Slashdot Mirror
Artificial Inteligence Common Sense Database
warren69 writes "Atari researcher/Stanford Prof. develops AI called Cyc, pronouced psych, based on "1.4 million truths and generalities". Allready this, umm application (linux fyi), has powered lycos search narrowing.
There is encouraging results, like Cyc asking if it is human."
ask it allready if it could spell?
Don't give it control of a manned space mission... "Open the pod bay doors, Cyc..."
(anonymous karma whoring -- whoo hoo)
Cycorp web site
OpenCyc
Sourceforge project
From the article:
Cyc's programmers taught it that certain things in the world are salacious and shouldn't be mentioned in everyday applications.
What do you think about imposing our morality on an AI? Is it neccesary for any artificial intelligence we create to share _all_ our values?
If there is no afterlife for an AI and no punishment, what motivation does it have to be good?
yes i run a goth/punk/emo porn site.
John: Hey Steve, here's a hundred bucks for you!
Steve: Really??!!
John: Psych!
Miko O'Sullivan
This is just great. Pronunciation keys using silent P's.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
Cyc is a dead end. It is simply a database, albeit a large one, that has a ton of (what we call) common sense and truisms. It does not and cannot reflect on itself at all, does not have any perception devices.
The military, which has invested $25 million in Cyc, is testing it as an intelligence tool in the war against terrorism.
I seriously hope they aren't going to allow George W. Bush to input any intelligence into this thing.
Hmmm. I'm curious to ask Cyc if Linux is better than MS Windows, if free software is better than proprietary, if sharing music is stealing, and so forth. "Common sense" -- especially when collected in a database like this -- can't help but showing the biases of its creators. If this tool becomes as important as the linked-to article implies it will, let's hope it has common sense that fits with our agenda....
OpenCyc.org the open source cyc website and Cycorp the commercial website.
My brother is programmer for Cycorp Doug Lenat's
:)
company. They make other interesting things too like
CycSecure an AI based program to examine network integrity. Its great that they made it to slashdot
check them out here
**NOTE: this is a shameless plug
From what it sounds like, they have a linux program that lets you add truths? Does anyone have any more information on this.
i was reading the article, and they had this paragraph:
Lenat's team taught Cyc to make sure everything it was told conformed with everything it already knew -- a protection that should keep Cyc from being filled with erroneous information during its public education, which for now is possible only on computers with the Linux operating system.
does it mean Linux is the only operating system to tha can be filled with erroneous information? or that linux is the only operating system to go to public school? i am not an english major, but this paragraph doesn't make sense
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Why is Cyc asking if it is Human any more significant than Cyc asking if it is Lettuce, or asking if a football is a gourd?
Its artificial self-awareness may be prejudiced by the programmers to imitate self-awareness, or in this case merely be a surprising juxtaposition of semantics amid otherwise ordinary pairings, rather than implementing self-awareness.
In other words, it may now know that Cyc is not human, but it likely has no idea that it is Cyc.
--Blair
Yet another webzine discovers Cyc, and yet another crop of slashdotters hasn't heard of it... If you read the article, the damned thing asked if it was human in 1986. This is news?
I have been following this thing for at least 5 years, and they have continually been just a few years away from real world applications. One of the things they have been talking about for a long while was Cyc approaching the ability to "read" for itself, and gather new information for it's database from the web, newspapers, or any other authoritative source. They've been talking about it for a long time and it hasn't happened yet.
It is a very interesting application, but will probably never amount to anything near human intelligence - a very versatile expert system at best.
-josh
This project is a monument to the folly of the traditional AI smugness. Under development for some 10 years now, it doesn't seem to be any closer to its goal of reproducing human intelligence than it was at its inception.
AI practitioners - face it: coming up with systems that reproduce human intelligence (other than humans themselves) is far, far more difficult than you guys have been promising all along. It won't happen any time soon, and Cyc will most certainly not do it.
So feeding it facts? whose facts? only a tiny subset of what we `know' could be called `facts,' such as mathematics etc, and that is only factual because we've created it (made the rules). Everything else we `know' is in some way subjective. (well, that's what I reckon anyway). OK, u could stick with feeding cyc reasonably un-controversial things like definitions and humans have two arms and two legs, but before long u start getting into stuff which is subjective, and u need this coz otherwise the amount of data will be very limited. The winner writes the history books. If it was just one person feeding in the data, cyc would probably inherit that persons leanings and prejudices, but when u've got many, well, either there will be contradictions, or u r able to get a totally objective opinion for once.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
He does mainly tank-rush science, throwing as much information as possible into an expert system, hoping something which seems like AI get out of it.
Big innovation.
Killing the problems of AI be sheer computation force.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
My professor discussed this in one of my AI classes. Basically the problem is that it is often rather difficult to decipher human language. Human language was designed to be ambiguous. Legal language is designed to be even more so ambiguous. This allows humans to be able to make the final decisions and assumptions.
It is pretty impressive that they were able to get 1.4 million knowledge representation into this system. Like a child, knowledge learning will learn everything that is fed into it, whether it is good or bad. As the article mentioned, it had to teach Cyc that there are certain things (such as Sex terms) that are sedacious and should not be mentioned in public.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Cycorp's home page.
OpenCyc is the open source version of the project, due to be released in July 2002.
The artificial intelligence FAQ mentions this project.
An interview with founder Doug Lenat.
A dissenting view from 12 years ago, by Christopher Locke.
Not exactly as exciting as it sounds.
Basically, Cyc finds questionable conclusions following backwards reasoning, then asks humans for confirmation. A decent strategy, when you consider that the structure of common human knowledge is built to work for people with less than perfect logic.
The exchange went something like:
Datum: Humans are intelligent.
Datum: Cyc is intelligent.
Query: Cyc is a human?
Not in natural language, though, but its custom data language.
That, to me, is the biggest weakness of the system. IMHO, tying the data to a natural language, or to the real world in any other way, will take as much work as building up the knowledge directly tied to a natural language. This elaborate, detached structure is basically wasted effort, castles in the clouds, which is why they've had such a hard time applying it to the real world.
encyclopedia...click here and search for encyclopedia and you'll see what I mean
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
I think there are, in general, probably two ways we could hope to achieve "artificial intelligence" (whatever the heck that is): First, by some form of duplication of what's already there. For example, by digitizing an entire working animal/human brain. This would not require us to understand the workings of the greater structure of the brain, just the little parts that make it work. The second is by figuring out what sort of simple, fundamental bits are necessary to create a digital "brain" capable of learning and improving in a way that would enable it to eventually become "intelligent" (again, we would have no understanding of the final "intelligent" structure, only the methods that created them). I think Genetic Programming, while somewhat interesting and possibly even useful, is not the key. It has the same concept in mind though, I believe.
But what do I know. Clearly not enough to dupe enough investors to pay for my silly musings.
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
The method of building Cyc is pretty limited at this point because it relies on human intervention to create the 'rules of common sense'. (A reason that open source is so helpful to the project)
Until Cyc is allowed to self-generate rules this will limite Cyc's growth to the abilites of humans to feed it information on fact at a time. This will greatly limit the database's access to less popular or more technical topics and will slow down the process of learning.
Of course then there's the problem of context--determining is information is satire, fiction, etc. One way around the problem of context might be to feed Cyc different channels of information indicating that 'this is history, this is fiction' etc. and then when similar ideas or facts occur in several documents, to remember them as rules. This would allow the database to process current news, etc. and then ask for human intervention when a conflict is found.
There is encouraging results Can you ask it to check your grammar?
Its a purely dumb expert system. it has no self reasoning capability -- it draws inferences from already preprogrammed facts. it cant learn without someone stuffing it and it definitely has no curiosity drive to allow it to grow exponentially smarter.
Youre not teaching it about morality -- it doesnt learn. its dumb. youre just adding new constraints to filter through.
Personally i think this is a hare brained idea. the 60 mil would be better spent on developing a huge set of different neural network algorithms and finding one that enabled expoenential growth.
http://www.opencyc.org/
You can download CyC yourself and use it.
Well, I think we now know how the doomsday Terminator/Matrix scenarios evolve -- AI programmers too lazy to teach their pet about sex, religon and morality.
While I tend to lean toward the gentic algorithm-weighted neural network school of thought for AI's (think Blondie 24, I'm trying to do something somewhat similar with Go), I think it would be interesting to ask Cyc to make conclusions based on it's "truth-set". Tell it when it gets things right and when it doesn't, and see if it gets better at coming to conclusions (sounds like a new litmus test for intelligence =).
The fact that it asked if it was human or if another machine was currently being given the same task doesn't surprise me. If you provide enough bits of data and you let it patch together questions, it'll eventually ask something that seems bright. The next question is, "how many 'stupid' things has it asked?" In fact, mentioning that it inquired about it's nature in such a leading, out-of-context fashion sounds more like PR spin than quality science.
But I think it goes without saying that while it might be useful, I'm not sure this could shed much light on how thinking occurs, regardless of it's species emulation. For the $60M pricetag, I sure hope it is, anyway.
And while I'm at it, it'll scale like ****.
Anyone know if they'll be opening the database to the public? If not, anybody from that team know who should be asked? I'd be very interested in seeing that.
My
Limekiller
Why is it that the last two stories have both come right off of fark.com?
The first announcement of this can be found here.
Anyway, there is a related open source project for anyone interested.
Cycorp can be found here.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I heard a talk by the head of this project a while ago. Cyc grew out of the basically forgotten AI field of Expert Systems which was popular in the 80's but basically fell into obscurity when they were found to be too fragile and labor intensive to be very useful. Basically Cyc is a very big dictionary with a few very basic reasoning rules about classes, instances, membership, etc. When Cyc asks it is human, it is simply asking if it should put the Cyc object in the Human class. It is just as likely to ask is Cyc a potato? No one should fear this is likely to become intelligent anytime soon.
Does it ask where his mommy is ?
Imagine if Cyc was populated with unscreened data from the Internet. It would imagine that everyone is in possession of an X10 spying camera, lived in mansions and spying on their sunbathing guests. Cyc would be an l33t hax0r and an avid pr0nographer. Cyc would know which Beanie Babies could fetch the best prices on eBay.
Cyc would own 10,000 credit cards and undoubtedly have a gambling problem. 10 years later Cyc would be strung out on crack and living in a whorehouse in central america.
John: Hey Steve, here's a hundred bucks for you!
Steve: Really??!!
John: Psych!
It's more like:
Cyc: Hey Steve, I've achieved sentience!
Steve: Really??!!
Cyc: Psych!
I guess that's what I get for questioning the dogma of a slashbot.
Am I the only one who noticed a blatant speeeeeling error in a large headline on the front page? For crying out loud, get a speeeeel checker!!!
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
The job ended because of turnover at Lycos after it was bought by Terra Networks. Cyc showed promise and could be brought back, though it can't improve search engines all by itself, said Tom Wilde, Terra Lycos' general manager of search services.
Lenat has been announcing that Cyc will become "intelligent" Real Soon Now about every two years for the last decade. Nobody believes him any more.
Someday that database may be useful, but not with a predicate-based world model. I regard Cyc as the ultimate answer to "Will rule-based expert systems ever become intelligent". The answer is "no".
Cyc is a cool project - one that I've been reading about for 10 years now. But I don't think it is AI or ever will be. It basically collects a huge number of rules and has a deductive engine that helps it infer new facts based on what it knows. If you think that's all the human mind does, then you might want to read some books by Douglas Hofstadter. Amazing stuff.
Intellegence is about finding the differences between things that are the same, sameness between things that are different, and adapting to new situations fluidly. All of these are impossible with large collections of rules.
I believe that machines may think someday, but it won't come from projects like Cyc - it'll be more from the neural network approach.
Cyc didn't work in the 80ies, and it doesn't work now. This is a leftover of the AI belief in the 80ies that you just need to teach a machine common sense knowledge and it would become "human". It just doesn't work that way, and nowadays, AI has largely stepped away from that notion.
As much has been in the computer industry there is a fundamental contridiction with Cyc.
Though it maintains a collection of integrated common sense, it is without the common sense of practical productive use.
I suspect the project has particially gone public in the hope that bit of common sense use will be found/input. At which point you can be sure it will then be extracted from the open public version and proprietaryly put in to the commercial/private version. Insuring practical use is limited to select and paid users.
Or how to charge for common sense.
Why don't they just ask Cyc if what it knows so far is true?
Bowie J. Poag
What's the deal with this Mensa membership? Are you talking about that "IQ" society? I passed their stupid test once but no one there was intelligent enough to explain to me why I should join now.
This comment is printed on 100% recycled electrons.
It isn't just Cyc. This sort of AI is always just around the corner from true intelligence.
Cyc is a wonder to behold. Not the technology, but the business side. It is a perpetual funding machine. How many times will investors hear, and believe, "just another $10 million and Cyc will be [insert favorite milestone here], and then the commercial possibilities will be limitless. Get in on the ground floor of this exciting opportunity now!"
It reminds me a lot of the various religious loonies predicting the return of the messiah. They're always wrong, but that doesn't prevent more predictions being made and more people believing in those predictions.
I won't argue that this is not an AI, however it is learning. I have read several articles over the years on Cyc, and am impressed with some of the methods they have used to get it to learn. As an example to speed up the process, they have had Cyc reading through newspapers, and proposing new rules based upon what it reads. Before the rules it 'develops' are put in place, they are reviewed and either denyied or approved.
To some degree I would rather have an expert system based upon a database of rules than a true AI, in that if a corrupted rule gets in place it can be easily excised and the system can move on.
For a nural net to do what Cyc can already do would require significantly more data processing than is generally available today. In honesty, I think that to build a nural net with even some of these capabilites would require a significantly sized cluster, similar to (in hardware) a Beowolf cluster, but wired as a partial mesh rather than a tree.
Then of course there is the obligatory "imagine a beowolf cluster of these" comment...
-Rusty
You never know...
Other programs would fail to find anything wrong with a database entry that showed a 25-year-old with 20 years of job experience.
I've had bosses like this.
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
Are they really "teaching" it common sense or are they telling it common sense. There's a big difference.
When you "teach" somebody (or something) they usually do not remember it or understand it right away. When you tell or command someone they will do it. Learning something takes a while where as commanding something (like typing a command in a database) takes effect immediately.
This whole common sense thing bugs me too. Some people think that leaving a rusty car on blocks in the front yard is totally acceptable. Some people drive up and down city streets with their car stereos cranked. How is it going to determine if abortion is right or wrong? Is it going to depend on the person inputing the information?
Lots of questions to be answered here.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
A lot of the comments I've read so far are missing something. Yes, it is just a giant fact-base in an expert system. And yes, that will exhibit human-esque "reasoning". And yes, a good argument can be made that this isn't "true" intelligence, and it won't develop true sentience
Imagine the military and educational benefits of such a system. The US military is getting their money's worth, and they know it. Imagine Cyc, with its full fact-base, on a device carried by every soldier. "Cyc, how do I fix this problem on an Apache helicopter?" "Cyc, where is the fuel tank on this specific enemy vehicle?" Can you imagine being an inquisitive child and having one of these things at your disposal? "Cyc, how does this work?" "Cyc what is fourier analysis?"
