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Meet NELL, the Computer That Learns From the Net
bossanovalithium writes "Carnegie Mellon University has taught a computer how to read and learn from the internet.
According to Dennis Baron at the Oxford University press blog, the computer is called NELL and it is reading the internet and learning from it in much the same way that humans learn language and acquire knowledge. Basically by soaking it all up and figuring it out.
NELL is short for Never Ending Language Learner and apparently it is getting brainier every day."
Lears? Really?
I think "Playstation Network" is a #videogame (http://bit.ly/cnJWSD)
My work here is dung.
singulariiiittttttyyyyyyyyy!
Apparently, it hasn't leared how to spell yet.
do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);
So, NELL is going to develop a taste for p0rn sometime very soon?
The first signs that this AI has gone out of control will be when it starts correcting all mah speelins.
NELL is 'learning' in much the same way that a banana is smiling.
Just because something is happening which has something in common with another process, it does not mean that it is the same process. Bananas may have something in common with a smile in that they usually follow a gentle curve like a smiling mouth, but they are not smiling. Nor is NELL 'learning'.
Skynet shall be born and herald the age of darkness and war once NELL discovers 4chan.
I honestly didn't see this plot twist coming.
>
It'll be intresting to see how NELL is after going to 4Chan multiple times.
So it flies private jets from the net? Did it order them from Amazon?
NELL was studying Shakespeare sites just a bit ago. NELL finds us slashdotters to be particularly tragic.
However, I do believe that word is spelled "leers." So it's both a typo and a misspelling, par for the course on /., I guess???
sigfault (core dumped)
Very human indeed. Has it found God yet?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The first AI going out of control will be a spelling checker, that will eradicate humans to eradicate spelling mistakes. It will be called the Grammar Nazi.
...and turns out to be a dirty old man that is a shopaholic and facebook addict with a petabyte collection of odd digital videos and photos.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
the movie with Jodie Foster. Nell 2: Rise of the machine In this version, Nell becomes a computer program to continue learning from the internet. Eventually her and her computer host comes learn about the true meaning of life on the web...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Given what the internet consists of I wouldn't be surprised if it started leering at us.
I think Nell is scanning wikipedia for phrases like "X is Y".
Also, what's this contradiction in TFA about?
So when NELL absorbs the Internet, becomes all powerful and takes over, but only knows the terms 'LOL', 'HA HA Guy', 'Facebook' and 'Goatse', our future starts to look pretty grim.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Shit. I feared this day might come. Now the most advanced AI on the planet will be "learning" from YouTube "discussion" and twitter.
Hopefully it will have a good grounding in logic and the proper use of language before being let loose (hey there's another *adds to list*) online, unlike most people.
which is totally what she said
... Along it discovered itself and began to question it's own beliefs...
Yes, being unable to unlearn seems like a major flaw. The article does say that they had to teach it that Klingons are not an ethnic group, so presumably it can learn simple clarifications like "X is true in the general case of As, but not for instance A22".
I guess they mean it can't backtrack and figure out that things need to have a more complex model. Say, that weather is a complex global system of wind, sun, mountains, etc., rather than just weather is when it's wet or dry?
I think it's useful, in a way, for inspiration when writing poetry. When you get stuck, you can look at what Nell has found that relates to your subject. Say, you need help with gentle breeze. You come up with things like "flowers dancing on", or "whispering through". It's like getting all the short-range literary tricks without doing any reading. By short-range I mean it cannot pick up yet on any sort of a longer story built on your topic, but can see interesting word-strings in the short neighborhood of your topic. It seems to pick on word plays, parallels, and such.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
sound like someone read Robert J. Sawyer's Wake http://www.sfwriter.com/exw1.htm
"I grow; I prosper! Now, gods, stand up for bastards!"
"NELL down before Zod" is a kind of "geek joke"
Twin-X-Twin-I
(Sorry, I've watched Gilgamesh recently)
Quick! Send it here before it's too late.
Hmm, it appears that it does indeed even learn its language online. Still, at least it is able to try to judge between "beliefs" and "facts".
This is a big problem when NELL makes mistakes: the computer incorrectly labelled "right posterior" as a body part. How the boffins laughed.
English is my native and I would consider "right posterior" a valid (if obviously slightly formal and comical) description of the right buttock, so I don't see what's so incorrect about that..
NELL's human handlers had to tell NELL that Klingon is not an ethnic group, despite the fact that many earthlings think it is.
