DARPA Contracts For AI Technology

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!"

Comments

Meanwhile OpenCYC has not been updated since 2003

[NZheretic]

OpenCYC.org project Sourceforge CVS repository has not beent updated since October 22nd 2003. I hope some of that DARPA money will go a little way towards completeting the 1.0 release.

Re:CycCorp

[TheKidWho]

I dunno, but to me it seems like there are two different ways to go about this.

One is the way that CycCorp is going which is to create a giant knowledgebase and feed the AI tons and tons of data. Eventually just by the fact that is has so much data, it can become semi intelligent.

Another way, would probablly be to actually have the AI interact with the enviroment and learn by doing. Even in this case though, it would still be preferable for the AI to have a knowledgebase it could look into to find general information. Just like how humans have the internet and books to read up on when they want to learn something new that might be prohibitive to actually do in real life.

For example, say you want to be intelligent about nuclear reactors. You have two choices

You could, build a nuclear reactor
You could also read up a lot of information on nuclear reactors

In most cases you will end up reading up information on the reactor, maybe if your lucky you can actually design one and work on it. But just because you haven't built one and only read up on them thoroughly does not make you any less "intelligent" in that field.

I guess what im trying to say is, why reinvent the wheel. Why have the AI try to learn everything the way humans have?

the perennial problem for AI

[Trepidity]

AI has always "failed" because every time it's succeeded, the problem it succeeded on has been retroactively defined to "not require intelligence". Cf. automated theorem proving, chess playing, control of chemical plants, and just about any other AI success of 1940s - present.

Re:This is AI?

[NanoGator]

"Can a machine create a syphany or comopse a masterpiece?"

"Can you?"

Re:Text Compression Grand Challenge

[segmond]

Any advance in the field of AI will fetch a gigantic amount of money. No one in their right mind will sell out to DARPA if they have the solution. For example, think of search engines, just a little drop of AI and you will have the best search engine around. Think of language translation, just a little drop of AI and your langauge translation software will be the best. Likewise with a lot of software systems. Once the idea comes to anyone, please believe that they are heading to the patent office first not to collect $1million prize from DARPA.

Re:This is AI?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Actually there was a digital music symposium in the early 90's where a (IIRC) Bach composer was demonstrated. They fed a neural network all the Bach pieces digitally and let it learn from the patterns. Then they set it to composing and it came out with a 5-minute piece that sounded remarkably like Bach. (I'm sure I'm oversimplifying) There was resounding applause for the demo.

At the end of the talk people were standing around talking to the author of the system when a wirey dark-haired man with beady glasses and an eastern european accent came up to him and shouted, "You've killed Music!" - and clocked the guy, laying him straight out.

Not everybody is going to handle AI well.