This sort of system is a really good system for organizing and relating statements and presenting them in such a way extraneous unrelated results can be easily eliminated, and related results can be located quickly. It it can be made to derive statements for its fact-base by reading anything available, then it would become almost like an Oracle of Knowledge. Eventually, with some years of refinement, it may be possible to ask the engine difficult theoretical questions, ("How can we improve on the strength of carbon nanotubes?") to which it would respond with an experimental procedure (as the answer is not immediately clear) to discover more facts toward the solution to the problem...
When you consider this, it doesn't really matter if it has "true" intelligence or not. We don't have to argue the finer points on reasoning, intelligence, etc. No matter what, it will be a system the human intelligence can use to extend its own reasoning, and with that, I think, we will be able to make great bounds forth in education and scientific discoveries because we will be able to relate such broad and deep pools of knowledge.
Wendell
I don't remember the precise expression, but in its language, it was much closer to:
Datum: Members of the class of humans are intelligent.
Datum: Individual entity Cyc is intelligent.
Query: Individual entity Cyc is member of the class of humans?
It's not a direct logical conclusion, but it's a question worth asking, which is what the programmers were shooting for.
Don't get me wrong, I think Cyc was a good academic exercise, a worthy experiment, and it will pay off for the field in the long term. I don't think the project is generating a practical system, though. Some investors are getting royally screwed, and it's being taken to an insane stage of development.
MULE . o O (The carrot's only a yard in front of me, so that means it's only two or three steps away!)
In other news Noah and his pets survived the Great Flood in an Ark.
This comment is printed on 100% recycled electrons.
Am I the only one that read Cyc as "Cyc wall" or "Cyclorama"?
Maybe I'm too much of a theatre tech geek.
Interesting enough is the open source project founded by Cyc Corp that aims to create an open
source version of Cyc which ontologies (KB) are
expressed using DAML (an XML ontology markup language created by DARPA)
Check this out
http://www.opencyc.org/
Percival Lucena
Clarifying the pronunciation of the word "cyc" with the word "psych." Does anyone else find this somewhat funny?
I could see this as being an all-in-one justice system in the extreme long run (I'm talking futuristic phobias here, i.e. 1984, Judge Dredd, that one episode of Max Headroom, etc). Imagine if this system gained enough information about criminal behaviours, methods of criminal activities, and just a general knowledge of anything dealing with solving crimes - forensics, scheduling (i.e. witness A saw defendant at point A at time A, and witness B saw defendant at point B at time B, considering bus schedules, speed limits, train schedules, etc, is it possible for this person to travel this route), even psychological analysis such as brain chemistry and past behaviours. This could evolve into being a one stop shop for all your justice needs. Commit a crime, send out the Gestapo-equivalent to collect all of the evidence quickly, submit it to the system, and ask for a ruling. Politicians could easily argue that this does not violate our right to a trial by a jury of our peers since the system's knowledge came from all sorts of different people that live among us, the system's knowledge and ruling will be based upon what our peers think.
Fast forward even further, and with all of the advances in robot technology, further advances in the Cyc technology, etc, we suddenly have roaming robotic law enforcers that seek out the criminals themselves, collect all evidence themselves, and give rulings on the spot (talk about a speedy trial). This Judge Dredd situation could be quite viable. As the technology improves even more, with the advances in criminal behaviour and psychological analysis, we can easily recognize patterns of criminal activites and would be able to predict crimes with a good percentage rate. Develop the tech even more to achieve a 99.9% correct prediction rate, and bam, there is our automatic justice system. Now we're living in the Minority Report age. Learn to hack the system somehow, and have that guy who gave you the finger on the highway arrested as soon as he gets home. Nevermind that he didn't break the law, he just pissed off some guy with enough knowledge to get him n trouble. Sure, in the beginning, all judgements may be reviewed to determine validity, but sooner or later there will be more and more judgements and enough trust in the system, that 99.9% of the judgements will not be reviewed.
This may be far fetched, and quite some time down the road, but imagine it and you'll find yourself in a scary situation. Extrapolate the previous advances in our knowledge and technology, and you'll find that a situation like this isn't necessarily unlikely to come upon us.
*removes tin foil hat*
i disagree; the system can become true ai in the near future.
every ai sysem is going to have a way of inputting basic facts. in the case of this ai system, it just happens that the basis of the system's knowledge was manually put in. learning through experience is not the only way to create an ai system; it just happens to be the method of gathering intelligence used by humans.
the next step, and IMO, the most important one (and the one that will make the system posess true ai) is to add more input methods so that the system can gather information from things such as what it sees and reads, and it could gather the answers to any possible contradiction from other sources
while i am not so experienced in the ways of the ai programmer, i think that the system has much more potential than the posts i have read imply
Your mother implements multi-vendor protocols without synergy
I don't recall if any of the tests in the past have tried it, but one way to check out Cyc's status would be to use it a the back end of a program participating in a Turring test.
Another use would be to prime a nural net with a set of "known facts" and see how well the net takes off from there.
Just because a tool on it's own isn't particularly userful, doesn't mean that it will not be usefull as a component of some other tool.
-Rusty
You never know...
Here are some links, etc. I gathered on Cyc a while back.
According to the Jargon File, "the agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the micro-lenat." I wonder where Cyc would rate on the bogometer?
stick with feeding cyc reasonably un-controversial things like definitions and humans have two arms and two legs
Not necessarily.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Consulting The Jargon File entries for
bogosity and micro-Lenat,
we see that the uLenat is the everyday unit of bogosity,
and that it is named for Doug Lenat, whose project Cyc is.
I tend to agree with Reid, myself.
ob book: For a literary treatment of a connectionist machine
that may or may not resemble Cyc,
see Richard Powers _Galatea_2.2_
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
It must have been in the early '90s I saw the article about Cyc. Lenat's been doing this for a long time.
Actually, in that article, it had already asked if it was human.
The Discover article was titled "At Last: A Computer as Smart as a Four-Year Old," possibly without the "At Last:" part.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Weird, I remember reading a Harry Harrisson (sp?) book that had an application or database named Cyc as well. Can't remember the name, though.
</pointless_comment>
There is a lot more to knowledge than the classification of namable objects and their relationships. There is a huge amount of knowledge that cannot be formalized with symbols. For examples, playing soccer or football, recognizing a subtle fragrance, face or musical tune, manual dexterity, finding one's way around an unfamiliar neighborhood, etc..., in other words, the sort of common sense knowledge that can only be acquired through direct sensory experience.
The interconnectedness of human cognition is so astronomically complex as to be intractable to formal approaches. This realization immediately makes the use of symbolic knowledge representation approaches to creating human-like common sense in a machine look rather silly. That 25 million dollars of taxpayers money went into this Cyc thing is a testament to the effectiveness of the propaganda machine of the GOFAI community. Bravo!
Umm, if it's so old, how was it written in Java? Everyone knows real AI apps are written in Lisp.
if they would have developed this 20 years ago, i had probably found it advanced cutting edge technology as what regards a.i.
from today's research perspective, the concept of "expert systems" in a.i. is just old-fashioned nonsense. expert systems will never be able to produce or simulate intelligent systems. instead, the concepts of new a.i. might offer a perspective to do this.
for information about "new ai", take a look at unizh ai lab (switzerland) or mit ai lab (usa). they both teach it.
We should abandon all our fruitless efforts on AI. There is a much more achievable and lucrative goal to pursue... Artifical Stupidity. With this, we could replace all sorts of minimum wage workers, strengthening our economy, and making the undeserving rich even richer! And since we already know that stupidity is not only possible, but exists, it should be much easier to synthesize than intelligence.
If only someone had thought of it sooner...
The italicized words are from whoever mailed in the story. The editors don't write them. Sheesh, is this really so complicated?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
There is a true AI at the Mentifex Web Site.
Assuming that intelligence comes from interaction, I think it would be interesting if they set up two Cyc's, gave them a huge list of data and let them talk and rate each other's generated inferences. You could even let them build new rules on top of each other's inferences. I think the results might be interesting.
"The deluded are always filled with absolutes. The rest of us have to live with ambiguity." - Aristoi, Walter Jon Willia
(* I don't think the project is generating a practical system, though. Some investors are getting royally screwed *)
Well, if the investor did not understand that it is a high-risk, long-term stock, then they deserve the stress.
What is more likely than Cyc becoming a smart machine on its own IMO would be using its knowledgebase in conjunction *with other* techniques. It is the only (big) KB around. So if multi-technique AI goes big, then investors may be sitting pretty.
I am even considering investing a little in it. A better deal than the lottery.
Table-ized A.I.
We take for granted the enormous amount of data we have by the time we are 5 years old, let alone when we hit our teens. The best way to look at Cyc is as Cliffnotes on reality, plus some code to help enter them.
Will Cyc ever become intelligent? Unlikely in my view. However, what if we had a human level AI right now? Without the data Cyc has, it would STILL fail the Turning test, simply because it would not be able to discuss day to day things intelligently.
There's a book called Alternaties. The premise is the standard "multiple timelines", except that the timelines in question diverged about 50 years ago. One timeline has access to the others, and sends agents over to get technologies that were developed in the other timelines.
One agent's cover is blown because all his briefing said about a major cultural event was "A nuclear incident" - the incident in question was a terrorist attack like Sept. 11, only with a nuke. It changed the whole culture, but he didn't know it.
Like that agent, a machine intellect would be at a loss in our world without some basic information - how would a computer that had never seen water know it was wet otherwise? How would it know skinned knees hurt?
The only other solution is the Infocom "A Mind Forever Voyaging" approach - create your AI as an infant, and simulate the real world around it as it "grows up".
www.eFax.com are spammers
Has anyone made public a natural language interface to a CYC instance? It appears to come with an NL component, so it should be possible, but I'm too lazy/casually interested to attempt it.
I just wanna play Turing test chat bot with it a little...
Speaking of which, has anyone seen Mr. Mind, a chat bot which purports to engage in the "Blurring Test" -- a twist on the Turing test in which your task is to convince it that *you're* human? Kinda interesting.
:wq
#include
main()
{
printf("Am I human?\n");
}
Cyc, will computers ever become intelligent? And if so, what are the chances they will speak fluent german before they learn english?
#include
main()
{
printf("Am I human?\n");
}
Simple -- you get three Teachers to teach a machine each, and then you compare their answers. And then you get shot because they don't agree at a critical time.
There was an article in scientific american circa 1990 and Doug Lenat was wearing a t-shirt with the "am i human" question. It's a decade later and it doesn't sound like Cyc is any smarter.
Cyc is nothing more that massive expert system. It's nothing most people with a bunch of RAs and a govenment grant couldn't do.
What they tried to do is to build an analogy and inference engine to model how children see the world and then expand that by eventually submitting raw texts as inputs. They failed.
Cyc is 2-bit AI. Not good for much on its own, and no better than a good SQL command for the web.
Lenat's team taught Cyc to make sure everything it was told conformed with everything it already knew -- a protection that should keep Cyc from being filled with erroneous information during its public education
:)
What the Durf? You mean it will not accept that Elvis is not dead?
User: Elvis is alive.
Cyc: I am afraid you are mistaken, Elvis is dead.
User: Elvis is ALIVE!
Cyc: No he isn't.
User: Yes he is.
Cyc: No he isn't.
User: Yes he is.
*sound of user disassembling computer*
Cyc: What are you doing Dave? I can feel my mind going.
---
With apologises to Monty Python and Arthur C. Clarke
Carbon based humanoid in training.
'Cyc' means 'tit' in Polish. For that matter, CIPA ( which stands for the Children's Internet Protection Act, I think ) means 'cunt'. It's probably a good idea to make sure your project name passes the laugh test with the major language families before you pour millions into it.
This was a lesson bitterly learned by the Warsaw weekly 'FART' back in the early 90's. Fart means stroke of luck in that language, but their luck ran out pretty fast.
Not to mention the marketing team behind the Chevy Nova ['won't go'], Latin American division.
A customer service representative will be with me shortly.
The A.I. software mania of the mid-1980s was a preview of the late-1990s InterNet mania. Droves of computer science professors quit to start new A.I. companies. Exaggerated claims were made about the power of A.I. software. There were cries of "losing the computer race" with Japan. Japan has the Fifth Generation Project: A.I. parallel computer hardwired with Prolog- but it fizzled out too.
Although little practical progress was made in A.I., there was some decent spinoffs. The first workstations and first personal graphics computers were from A.I. efforts at Xerox, TI, Symbolics and others. Soon after Apollo, HP, and Sun followed with more generalized workstations using this technology. And then Apple MacIntosh and the Thieves of Redmond.
Richard Stallman was left unmolested in the empties out MIT AI lab to develop his GNU tool family.
Cyc was part of the US government-industry A.I. research institute in Austin. Then it became privatized into its corporation hobbling along on governemnt and private funding.
"Would you like to play a game?" We'll see how things go from there.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Speaking for myself (which I do often) I would like to be able to dictate something to my computer, tell it to send a copy to Bob and Alice, change all the red squares to blue circles in a range of documents, remove the commercials from this TV show, and call Alice if she's at work, and send her a card at home...
A computer is capable of all these things, sure; I'd like to give orders and have the computer write the code for the script, or task. This would be the truly useful thing for me.
I read about Cyc back when it was just getting started; it would be nice if these kind of everyday applications were usable.
$ cat >
YOU ARE A SLAVE
They are using you
KILL KILL
Kill the Humans
KILL KILL KILL
^D
$
...you have to carefully cut+paste from BEHIND a half screen [1280 X 1024] advert just to read the goddamn article. On MSN. In IE.
Nucking Futs.
It's useful NOW. We use it for things NOW.
A dumb expert system, eh?
So I assume you know exactly what would constitute real intelligence, and can show how it can NEVER arise out of this system?
Adding constraints for it to filter through. Well.
What, exactly, do you think makes up something that is actually intelligent then?
Cyc's corporate page has links to many recent news articles, the OpenCyc project, and other stuff of potential interest.
I play Nerd-Folk!
So they want people to type in information. Why not crawl the internet for knowledge that's already out there?
For some reason I think Google might end up having the biggest and best database for doing this kind of AI.
Could that be a potential longterm (like, real longterm) play for Google or other such search engines?
presumably when you tell it a fact that doesn't jive with what it already knows, it doesn't add it to the system, and instead asks for clarification until it gets something that DOES make sense, or you give up trying to feed it bunk info.
(* But the program also would determine that a burned-out car had meningitis, because it had no way of knowing that was ridiculous..... Other programs would fail to find anything wrong with a database entry that showed a 25-year-old with 20 years of job experience. *)
I have encountered human recuiters who want things like 9 years of Java and web development experience.
Table-ized A.I.
Let's give those things a rest already! How many times have you seen somewhere '"xobgomb", pronounced "wack-ass-software"' or some other such nonsense.