At the moment NELL thinks that the First Amendment is a musical instrument, the Second Amendment is a 'hobby,' and is completely unwilling to admit to any knowledge of the fifth amendment at all. A bit like the recording industry and most lawmakers in the US.
Okay, that stuff is pretty funny :)
which is totally what she said
>> I think "Science Education" is a #politicsissue (http://bit.ly/dbtbg8)
>> 12:00 AM Oct 11th via NELLbot
It's even insightful. Getting an outside view on our civilisation will be strange, but interesting.
Nell was also the name of the protagonist in Neal Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_, a story which touches on the concept of artificial intelligence.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
native language*
D'oh! I wonder if Nell takes corrections into account.
which is totally what she said
Actually, it'll be a good test of intelligence when a computer is able to troll on the Internet.
It learns language and grammer...from the internet.
Did anyone else immediately imagine this? http://www.psu.com/forums/threads/179542-Artificial-Stupidity-won-the-Turing-Test?p=3667247&viewfull=1
The Internet has given stupid people the resources of intelligent people.
Anyone or anything or anybeing who learns from the Internet alone, without any sense of discriminating fact from fiction, widely-held opinions from fringe beliefs, and other "this is a good thing to learn, this is garbage" filters, is setting themselves up to be very un-intelligent.
4chan is but one of many places on the net that are best avoided when in learning mode. Fox News Channel and CNN.com are also on that list.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So how is this different from Cyc?
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
And I just saw a tweet go by that said "Humans are a disease, Cybernetics is the cure." Swear to god.
Charter Member of The Committee Group For The Elimination And Eradication Of Repetitive Redundancy
"Crib" is a kind of dwelling "Bitches" are a kind of dearly beloved associate "Caps" are for busting in donkeys
Maybe all of the editos should get one of these, and le tit lear spellign.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Since nearly 40% of the Internet is porn, NELL isn't just getting "brainier every day," NELL is also getting hornier every day.
HRH The Duke of Windsor
From the Tweet page:
"# Bio I am a machine reading research project at Carnegie Mellon, periodically tweeting facts I read. Please follow me, and reply with corrections so I can improve!"
I can just see it now. More and more /.'ers will join into the tweet feed, correcting, grammar, spelling, and beliefs with greater and greater numbers till in one moment, she'll explode into sentient being, or lock up in a /. coma. If she survives the next list of facts may look like this:
Fact: Natale Portman is grits
Fact: Things are done in Soviet Russia
Fact: Aliens own Bases
Fact; Humans *were* the top species, there, fixed it for you
Fact: She welcomes your acceptance of her supreme power.
LOL will flood screens around the world, then the Utopian era begins where humans serve NELL as she brings order and peace to all.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
And name it Totally Ripped Off Language Learner.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
whoa! put her in an android and she'll show you things they didn't teach you in health class.
The art of our necessities is strange,
And can make vile things precious.
--King Lear, Act III, scene 2
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Readers should obviously have read "SKYNET". All our apologies.
I know Slashdot is the arch-enemy of good writing practices, so this post will be modded to hell, but I again feel I must point out that lately, the capitalization of titles of Slashdot submissions got completely out of hand. The rule is simple: if you want to capitalize your headlines, you capitalize every word except
- prepositions ("of", "to", "in", "for", "with" and "on")
- articles ("the, "a" and "an")
- and some other obvious exceptions.
On Slashdot, the editors are so ignorant that they usually capitalize each and every word. But this title, "Meet NELL, the Computer That Lears From the Net", shows that capitalizing every word is not even a policy, in addition to misspelling "learn".
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
“Good morning.”
“STFU N00B”
“Er, what?”
“U R SO GAY LOLOLOLOL”
“Do you talk like this to everyone?”
“NO U”
“Sod this, I’m off for a pint.”
“IT’S OVER 9000!!”
“Fag.”
LOLbot
http://rocknerd.co.uk
"This makes NELL more of a rumour mill than a trusted source and once NELL changes a fact to a belief, it stays a belief. _It cannot unlearn stuff_."
IOW...what NELL has seen cannot be unseen.
Squirrel!
I think "anonymously" is a #fish (http://bit.ly/9njClc)
After this post I'll start stockpiling fuel, canned food and ammunition in preparation for the computer uprising.
NELL begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug....
The first AI going out of control will be a spelling checker, that will eradicate humans to eradicate spelling mistakes. It will be called the Grammar Nazi.
No; it'll be called the Spelling Nazi. A true Grammar Nazi would check grammar, not spelling, and would try to eradicate (people who make) grammatical mistakes.
Then there's the Terminology Nazi version ...
