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.
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.
(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.
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?
But have they told Cyc not to use humans as batteries?
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 : )
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 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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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". :)