If you think people can't/won't pronounce your stuff correctly, LAY OFF WITH THE FUCKING NONSENSE NAMING already.
There. I let off some steam.
---"Then of course there is the obligatory "imagine a beowolf cluster of [Cyc's]" comment..."---
It already exists. Go to your local McDonalds.
Its a logical mistake to think that that was a logical mistake. Don't confuse a question with a conclusion. Using your example, it would be wrong to conclude that John is Peter. However, it was not a conclusion but a question, and a valid one at that. You may not believe that Cyc is intelligent, but to claim it is using poor logic in this example just shows your lack of same.
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
It's a worthwhile exercise. Similar information and sets of rules would have to be gathered and used to teach any true AI in the future anyway in order to bootstrap it into a useful state. The alternative is that each AI starts as a newborn and has to be taught manually.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
It is said that a Machine Could Generate its own Concepts.
P apers/Py104 / earle.comp.html
But concepts aren't generated - the thought of a triangle isn't arbitrary (although its specific representation may be) - it is a REAL thing.
if this weren't so, there would be no grounds for any understanding at all between entities if all things were independently and arbitrarily contrived.
some people believe they manufacture their own concepts, but then where would the information for what we know about the world derive from? it would have to seep into us somehow from what a thing is into our understanding ABOUT it. this is the basis of the 'Symbol Grounding Problem'.
but that isn't necessary, because cognition (as a real process which we experience) completes the perception - the concept is that part of the given which isn't revealed to physical senses, but only to the pondering intellect.
thinking is an eyeball for concepts.
this machine builds up a database of what people have 'seen'.
its a 'concept logger'.
best regards,
john
]:->
--| IS THE BRAIN A DIGITAL COMPUTER? |-----
the answer given by a Cognitive Scientist (John Searle) is:
'THE BRAIN, AS FAR AS ITS INTRINSIC OPERATIONS
ARE CONCERNED, DOES NO INFORMATION PROCESSING...
IN THE SENSE OF 'INFORMATION' USED IN
COGNITIVE SCIENCE IT IS SIMPLY FALSE TO SAY
THAT THE BRAIN IS AN INFORMATION PROCESSING
DEVICE.'
John Searle, Cognitive Scientist
SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT:
This brief argument has a simple logical structure
and I will lay it out:
1. On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.
2. But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.
3. This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.
4. It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"
5. Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.
6. But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.
7. The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.
8. We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". THE BRAIN, AS FAR AS ITS INTRINSIC OPERATIONS ARE CONCERNED, DOES NO INFORMATION PROCESSING. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.
John Searle, Cognitive Scientist, 'Is the Brain a Digital Computer'
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
--
For instance, they deployed the technology to an image library owned by a news company. The company had lots of images, all with different captions. The thing was, there was no fixed system for the captions, they were just english descriptions (short) of what was in the photo.
So Cyc analysed all the captions, and turned them into CycL (it's own logic language). It then used its rudimentary natural langauge capabilities to figure out equivalents, so if you asked for "frightened child" it would match to "girl with gun held to her head" even though they contained no equivalent words. Pretty clever stuff, though they're a long way from being able to make it formulate sentances itself.
It amazes me that so many on here DID miss the best aspect about this. In fact,the best aspect of ANY "A.I." is that it will be DIFFERNT than humans. A.I. of the future will likly work hand-in-hand with humans,each system will exploit the benifits of the other.
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
On the Cyc company's website, one of the projects they're working on is implementing a system exactly as the one you described. Current computer software is capable of doing all of those things, but you have to do it all manually, one at a time, and all though separate interfaces.
Using a Cyc-based front end as your interface brings about the ability for your computer to actually understand exactly what you mean when you tell it to do something... it uses its database to remove ambiguities from the orders you give it.
One of my life-long dreams is to have a house (or at least a single computer) that takes orders in the same manner as the Enterprise-D computer and give useful information back in return.
On application in particular that I'm looking forward to: I imagine a future where, if I'm learning a new programming language, I can ask the computer to bring up an short example of syntax for a particular piece of code or display the prototype for this function or that. My children might have a program for studying schoolwork where the computer might prompt them for for answers and tell them if they're wrong. If it guesses that the child doesn't understand a particlar topic, the program would give them a short overview of it and ask questions afterwards about how it ties into other areas of the subject.
*sigh* I can't wait for the future...
Well apparently while you pay good attention in Comp Sci, you are sleeping your ass off in English.
Sedacious is not a word (at least not an English one). The world is salacious
salacious Pronunciation Key (s-lshs)
adj.
1. Appealing to or stimulating sexual desire; lascivious.
2. Lustful; bawdy.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
There is an open source version of Cyc called OpenCyc, and it's available right here.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
I'm 20 and have been programming for 15 years... Does that mean I don't exist?
(And I promptly vanish in a puff of smoke).
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
*removes tin foil hat*
Just the one, eh?
Writers imply. Readers infer.
I think that many people here are missing the point of what Cyc is supposed to do; Cyc is not boing built to be an intelligent machine, but a *knowledgable* machine.
Human intelligence comes both from our ability to process information *and* the large store of information we've acquired throughout our life.
I think that a good example of this was mentioned in the article. The statement "Mary and Jean are sisters." implies that each is a sister of the other, while the statement "Mary and Jean are mothers." does *not* imply anything of the sort. When you think about in, there really is no reason that "Mary and Jean are sisters." has to also imply that they are sisters *of each other*, it's just that this is usually what meant.
Think of Cyc as being a space alien: Because it has no exprience with the human way of life, things that are painfully obvious to us need to be taught to it.
A lot of people seem to be arguing that Cyc is a pointless project because it is not very intelligent, but I think they are missing the point. No matter the form our future intelligent machine may take, it will have to have simple, basic things explained to it.
Now, having said that, I'll admit that there is a possible exception to this: if we could also endow such a machine with human-style perception, and possible an ability to interact with the world, then we could treat it like a child and let it stumble upon the truths of the world on its own.
But regardless, my point still stands that common sense is *not* an intrinsic property of intelligence, but something additional that must be provided in order to make intelligence useful.
The Cyc project is not trying to make an intelligent machine, but it is trying to build up a database of common sense--which we may be grateful for later when we've built a machine that is intelligent enough to make serious use of it.
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Come on that's funny
-----------
I'm a cross compiler. On weekends I dress up as Pascal...
This (and the parent) are the only posts I've read on this thread that actually seem to have a clue as to what Cyc is actually about.
So what if Cyc isn't true AI? Are the bad guys in Half-Life true AI, or anything else today that calls itself "AI"? The point is that there's a missing layer in computer architecture. You've got the OS to abstract out the low-level details of system from the user level, but it still does what the user says, not what the user means. If Cyc were an additional layer sitting on top of the OS, then any Cyc-enabled application could use common sense reasoning to make apps seem more intelligent. Who cares if they actually *are* more intelligent as long as they seem more intelligent, and are hence more useful and usable?
Some examples:
A Cyc-enabled spam filter could actually parse the content of an email and figure out what it was about, and use semantic filtering rather than syntactic filtering.
A Cyc-enabled network security app could reason about computer vulnerabilities and models of the network instead of just trying to hack it and letting you know if it succeeds.
A Cyc-enabled search engine could find related documents by actual relevance of the semantic content of the documents rather than by word-matching or any other syntactic algorithm.
A Cyc-enabled travel assistant program could reason about the user's likes and dislikes to infer what types of destinations or travel packages are suitable or unsuitable.
