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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.
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
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.
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
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.
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.
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.
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.