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U.S. Plan For "Thinking Machines" Repository
An anonymous reader writes "Information scientists organized by the US's NIST say they will create a "concept bank" that programmers can use to build thinking machines that reason about complex problems at the frontiers of knowledge — from advanced manufacturing to biomedicine. The agreement by ontologists — experts in word meanings and in using appropriate words to build actionable machine commands — outlines the critical functions of the Open Ontology Repository (OOR). More on the summit that produced the agreement here."
the Thinking Machine is a creation of Jacques Futrelle if I recall his name right and is actually Professor Van Dusen. That is the title given to a collection of detective stories of Van Drusen.
Futrelle died aboard the Titanic.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Computer thought is probably no more advanced than that of a bug. Mars rovers etc can only executed canned move sequences and don't operate autonomously. Some robots etc are more autonomous, but are still pretty limited when it comes to any biological equivalent.
As much as people have been predicting thinking machines for the last 60 years or so, the reality is a lot less impressive.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The guys at cyc (look for wikipedia entry too) are already halfway there. Last time i checked there were already something like 5 million facts and rules in the database, and the point where new facts could be gathered automatically from the internet was very close.
Many years ago i remember the founder (Doug Lenat) saying that practical purpose intelligence could be reached at ten million facts....
we'll see within the next decade, i guess.
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
Speech recognition has improved dramatically in last 20 years. Dragon Naturally Speaking on an inexpensive PC can take dictation faster then most people. In the 80's the best super computers would struggle with a small speaker dependent vocabulary. Better hardware has clearly made a huge difference.
Better hardware is a necessary yet insufficient requirement for strong AI. There is still a lot to learn about how the human brain works and how to write software to emulate it. However, when you look at the state of projects like "Blue Brain" it doesn't seam crazy to me to think people will build a strong AI system in the next 50 years.
I wonder sometimes why we humans do things and after all these years spent here I still do not know. Let us take this little idea of building 'thinking' machines. So members of human race are trying to build thinking machines - how splendid - while majority of us cannot even spllel properly not to mention reading with understanding , some of us are arrogant enough to attempt to build a 'thinking' machine. Besides technical challenges in the process - how on earth would they recognize that it is thinking? Please spare me this Turing sort of tests - they all contain a flaw namely that there is a human judging what is and what is not intelligent. If the only criteria on which we have to base our recognition of intelligence should be inability to distinguish a machine from human than there is no need for intelligent or thinking machines. Then the question may arise and that is the question humans should be asking much more frequently:Why bother?