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."
Cyc is old, old news. The only interesting vaguely interesting, slightly timely part (unmentioned) is that they opened up a lot of their source last summer.
I'm not sure this is a matter of morality so much as it is of manners. Social intelligence is one of the hardest kinds of intelligence to define, and surely one of the hardest to create artificially; if the Cyc people can come up with a machine that not only knows a lot but knows when and when not to talk about what it knows, that will be quite an accomplishment.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
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.
In the same way that a child is biased by their parents and/or interactions with their educators, Cyc will have the same bias. The point here is that they have opened it to the public to reduce/limit the biasness.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
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.
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.
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.
Why is it that the last two stories have both come right off of fark.com?
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!)
Why does a sense of morality have to be based on an afterlife and a fear of punishment? My sense of morality is based on an acknowledgement of my own conciousness and intelligence, and a respect for the same in others.
It sounds to me like this is what they were trying to teach Cyc...to have respect for the phenomena of conciousness; isn't this the source of morality? This same concept is what CREATED the myth of an afterlife and a G-d, not the other way around.
If there is no afterlife for an AI and no punishment, what motivation does it have to be good?
Are you implying that the belief in an afterlife and punishment in it is humanities only motive for being good? That is not the case as there are quite a few of us who don't believe in such a thing.
If there is no afterlife for an AI and no punishment, what motivation does it have to be good?
There is no afterlife for a human either. What motivation does it have to be good?
The answer for both questions is simple: there is no "good" (or "evil"), there are only actions and consequences. If you want an AI or a human to take or not take certain actions, provide appropriate consequences.
When we create an AI, we must take care that they, like most humans, have some "hard wired" drives or desires. otherwise, there will be no consequences that can be applied to motivate their actions. We must also take care that the AI, like most humans, are intelligent enough to understand the consequences of their actions.
In the human realm, the desire to live is the prime motivator. The man who does not fear death is a danger to society. And the man who does not understand the nature of death is an equal danger. Furthermore, a human who believes in an afterlife does not fully understand the nature of death. And so, ironically, that belief which the original poster sees as a safegaurd against antisocial behavior, in fact encourages it.
Current events prove this frequently and graphically.
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!
Yup, slashdot. And inflammatory sig linked to a racist flamebait page is unmodded, but a disagreement is modded down.
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.
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.
How the hell is an anti-racist site racist? Because it depicts a bunch of cruel ass bastards being dickheads?
Care to defend your claim that the Israelis are `cruel-assed bastards being dickheads'? This type of statement is a slur, not an argument. As to the racism of the site linked to, well let's just say that comparing American blacks and civil rights workers to the Palestinians is a false analogy -- and extremely insulting to the former. Comparing the Israelis to the Klan is just as nonsensical and offensive.
Now nobody is defending the VIOLENT palestinians, just the ones who are getting their asses shot up and their children raped.
Can you provide any credible cite for these claims? Any? This is nonsense. Even Arafat isn't claiming this.
Fuck man, look at the pictures some time, both sides of that war are doing horrific shit, and civilians on both sides don't deserve it.
I'd say this is at best a false analogy. Let's look at the two sides, shall we?
On the one hand, we have a free, capitalist, democracy, with equal rights for all of its citizens (hint: there were 17 Arab members of Israel's parliament, the Knesset, last time I checked), which has been trying to trade land for peace for decades, and as of Oslo gave the other side everything that was asked of it, asking only an end to murder-sucide bombings in return. This side has gone out of its way to avoid harming civilians, including sending ground troops to fight house-to-house (at the cost of two a number of its own soldiers) instead of bombing from the air, which it could easily have done.
On the other side we have a dictatorship which has turned down every offer of peace and which sends its young men to blow themselves up in the childrens areas of restaurants, with the intention of killing as many civilians as possible. It does this because its stated goal is not to have peace but to destroy the other state and take the entire region for itself. Anyone on this side who even suggests peace or coexistance with Israel is brutally lynched by their own government.
How is this `both sides .. doing horrific shit' at all?