Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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!"

2 of 403 comments (clear)

  1. 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 :)

  2. 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.