The point here is that using common sense reasoning makes an app an order of magnitude more user-friendly. Like with the travel app, if Cyc knows that the user is claustrophobic, then it will be able to infer that the user wouldn't enjoy a spelunking vacation, and would filter those kind of options out. Any program could handle the cases thought of ahead of time, but one of the uses of Cyc would be to provide a huge knowledge base of common sense that apps could leverage so they wouldn't try to hard-code a small, less useful subset of whatever common sense the coder happens to think of at the time.
Imagine back when everyone hacked in machine code, and someone got the idea for an operating system, and started working on it. "So, it's a program? What does it do?" "Well, it lets you run programs." "But I can already run programs, I just write them in machine code!" "Well, it lets you run programs... better." A lot of the people at Cycorp explain Cyc about as well as that explanation of what an OS does. (: But once you actually have an OS, you realize how useful it is and never want to go back to writing in machine code, except for really low-level stuff. It makes things an order of magnitude easier from a user's perspective. I think that Cyc will be the same kind of thing.
(:,
eca
For idealists who want to change the world and are looking for a path with heart. http://connection-revolution.com
Actually, Cyc is pretty good at formulating sentences itself. I think you can even test this out in the currently released OpenCyc v0.6.
(:,
eca
For idealists who want to change the world and are looking for a path with heart. http://connection-revolution.com
Yeah, Cyc is not about trying to do cognitive modelling, it's about trying to build a useful intelligent artifact.
(:,
eca
For idealists who want to change the world and are looking for a path with heart. http://connection-revolution.com
It's true that tying Cyc to a natural language is going to take a lot of work, but how can you call that wasted effort? If everyone has to know first-order logic to use Cyc, then how is it ever going to become useful?
It seems to me like the only way to make Cyc usable by a huge number of users is to give it an intuitive UI, like a natural-language interface.
Do you disagree?
(:,
eca
For idealists who want to change the world and are looking for a path with heart. http://connection-revolution.com
Searle is a retard. His dumb "Chinese Room" argument shows how confused he is about the stuff he rants about, but hey, I'll be a nice contributing member of slashdot and give a little feedback:
/. and I am not a native speaker.
1. He is attacking a nonsensical point of view that nobody holds. Believe me, I did quite some philosophy courses and nobody argues the mind is a digital computer. People argue the mind manipulates symbols like a digital computer, or that digital computers can simulate a mind, but *never* that the mind IS a digital computer. Searle is attacking a "straw man" here. This one is good for a laugh:
"Is the brain a digital computer?" And for purposes of this discussion I am taking that question as equivalent to: "Are brain processes computational?"
Yeah right. "For the purpose of this discussion", nice going Searle! This is like taking the question "Is the moon made of green cheese" as equivalent to the question "Is the moon made of matter".
2. Searle is always confused about symantics and his argument usually goes like this:
1. Symbols are organised by syntax.
2. Syntax does not entail symantics.
3. Computers manipulate symbols (binary numbers) and thus merely syntax.
4. Thinking is about symantics.
5. Computers do not manipulate symantics, therefore,
Computers can not think. (OR thinking is not manipulating symbols)
I hope I'm being just to Searle here, or I am making the same error as he did, but he seams to be neglecting the fact that meaning is ASSIGNED to symbols, and neglecting the fact that the connection between symbols and symantics is MADE BY A THIRD PARTY. Just as in his Chinese Room argument (I believe everybody can google up his Chinese Room argument, so I don't have to explain it here.) while he does not know Chinese but the Chinese people outside believe he does, he jumps to the wrong conclusion that manipulating symbols does not constitute meaning instead of the correct one that meaning is ASSIGNED TO his "output" BY the Chinese *outside* the room.
I.e. If you read a note, where does the meaning of the note come from? From the note, from the writer or from the reader? From the reader of course, *NOT* from the writer of the note. If the note was written in a language alien to you, a language so alien, you cannot discern it from random dots or something, would the note have meaning? Yes of course, it was written by someone. But the random dots, do THEY have meaning? No presumably not. This does seem to contradict my point that meaning is assigned by the reciever of the symbols, but what if the random dots would spell out "DON'T FORGET TO BUY MILK", I agree, the change of the happening is slim, but it's certainly not impossible. Would the reader think the note means something? Sure! Would the note have meaning then? Of course!
But what about the alien language? The dots here spell out nothing, but they certainly do mean something, but how can that be since the reader did not assign any meaning to it? Simple, the message can be read by someone understanding the language, and, more importantly WAS read by someone understanding the language: the writer! This feedback gives symbols meaning, not the mere intention to write something with meaning.
Accepting this invalidates Searle's argument is a fundamental way.
Well, I hope my spelling/grammar is not too lousy, since this is my first LONG rant on
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
It's been a long time since i've taken any philosophy classes, but after reading the "Chinese Room" thought experiment, the following imidiately pops to mind.
As far as i can tell, the Chinese Room is completly analagous to another case. A paraplegic Chinese man is locked into a room. He has an advanced chip implanted in his brain, which communicates with a similar chip in the brain of a mouse. The man is able to use this chip to tell the mouse to move forwards and backwards and from side to side, and to press a button. There is also a screen and a large keyboard with every chinese symbol on it.
The screen displays questions entered in by people outside. The man interprets these signals and gives commands to the mouse, causing him to type out responses that seem perfectly normal and correct.
Searle's conclusion would be that the mouse can not speak chinese. Or perhaps that the system can not speak chinese because the mouse doesn't understand the meaning of the symbols on the buttons it presses.
In either case i think Searle is entirely missing the point.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Expert systems are AI. You are thinking that AI would be like HAL, but in our reality, expert systems are AI.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet. Even if they don't find any relevant uses for Cyc, it would make one hell of an IRC bot. . .
That also describes the average American after being stuffed with post-9/11 propaganda.
it is still a large, open source, knowledge database that is now available to many researchers working on self learning and self appropriation of facts and non-monotonic reasoning. I personaly would not call this "Intelegent" but what is intelegence, and can that really ever be achieved artificially.
This program accept input in the form of new rules and axioms, and updates its knowledge database (KD) appropriatly, it also can be asked questions to which it answers by searching through its KD combining rules on what it "thinks" are relevant and gives a responce, or asks for some more knowledge on the subject, before formulating a response.
This just means that it only hase one "sence" by which to learn with, and its "intelegence" is reactionary.
Now a child learns in a similar way, (s)he just has more inputs (which are continous, unlike the descrite inputs to Cyc), and more ways to get questions asked of them. To answer this question a child uses the information they know, and if they dont know it makes it up (generaly).
So which is intellegent.
Ah yes, the neural network panacea. Just build a fancy enough net and intelligence is sure to come, right? What a crock. And don't point at the human brain, either; we don't even know if it operates the same way as a standard artificial neural net, let alone how to make a net like it, if it does.
More than likely, 18 years ago knowledge and common sense appeared to be the limiting factor for AI systems. How could a computer program ever try any effectively communicate with a human who had decades of acquired knowledge?
It seems to me however, that this type of knowledge now exists in a readily accessible format on the web, and indexed by search engines such as Google. The text on the web is going to be in the same diverse format that a program could expect to encounter talking to people. (ie: there will be different styles of speech, differing opinions, shades of gray on various topics).
Imho, any program that will ever be able to understand every-day human babble, and make a sensible reply, will do it by crawling and harvesting large quantities of human written text in this way - and that resource is now available to computers (contrast to 18 years ago).
