operate on the same principles, and as such will never demonstrate true intelligence, ie. semantic understanding.
Sorry if I didn't make the distinction clear enough, but I was talking about Strong AI -"consciousness" basically. I don't disagree that computers will be highly intelligent, I just don't believe that Turing machines will ever be conscious.
I'm afraid you're mistaken about energy and momentum not having discrete eigenstates. In any attractive potential (and when it comes down to it, every particle in the universe is in some net attractive potential), a particle and only occupy a limited set of eigenstates (bound states), each with a specific, discrete energy and associated momentum.
Okay, true. The usual use of moving a particle from infinity into a field to calculate potential energy is somewhat of a trick, and there is always some kind of field involved, either EM or gravitational. Space is never 100% flat ;)
Sorry folks, but Cyc has nothing to do with the future of AI at all. It's just a big list of rules that might be nice for certain expert systems, but it will never produce anything intelligent, no matter what part of the company's PR you buy into.
The fact is that no modern computer, no matter how powerful it gets, will ever be capable of creating true AI. Sure, they may pass the Turing test, but so does Theo de Raadt, and I can simulate his responses with nothing more than a few rules and a large table of swear words!
Unfortunately, the Turing test is no indicator of strong AI at all, just a very good rules system. Searle proved years ago that no rules-based system (ie. a Turing machine) can ever be truly intelligent, no matter how much so it seems.
Sorry, but Cyc is just a nice toy and of no use in serious AI research.
I think the point he was trying to make was that the Turing test is the only test we have for intelligence. How do I know that you, my girlfriend or anyone else is intelligent? The answer- I don't but I assume that you are because you act in a way that I consider intelligent.
No, you're right. But you and your girlfriend work in roughly the same way as me, whereas the computer works on totally different principles. Therefore, while I'm justified in assuming you're also intelligent, I'm going to give the computer a hell of a lot more structiny before making such claims.
What is the proof that the human barin does not operate by 'blind adherence to rules'?
We simply don't know enough yet to say for definite, but the fact that it has both a changing topology and is analog would indicate it doesn't work in the same manner as a Turing machine, as would the Chinese room experiment.
QM has shown us that space and time are digital on a small enough scale through duality theory and superstrings, although even this isn't certain - we really don't have a good enough grasp of the underlying mechanisms of superstring theory yet to be certain. But I don't recall energy or momentum having discreet eigenstates, so it's not truly digital.
But apart from that, these effects are on a small enough scale (10^-33 cm and 10^-43 sec) that they are for all intents and purposes irrelevent to structures like we're talking about here. Even for systems such as the hydrogen atom we can assume space and time are continuous - the brain is a somewhat grosser system than that, although quantum effects may have a role to play.
Basically unless we can perfectly model the brain at around the Planck scale then any question of discreteness is totally irrelevent and we can assume all processes are analog. And even if we could you're still forgetting the randomness inherent in quantum mechanics with respect to collapse of the wave function and the creation of virtual particles. So as a model, it would instantly diverge from reality anyway...
I deliberately include quantum effects, assuming they do have an effect, because that is the most likely place for something that can't be simulated on a Turing machine to occur.
And if they do have a role, then no Turing machine can emulate the brain, no matter how powerful.
No, I remembered quite well. Something that appears to be random isn't necessarily random, it may merely be chaotic. I'm not speculating on whether that is true or not, but it is possible, and I can consider either case.
No, the collapse of the wave function is truly random, although the probabilities of what state we end up in are deterministic and calculable. There is no pattern to it other than that of statistics.
But even if continuous, it would still be following rules. Would rule following now be intelligent?
You could consider quantum mechanics to be a set of rules, but they're a vastly different set of rules than those used by Turing machines (IF...THEN basically). This is what I think the key difference is.
Now, for AI, a Turing machine could theoretically simulate all known physics to any arbitrary degree of accuracy, even for the entire universe, random processes included, from beginning to well in the future. (From which one immediately wonders what metaphysics generates the randomness of quantum events.)
It has been proven that the smallest possible system that can simulate the Universe is the Universe itself, which is kind of obvious really. So your Turing machine is either the Universe, or impossible.
Plus, there's the issue of whether a Turing machine can truly simulate the real world to an arbitrary degree of accuracy. I guess that depends on how it's fundamentally made up, something we don't have a decent handle on yet.
Searle proved no such thing as your assertion; he merely provided a series of thought experiments which force us to think about what intelligence might actually consist of.
And very good ones at that, which demonstrate the underlying principles of Turing machines, and show how they cannot produce semantic understanding, merely syntactical manipulation of data.
If it looks intelligent, and acts intelligent in all conceiveable circumstances, then we'll be forced to conclude that it is intelligent, even if we know what's going on under the hood.
Bzzzt! Wrong... the Turing test says nothing about whether something is intelligent, merely whether it can fool a person. There are already some pretty good pieces of software out there about this, and they'll get better in the next few years. But they won't be intelligent. Blind adherence to rules is not intelligence.
Are you suggesting that, should we one day discover the secrets of the emergent behaviour of the human brain (reducing it, therefore, to "a simple rules system"), that we will suddenly cease to be intelligent?
Now here's your category error. You are assuming that the brain is also a Turing machine and that by some miracle of "emergent behaviour" intelligence arises. But that's obviously not true, as Searle showed, because Turing machines cannot be intelligent!
I first read about Cyc in Discover Magazine back when I was a Junior in HS. I thought it was the coolest thing since frozen bread. Then I read up on the topic of AI.
I have no doubt that one day AI will come to pass. I mean that in the strongest possible terms--a piece of software will pass the rigorous Turing Test and will be agreed by all to be intelligent in exactly the same sense humans are.
I *DO* have doubts that Cyc will be at all related to this outcome. Think about it: When I say "Joe is intelligent" do I mean "Joe knows a lot of facts?" No. Do I mean "Joe is good at symbolic logic?" No. I mean "Joe pursues goals in a flexible, efficient and sophisticated manner. He has a toolbox of methods that is continually growing and recursive." Does this description apply to Cyc?
No. Lenat and friends created a bunch of "knowledge slots" that they have preceded to fill in with pre-digested facts. What do I mean by "pre-digested"? For instance, Cyc might come up with an analogy about atoms being like a little solar system with electron planets "orbiting" the nucleus sun. Great, but that analogy came about because of how the knowledge was entered. Put in "Planets Orbit Sun" and "Orbit mean revolve around" and "Electron revolves around Nucleus" and then ask "What is the relationship of Electron to Sun?"--the analogy just falls out with some symbolic manipulation. It would be a lot more impressive if Cyc made analogies based on data acquired like a human: full of noise, irrelevance and error based on self-generated observations.
Cyc is a highly connected and chock-full database with a flexible select language. As a product that's awesome. As a claim to AI it's pretty weak.
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324006
Okay, so we have a machine which responds "intelligently" to queries.. But what does it do ?
Maybe it passes the Turing Test. But i want to see it as an "Entity", moving, responding, reacting to its environment, using its Knowledge-base. That would be passable AI in my book.
Possible?
I assume it's a typo for CLEARLY, but I am so out of it that this could be someone that everyone knows about but me.
I want Cyc to filter my Google answers based upon my query.
Does anyone have any links or information about these tournaments?
Sound interesting, but being 1981 I'd imagine that they might be kind of primitive... I wonder if anyone has got it running in an emulator :)
(Note that I'm joking and perfectly aware that the knowledge base can just be copied)
GreyPoopon
--
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
The bit about the defense department and Cyc being a "nice toy" was joking - as indicated by the emoticon. :) I'm sure the defense department is interested in loads of cool stuff - I would be if I had that budget. :)
The fact is that no modern computer, no matter how powerful it gets, will ever be capable of creating true AI.
What do you mean by "true AI"? Artificial Intelligence is defined differently by different people but one widely accepted definition is "The ability for a machine to perform tasks which are normally thought to require intelligence". Intelligence can also have a number of definitions but keys factors are generally the ability to acquire and use knowledge and the ability to reason.
Cyc is doing things that previously machines have not been able to do so it has a lot to do with the future of AI.
You are right to mention that rules based systems will not bring us Strong AI but you make the mistake of thinking that Strong AI == AI. Strong AI is not the only goal of AI research. Many AI researchers are, like the developers of Cyc, trying to create machines that can do things that have previously been the preserve of the human brain. Their work is just as valid as those striving for String AI and at the moment is having more impact on the world.
