MIT Finds 'Grand Unified Theory of AI'

aftab14 writes "'What's brilliant about this (approach) is that it allows you to build a cognitive model in a much more straightforward and transparent way than you could do before,' says Nick Chater, a professor of cognitive and decision sciences at University College London. 'You can imagine all the things that a human knows, and trying to list those would just be an endless task, and it might even be an infinite task. But the magic trick is saying, "No, no, just tell me a few things," and then the brain — or in this case the Church system, hopefully somewhat analogous to the way the mind does it — can churn out, using its probabilistic calculation, all the consequences and inferences. And also, when you give the system new information, it can figure out the consequences of that.'"

Comments

Re:The real summary

[Trepidity]

Mostly, he or his university are just really good at overselling. There are dozens of attempts to combine something like probabilistic inference with something more like logical inference, many of which have associated languages, and it's not clear this one solves any of the problems they have any better.

This looks familiar

[Meditato]

I looked at the documentation of this "Church Programming language". Scheme and most other Lisp derivatives have been around longer and can do more. This is neither news nor a revolutionary discovery.

Re:The real summary

[Trepidity]

I should add that this is interesting research from a legitimate AI researcher, not some kooky fringe AI. I suspect it may have been his PR department more to blame than him, and his actual academic papers make no similarly overblown claims, and provide pretty fair positioning of how his work relates to existing work.