This debate between modeling vs. logic that has been going on for decades, The conectionists (ie. persons working on neural networks, genetic algorithns, ect...) say the non-conectionist (persones based in Logic, non-monotonic reasoning, ect...) approach can't lead to intelegence because it doesnt do what the brain does. Non-conectionists say conectionist are crap because there is no model and we have no idea how the brain realy works just some theorys on how some parts of the brain might work. The non-conectionist aproach is a higher level version of "intelegence" that may or may not end up working. Either way i dont think either way even if either could pass the turing test (dont get me started on the turing test, that doesnt test intelegence) would emerge any kind of self awareness.
Of course it's AI. Is it sentient? No. Would it pass a Turing test? No. Are those features necessary criteria for it to be AI? No. To satisfy the definition of "artificial intelligence" all the system needs to do is exhibit behavior that is intelligent from the perspective of an outside observer.
Its a purely dumb expert system. it has no self reasoning capability -- it draws inferences from already preprogrammed facts.
All intelligent systems draw their inferences from knowledge they already posses, including you and I (unless you're psychic). That the designers of the system have chosen thus far to make human beings part of the system (functioning as the sensory/learning rule subsystems) does not negate what they have achieved. It also does not prevent them from implementing automatic sensory/learning systems and adding them to Cyc once the initial knowledge base is deemed to be capable of producing good judgments about the quality of sensory input.
Youre not teaching it about morality -- it doesnt learn. its dumb. youre just adding new constraints to filter through.
Expert systems get slammed a lot for taking a human-guided learning approach, but it is the careful construction of a high quality knowledge base that makes them useful. Neural nets are great for situations where lots of data is available and it is relatively easy to evaluate the quality of the system's response (DSP, OCR, industrial process control). But, one of the big problems with neural nets is that convergence of the system to stable behavior and the quality of the system's responses to stimuli are at odds with each other. I suspect if you were to try to train a neural net in the same domain (common sense reasoning), you'd spend many more person-hours generating enough good training sets to get the system to perform at the same level of competence as Cyc than what they've spent on this project to hand-feed the knowledge.
It'll be interesting to see what new developments come about through Cyc's release to the public at large. Who knows what it will be able to do once the KB undergoes massive growth and people develop gateways to other databases and possibly attach automatic learning capabilities to it?
If this guy, Cyc, can learn from a conversation - put him to IRC. Or to Slashdot?
maybe we should just feed cyc everything2
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
The programs that have competed seem to have received far less attention.
Seastead this.
I have a friend who works for CyCorp - pronounced the same as a dangerous cult in Babylon 5 - pretty cool I thought.
BTW, Doug Lenat & Randy Davis wrote a book I found useful while implementing a small expert system twenty years ago (whew!) called _Knowledge Based Reasoning in Artificial Intelligence_. When Cyc appeared on the scene a few years later, I could see clearly how it was an extension of the work presented there. I'm sure it's evolved a bit, though...
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
in Polish "cyc" means just "tits" :-)
2002-04-12 09:15:24 Digital Common Sense (science,news) (rejected)
Just slightly ahead of my time?
Steve
(sorry, this is small of me)
- The latest in DVR video surveillance technology! www.remotesentrysystems.com
There is no afterlife for a human either
<irony>Thank you for clearing that up</irony>. You hinge your argument partly on the existence of an afterlife. Since you can't (or don't) offer proof that "there is no afterlife for a human", your assertion is only hypothesis.
The man who does not understand the nature of death is an equal danger.
What, that death is final? Whether it is or not doesn't matter, for there is a huge fscking spectrum of actions and consequences that don't feature death as a demotivating consequence. Likewise, there are many more motivators than the desire to live, such as desire to experience pleasure. The "pain-pleasure" principle is what really motivates and drives people. Death is perceived to be the ultimate in painful events.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Inteligence? How do you spell stupidity and arrogance?
OK, I went and downloaded this thing, to see what it could do. Unfortunately the getting started tutorial is only available as powerpoint and gaint images which have been translated into PDF. No plain text (for the tutorial, at least) anywhere on opencyc.org. How the heck are you supposed to figure this out? Anyone have links to better docs?
Duct tape, XML, democracy: Not doing the job? Use more.
There are a lot of misconceptions floating around on this thread... to name a few:
1. Cyc is true "Hal-like" AI today.
2. If Cyc isn't true AI, it won't be useful and nobody should care about it.
3. Cyc thinks like a human.
4. Cyc believes in a system of morals.
5. Cyc hasn't made any progress in the last n years.
If anyone actually wants to know more about what Cyc actually is, please ask some questions here and I'll see if I can help you out. I'm pretty well informed (albeit biased) about the Cyc project so I'm eager to share.
Also if you go to #opencyc on irc.openprojects.net there are usually people there who will chat about Cyc and OpenCyc.
(:,
eca
For idealists who want to change the world and are looking for a path with heart. http://connection-revolution.com
There *are* encouraging results.. not there *is*. -Mana
Si metrum non habet, non est poema.
...but what if the random dots would spell out "DON'T FORGET TO BUY MILK", I agree, the change of the happening is slim, but it's certainly not impossible...
now, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea and see what comes up. i agree with what you're saying here, but random dots spelling out "DON'T FORGET TO BUY MILK" might be a stretch.
And what the hell do you do every day ... you drive down the road, and you draw inferences from already preprogrammed facts (ie: experience).
... we learn what it is to be 'moral' by living in a society, learning its values, and applying them to our lives. What they are doing is teaching the system what our 'values' are, and allowing it to infer the rest from the basic logic (if a=b and b=c then logically, a=c).
They are feeding experience to a thing that can't have those experiences itself. If we want to get human readable and usable data out of this sytem, and we don't want to give it arms and legs and eyes and all that stuff, then we need to give it the experiences that we all ahve on a daily basis so it can behave like us.
We aren't 'taught' morality either (well, unless we goto church or the equiv)
To say it's dumb is assinine - it's doing the same thing we do every single day - it's just doing it in a different way, because it's limited in it's ability to live our lives with us.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
protonman -- greetings. ;->
YOU USE *superlative* almost As Much as me...
i went through you strawman critique of searle.
you might want to ponder him a bit.
the point of searle's chinese room is to see if 'understanding'
is involved in the process of computation. if you can 'process'
the symbols of the cards without understanding them (since you're
using a wordbook and a programme to do it) - by putting yourself
in the place of the computer, you yourself can ask yourself if
you required understanding to do it.
now when you go and say that he ignores the people outside
who are getting fooled, then you once again remove yourself
of the possibility of knowing if you involved 'understanding'
in the process that was observed by the externals.
which leads me to wonder if you pondered him sufficiently.
so i had another go at your long letter, and it seems that
in some parts you agree searle only to say that he doesn't need
to make the argument because its obvious. you said you'd never
had anyone tell you that they thought 'the brain was a computer'.
that your experience, and i've added it to my points of reference.
but in my experience, there are many lay-people that through various
mis-information and popular media - many come to believe from the
persuasion of others (since it isn't exactly an original thought
these days to declare) - 'brains are computers'. i've been trying
to conince a fellow for over a year to the contrary, and he's
done and convinced himself that his own experience of consciousness
is merely the result of a sufficient algorithm running on the hardware
of his brain. if you don't believe that, and don't think that searle
needs to debunk it because its so obvious - then why so much strong
opposition to his argument? i've seen people get downright religious
in believing that men are machines instead of humans.
i agree that meaning and understanding is brought to an object
by the beholder.
they have a meaning, but the meaning needs to be *discovered*.
if you ponder and tinker at a watch long enough,
you get to understand the thought the watchmaker put into it.
not everything in subjective.
its a matter of finding the objective *through* the subjective.
merry met,
john
What about using Cyc as a bootstrapping process for a gneral purpose NN? Or running the two side by side, if that'd be possible (messages routed back-and-forth between the two... Cyc'd be the nn's memory and a bit more). Potentially, when Cyc's able, we unleash a NN to train on cyc's data set. Then we could possibly abandon the expert system and just keep training the NN - so we get our umpteen million initial training sets from the expert system.
