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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."
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
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....
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
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... Is that pronounced like psi-core?
Interesting, very interesting.
-Captain John Sheridan
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
--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.
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.
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.
Why is it that the last two stories have both come right off of fark.com?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
'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.
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!
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.
---"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.
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...
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 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. . .
The programs that have competed seem to have received far less attention.
Seastead this.
This is something that I've wanted to do for a -long- time: take an AI (or something resembling one, such as ALICE) and combine it w/ a script or other form of gateway communication device with something like IBM's ViaVoice tts software and voice recognition software.Text would get translated to speech for the human, and the human's speech would get translated to text for the AI/bot.
It seems to me that this would be an ideal use! I, unfortunately, have neither the time or necessary skills. If you plan undertaking something like this, I'd love to hear from you!
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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
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
...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.
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 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 ...
Yes, doable, but... not by me. :) I'd be overjoyed if someone would slap this together in a couple of hours in perl (for instance), even if integrating Cyc into the speech recognition process would possibly (probably? definately?) yield better results, after being tweaked efficiently. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that anyone has undertaken such a project yet, amazingly enough. It'd be spectacular to slap Cyc + perl gateway + IBM ViaVoice on a laptop w/ a mic, webcam, and network connection, and demonstrate it to friends and such.
(Good way to meet girls, too, I imagine! "Hey, look what I made!" "Oh wow, I've never seen anything like it!" *wow, he's smart!* (Personality not included!))
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers