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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."
(anonymous karma whoring -- whoo hoo)
Cycorp web site
OpenCyc
Sourceforge project
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.
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
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
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
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.
This is shamelessly stolen from Fredric Brown's excellent 1954 short story Answer.
begin 644
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
What you are describing looks a lot like the Turing Test Setup. This test, defined by Alan Turing has been setup to determine the amount of intelligence of an AI system by determining how many people the bot could convince of being human itself.
Most of the posts above however ignore the essentials of AI, which are :
Up 'till now, there was only one system that could effectively learn without being fed new data. That system used its database for extrapolation of new knowledge (AM, D. Lenat). All other AI systems in use today (mostly expert sytems like Cyc, Mycin, ...) use their database for inference only. They can only make up new conclusions by applying inference techniques on the (logic-)databases. But they cannot come up with new information. That is a critical problem in intelligent systems (also in Cyc):
And most of all: how do we get to make it work fast??? Billions of rules to apply to a query makes hard work for determining the best rules for applying resolution (another search problem).
There is more to AI than most people think ...