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DARPA Contracts For AI Technology

Posted by timothy on from the that-darn-skynet-is-already-late dept.

heptapod writes "USA Today is reporting that DARPA has contracted two professors from RPI to develop artificial intelligences that can learn by reading and understanding natural language. Interesting taking DARPA's Grand Challenge into account. Mentioned in the article is Cycorp, Inc. which has been pursuing this goal since 1994!"

9 of 403 comments (clear)

  1. CycCorp by TheKidWho · · Score: 2, Informative

    What they are doing is very interesting. By compiling the majority of human knowledge into a gian database, it should make AI development much easier to pursue.

  2. darpa.mil Blocked! by Blaskowicz · · Score: 4, Informative

    as you know we non americans cannot access darpa.mil
    If something is kind enough to give us a mirror to the "Great Challenge", kudos to him :)

    Or else I'll go through a US proxy. Not a big task, it's just annoying, I'll do that later.. grab an anonymous US proxy on www.proxy4free.com , enter the crap in your browser and enjoy the slowness. Maybe I'll use switch proxy this time :)

  3. And it still doesn't work by Animats · · Score: 3, Informative
    Cyc is basically the bad "expert system" idea from the 1980s, with too much funding. The concept of Cyc is straightforward - have a big staff putting in handwritten rules, and it will be able to answer anticipated questions. Like call centers where the staff just reads scripts. No way is it ever going to become "intelligent". On a really good day, given a narrow enough range of questions in an area where good answers have been preloaded, it can sort of fake it some of the time.

    It's not just canned questions and answers; it has an inference engine. It can do "if A is B and B is C, then A is C". But only if all the right predicates match perfectly.

    Lenat was claming it would somehow become intelligent in a few more years. That was a decade ago. Today, Cyc is regarded as the definitive demonstration that that idea won't work.

    Here's a critique of Cyc from 1994.

  4. No Killer Robots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is probably a good place to mention the No Evil Robots campaign...

    And for a glimpse, if somewhat longwinded, of what lengths DARPA will go to to make this happen, check out this article: http://villagevoice.com/news/0337,baard,46901,1.ht ml

  5. Re:darpa.mil Blocked! by aussie_a · · Score: 2, Informative

    This comment isn't Informative. It's either mistaken or a liar. That or he's in a country that is actively blocked. UK and Australia can access the site just fine.

  6. Good Luck. by headkase · · Score: 2, Informative

    If there's one thing that the last 60+ years of research into artificial or machine intelligence has shown is that there is no clear definition of intelligence. There are different types of intelligence for example muscle control, visual processing, tactile interpretation, olfactory classifying, and so on. With these rough subdivisions great strides has been made in creating successful "modules" for them, but what has eluded and probably will stay elusive for the near future is the general cognitive intelligence that orchestrates the interplay between the rough subdivisions.

    --
    Shh.
  7. 84, not 94 by real+gumby · · Score: 2, Informative

    I started working on Cyc in 1985 and can assure you that it did _not_ start in 1994. They already had a year or two under their belt when I showed up.

  8. Re:This is AI? by Dominic_Mazzoni · · Score: 2, Informative

    The story (probably exagerrated) is probably referring to one of the early performances of music composed by the computer program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence written by David Cope. Click the links for more info; it's a great starting point if you're interested in computer composition.

  9. The Peace and Love Alternative by alicebotmaster · · Score: 2, Informative

    The ALICE AI Foundation http://www.alicebot.org/ supports the development and adoption of free AIML software and standards for natural language chat robot technology. The ALICE brain, available freely under the GNU public license, is the three time winner of the prestigious Loebner prize for "most human computer" in a contest based on the Turing Test. One of the most interesting AIML implementations, Program N http://www.aimlpad.com/ by Gary Dubuque with contributions by Kino Coursey, already incorporates OpenCyc and WordNet into the ALICE conversational interface. The Foundation derives income from individual and corporate memberships, bot subscriptions, books, the Foundation directory, consulting, teaching, awards, Google ads, gifts and donations. We have never accepted one dime of DARPA or other government sponsorship.