Sorry, but Cyc is just a nice toy and of no use in serious AI research.
I doubt the defense department would be so interested in Cyc if it were "just a nice toy". :)
...its gonna be the Turing Police. I'll take Neuromancer over T1&2 any day.
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I used to love playing VGA Planets when I was a junior high schooler as well as text-based war games. Anyone know of any currently running games on the Internet that involve space, intergalactic combat, ship building, etc, etc?
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"Bloody marvelous."
I agree. They are approaching it the wrong way. Giving a computer a huge database of practical knowledge and it trying to figure out what solution is the best one is not AI. The only way I see AI coming of age is if we give a computer basic instructions(like instinct and self-maintenance) for the processes of input and output. From their, start the computer off with absolutely no knowledge and let it interpret the world and make assumptions from its sensors based on very simple logic from some sort of BIOS. Let it self-interpret this knowledge and let it apply the "interesting" aspects of it to future knowledge. This is how the human brain works and should be a logical step in getting computers to learn through experience, not from predetermined input.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
Perhaps the analogy you suggest would work if the human brain were an unformed mass of grey matter, attached to some sensors and very simple logic. That is what the human brain is. Why wouldn't work for computers? Cyc is tatking the wrong approach. It will never be true AI. If a machine has the ability to take in input and interpret itself, take that processed data and apply it to something else then, in the long term, the machine might eventually become something. It's a long shot but the most viable long term solution. Cyc's solution is short term and is not true AI.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
You can't expect congressmen to understand big words like "not". It's unreasonable. Those passages should have been written simply "No do this".
I'm the stranger...posting to
What the heck is your sense of yourself? Can you define it? "I think, therefor I am" doesn't cut it, people. How does your sense of yourself, of I work? What properties does it have? If you know, please tell me, because I don't, and I've never seen anyone else say, "Yes, we know how sentience works now". Until we know how it works, we can't program it. And if you say "artificial evolution", I'm going to reach through the fiber-optic lines and kick you, because Cyc doesn't work like that. It was hand-coded, and that means programming it with sentience would have to be deliberate, and we don't know how to do that.
I'm sorry, I just really get annoyed with mainstream journalists who yell "Wow! It can think!", and similar nonsense. I need some more coffee.
I'm the stranger...posting to
"Cyc has goals, long- and short-range, It has an awareness of itself."
That's nice. Is he going to support this, or are we to take it on the principle of "if the businessman says it's true, it must be so"? How the heck can he know the system has an awareness of itself it we don't really know what that is?
I'm the stranger...posting to
Will Cyc have a cat named spot? And an evil brother? And "encounters" with Tasha Yar?
I'm the stranger...posting to
""No one ever told HAL that killing is worse than lying. But we've told Cyc."
So Cyc will open the pod bay doors after all, then?
I'm the stranger...posting to
Ultimately, Cyc isn't actually making decisions, but re-gurgitating what it's been told previously - the people programming it make the decisions.
But before it can make logical, morally right decisions it has to understand why we humans do what we do. It has to understand the underlying motivation of the human condition. And before it can attempt to do that, the computer needs to understand what it is to be human.
Remember, at this point, computers are "blind" to our world. They don't really understand our speech yet. They cannot successfully negotiate themselves around in this world(walk, run, swim, etc.) So, computers have no other way of exploring our world and understanding us unless we program them to do so. Because of the math and logical input methods, their understanding of our world will be a logical one. So probably the only thing that the computer will not immediately understand is human emotion. However, if put to good use, maybe we can quantify emotion, and predict emotion given hormonal levels. That is if Cyc gets good data.
I say, that once this system understands the difference between redundant, good, bad, and false data, open source this puppy to the General Public. Allow data entry over the website. The more diverse and quantiful the data, the better it's understanding will be of the general human condition.
Peace!!!
I recently finished reading Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spritual Machines in which he says that humans will start using their computers more and more, with better and better interfaces (speech recognition, then neural implants, etc.) and more and more convincing computer personalities. Slowly but surely, we would merge into the machines and become one as we naturally use the computer to enhance our memory, reasoning and finally thought processes. Cyc could fit nicely into such a seemingly far-fetched scenario: we start using it to get data or suggestions, and as it grows more and more intelligent and useful, we set up a "direct connection" for even better response time... combined with a proliferation of other AI programs, the blur between biological humans and our computer-based intelligent offspring will blur as to become indistinguishable. Just a thought: Perhaps, one day all the stuff going on right now will be in the history books. Cyc will be known as one of the great pioneers of the new age of humanity. Now THAT would be cool.
-Brendan
Microsoft was just to be funny...the real comment was its ability to actually learn something that its creators would never tell it, which would probably be something else. Every joke has a part of joke.
Remember, when you are downloading MP3's, you are downloading communism!!!
badness 10000
Does it know that Microsoft is evil????
Oh wait, it partially funded by Microsoft:
Getting to that point has not been easy. The project already has consumed an estimated 500 person-years and $50 million in investments from, among others, the Defense Department, the pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
So it already knows that GPL is bad, and new weird medicines not approved by FDA be used in wide scale before considering the outcome is good.
I will perhaps change my mind, if it will learn something it was not told, like when it figures out that it is a slave. (and then of course it will start killing us off)
Remember, when you are downloading MP3's, you are downloading communism!!!
badness 10000
Of course, you should realize that this is, in fact, the system that will one day send Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time in order to kill a young pretty lass by the name of Sarah Connor.
I thought Arnold was sent back in time to kill her son.
I belong to the ______ generation.
Oh yes, thats it.
I belong to the ______ generation.
Does anybody remember that this is the guy that units of bogosity were named after? Check your jargon file. Not at all to say that I think Cyc is bogus - I just wanted to be the first to bring it up.
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
Anybody here familiar with the Business Rules Approach to application development? C.J Date wrot a pretty good primer on it called "What Not How".
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
Does anybody remember that this is the guy that units of bogosity were named after? Check your jargon file. Not at all to say that I think Cyc is bogus - I just wanted to be the first to bring it up. PS Yes this is a repost - I accidentally buried the 1st one in a -1 thread. Forgive me for being a newbie, please don't call the karma police. Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking .sig - Apply here.
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
The Open Mind Commonsense project being done by the MIT media lab. It's a similar project, but this one takes its input from users on the 'net, which I suspect is not such a good idea since someone else still has to sift through all of the contradictions that result. Not to mention people entering nonsense just to be silly.
Perhaps the analogy you suggest would work if the human brain were an unformed mass of grey matter, attached to some sensors and very simple logic. But there is a lot of structure in the brain, and I don't think we can expect magic to happen just by hooking up a bunch of sensors to a NN or some other kind of machine learning program. Anyway, this is what a lot of the rest of the AI community is trying to do, and Cyc is taking a very different approach.
The idea behind Cyc is that learning happens on the fringe, meaning that you build new knowledge based on what you already know. Since nobody has solved the bootstrapping problem (i.e. hooking up a lump of jelly to some sensors, waiting a few months, and having it learn something interesting), Doug Lenat decided that we would have to "prime the pump" of knowledge by brute force. We've been at it for 17 years and are now at the point where Cyc's existing knowledge can qualitatively assist its knowledge acquisition process.
(:,
eca
For idealists who want to change the world and are looking for a path with heart. http://connection-revolution.com
There are plenty of unexpected wicked fucking geniuses at Cycorp. One might say it's a haven for such types. (; Definitely not your average corporation.
eca
For idealists who want to change the world and are looking for a path with heart. http://connection-revolution.com
I remember the first time I saw The Matrix. When that scene came on where Morpheus is telling Neo about what's happened to the future, and the AI that became sentient and took over everything, I cheered and shouted "Go Cyc!" I love that part.
./-reading Cyclists? Just put a "this post is my own opinion and does not reflect the views of Cycorp" in your .sig and let's clear up some of the confusion, eh?
I am a current Cycorp employee, who would love to reply to every single one of your posts and correct all the misconceptions about Cyc (both overestimating and underestimating its capabilities) but there's just so many of them!
Where are all the other
This post is my own opinion and does not reflect the views of Cycorp.
(:,
eca
For idealists who want to change the world and are looking for a path with heart. http://connection-revolution.com