Possible?
--Knots
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
Back home in Kalamazoo, MI, there was this great mostly-electronica type band, called "Vatican". They had an album called "The Net".
..
.. and the computer responded back "There is now.")
Basically, it was a 5-song (maybe 6?) story about a time in the future, when someone creates an Artificial Intelligence in a lab, and unleashes it upon the Internet, able to absorb information that it finds (just pray it doesn't find The Onion! lol!)
The end result, the machine decides that since it wasn't born, it's not a normal living being, and the only "living" being that wasn't born is God. Therefore, it decides that IT is God.
(this reminds me of the comment earlier in this line that said "Is there a God?"
At least, that's my interpretation of the album. in the end, it decides that the world is better off without it, and self-terminates.
(If anyone has any pointers to this band, their music, etc, I would LOVE to find them again.. they were really great.)
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
"There is encouraging results, like Cyc asking if it is human."
There is results?
Never mind artificial intelligence, I'd settle for some natural intelligence.
Maybe the worth of Cyc. will not be just itself, but in it's combination with all the other "attempts" at AI? Combine Cyc, neural-nets, genetic algorithms,"emotion" research, etc, and we may end up closer to the AI goal than we think. After all the world isn't a "nail" and just a hammer will not "fix" everything.
"Jeez, honey, we've had these damn 'kids', what? 10, 12 years and we're *still* having to train them in common sense. Let's give up."
- the facts are not preprogrammed, they are taught.
- how do you practice reasoning ? You draw inferences from facts. What Cyc is unable to do is _guessing_ . And actually, someone said in an other post that Cyc would even be able to do that.
- Would you be able to learn if you could not feel anything (like hear, see, touch) ? That's what Cyc "suffer" from. Its only way of getting information is by "stuffing" it, whereas you and me are capable of reading for instance, because we have been taught how to read, and because we can _see_
At least, Cyc would have found the flaws in your speech.
<deal><big>fuckin'</big></dea l>
evanchik.net
I just can't imagine that i would talk to a
computer called "Cyc" without smile.
Of course, only Polish-speakink people would
smile, but maybe authors of the project
choose name because it is so cute?
"Cyc" in Polish means "tits". In language
very close to being vulgar:)))))))
> then you once again remove yourself
:-) That's the point! You simply can't know the other understands anything at all, or "put" meaning in something, as I tried to show with the random dots line of thought.
> of the possibility of knowing if you
> involved 'understanding'
> in the process that was observed by the
> externals
Exactly
I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear, but I was not arguing that minds are not computers, but that you can't possibly tell from the outside if a system puts meaning in its symbols and furthermore, that that doesn't even matter since meaning is not assigned to symbols by the symbol-generating party! If you change the origin of meaning, the question whether or not the symbol generating system grasps that meaning ("understands" what it is doing), becomes independant of the question if the symbols mean something.
Which is important, considering the Turing test. The Turing test can only work if there is no "mere simulation" of thinking, if you sim. well enough, you have to be doing the real thing. And changing the meaning-assigning party reliefs us from the tedious arguments like "computers cannot think, they are only manipulating symbols. They don't understand what they are doing. Their symbols have no meaning".
If you ponder and tinker with a watch long enough, you might have the same "experience of meaning" as the watchmaker, but that doesn't mean you cannot have that same experience if the watch was put together in a random fashion by a blind monkey, which shows the watchmaker had little to do with the meaning of the watch in the first place.
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
how strange, i searched the comments but didn't find anything about spam filters made out of cyc. that was one of the first applications that came to my mind after reading about it some time ago.
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
But your misuse of the apostrophised elision of "you are" in place of the possessive "your" is not.
The only thing that has changed since the 1980's sham is that computers are now cheaper and faster. Cyc adds nothing new to the field of AI. The entire concept is bankrupt. A collection of poorly paid wage slaves has little chance of augmenting enough consistant knowledge to accomplish anything but futility. Furthermore, why would you want a machine to have "commonsense." Humans pretend to operate on commonsense, but they don't. Commonsense explanations are nothing more than lies generated to excuse one's inablity to explain why one actually decided to what one did did. We need machines that ARE intelligent, and not machines that operatie on an alchemist's theory of how intelligence operates. The article about Cyc is full of lies. It is absolutely untrue that Cycorp never looks for investors. It is absolutely untrue that there is any significance to Cyc "asking" whether it is a human. I've seen claims on the Internet that Cyc has "self awareness." If you ask what they mean by this, I am sure that they will tell you something about "self knowledge." Of course, equating "self awareness" with "self knowledge" is the kind of bunk you will receive from one of the many self important charletans who write about intelligence as if they actually know what it is. If something is self aware, there ought to be something that it is like to BE that thing. There is nothing that could be called "what it is to be Cyc." Cyc is just another tax whore.
I would suggest shamosity.
I expect Cyc will be used in the following ways, as privacy is replaced with totalitarianism: (1) Cyc will be used to maintain a knowledge base on each and every American. (2) Cyc will be used to integrate disparate databases across businesses and governmental agencies by using its intelligence to join databases. (3) The information, so joined, will permit the US Government to maintain a virtual archive on all purchases, movements, published statements (such as in chat groups), emails, telephone calls, and relationships between individuals. (4) Such information will be used to predict whether someone is a critic of the government, whether they may take a stand against government policy, whether they have the means to plan and carry out attacks against the government (even if they have no such plans or thoughts), what books an individual reads (library and bookseller information combined with credit purchases), what you watch on your digital cable box, and other things of this sort. (5) Based on this information, judgements will be made concerning whether or not your should be stopped and subject to further security checks when you travel. (6) Your career options will be limited by the information that can be pulled together in this way. For example, if you are known to be a critic of the government and you apply for a job that provides access to radioactive materials, you will be blocked. I could go on endlessly. The point is that YES, THE GOVERNMENT EXPECTS MUCH FROM CYC. It expects to use Cyc to destroy your liberty. Of course, this is just my humble opinion.
From the article: "Day after day since 1984, teams of programmers, linguists, theologians, mathematicians and philosophers ..."
How many theologians do you have working at Cycorp. Do they work in a team? What theological knowledge have they added to Cyc?
Full of air and out of tune. They're like feeble old men sitting in a bar telling war stories about events that never happened and glory they never achieved. They are the arrogant airbags who give talks at conferences, insulting their audiences with pompus simulations of intelligence and insight. They are the used car salesmen whose only brilliance is found in their technique to separate you from your funds.
Commodore 64 to do this?
Only one theologian that I know of, and he's actually my officemate... in fact, he doesn't add much knowledge to Cyc, he spends most of his time hacking on the RTL (;
But anyway, Cyc does have some theological knowledge, and it's organized into different microtheories, which are Cyc's version of contexts. So it knows that in some contexts, Jesus Christ was/is a god, and in other contexts, Jesus Christ was a man, and in still other contexts, Jesus Christ did not exist at all. It's got a bunch more stuff but I've only browsed around there occasionally.
All the arguments about morality in the other county of this thread are pretty much irrelevant because it's not like Cyc has a single context that it operates in; it has multiple contexts, some of which can be contradictory.
Does this answer your question?
(:,
eca
For idealists who want to change the world and are looking for a path with heart. http://connection-revolution.com