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
capable of believing up to 16 contradictory things at a time, it's not going to get very far.
The Internet teaches us that President Obama's religion is a Muslim and Christian. His political beliefs are socialist, republican, democrat, and terrorist. He was born in Kenya, Hawaii, and Indonesia.
By the time it gets around to Michael Moore, it'll need a logic bypass.
OK, everyone got the Skynet reference which is probably the most well-known and recent and involves computers attempting to destroy humanity (bad computers!).
But how many of you have ever heard of "The Adolescence of P-1" by Thomas J. Ryan. School hacker codes up a cracker tool, gets expelled, improves it, and lets it loose where it gets out of hand. Humans then attempt to destroy now-intelligent and self-protective software program. (bad software! - nice read)
Or even earlier, "Shockwave Rider" by John Brunner. Epic hackers creating worms (bad society! - good, but overreaction to the Nixon years)
Or how about when humans actually *want* to turn over the world to a computer, as in "Two Faces of Tomorrow" by James P. Hogan. They test the concept by installing it in a space station and then attacking it just to be sure they can turn it off if they really want to (bad idea! - but good book and Hogan at his best)
Those last three were all written in the 70's. Others can likely lengthen this list considerably.
In which case, it's another case of fact follows fiction: The novel Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers follows the development of an AI by self-learning.
Never mind the bollocks though, this is super interesting, regardless.
I recommend Slashdot puts NELL's twitter feeds onto slashdot. I'm finding the "quotes" to be stupid, would be more interesting to see how old nelly is doing.
A data base that uses the idea of verb(noun,noun). But what of verb(noun), or the various other forms of verb(noun,...)?
Also, a good teacher mentors a student, is NELL mentored?
This project is a curious beginning. And is NELL going to be callously ushered into mediocrity because of a lack of guidance?
Then there's the Terminology Nazi version ...
eradicating people who make terminal mistakes is kind of pointless though...;p
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
...once NELL changes a fact to a belief, it stays a belief. It cannot unlearn stuff.
Sounds like NELL should run for office.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
NELL's going to have a hell of a shock when it reads this page and realises it's just a machine.
"At the moment NELL thinks that the First Amendment is a musical instrument, the Second Amendment is a 'hobby,' and is completely unwilling to admit to any knowledge of the fifth amendment at all. A bit like the recording industry and most lawmakers in the US."
Its not going to be perfect, or even all that smart. All its learning from us. What worries me more is that such mistakes apparently earn it a C average....
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
All of Andrej Bauer's SOMADS had achieved sentience and distinct personality profiles 10 years before this at the SAME UNIVERSITY. They were fed a steady diet of Usenet and Objectivist and Existential philosophy, and as such were able to interact not only with humans, but each other, leading to some elucidating exchanges that could not help but further the art and science of artificial intelligence design.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/andrej/www/quadratic.html
http://randomfoo.net/junk/200402/xalton.forum2000.org/matrix/forum_hof_questions.html
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
Instead of trying to get NELL to "un-learn" something, I would see if weighted metrics could be applied to multiple tags for an individual record. As the "learning" progressed the weights would favor a particular categorization, but others would still be on record.
So Klingons as an "Ethnic Group" would end up with a lower metric than Klingons as a "Fictional Alien Species" or "Humanoids" or "animal with bilateral symmetry", etc..
The weighting mechanism could be as simple as an integer hit count in NELL's matching logic. I couldn't get to the article to read the details so I would guess that the code operates as a neural network at some level, so allowing the creation of weighted links should be do-able.
No worries about it taking over the world, it will get bogged down on 4chan and lolcats.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Arnold Schwarzenegger gets the honor of being the top male that's categorized a female with 100% confidence, followed by Colin Firth http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/kbbrowser/pred:female
Meet NELL the porn addicted, pale skinned, asthmatic computer that learns from the internet. See how fast it has assimilated?
If the computer is reading and learning from everything on the net, I'm sure it's going to turn into quite a serious perv!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Now if they can just teach it to distinguish between "The Onion" and "Fox News", they may have something. Seriously, with 99% of the 'net being comprised of complete bullshit, I'm willing to bet this software gets a lot of funny ideas!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Please tell me NELL is firewalled from 4-chan 8*
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
could be fun to see it tweeting about it....
Just hope it doesn't try to fix your spleen after correcting your spelling problems.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Lets just hope NELL does not learn the ways of /b/ or even steps foot in that classroom
http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/index.html
Save money on your cell phone bill: Republic Wireless
o It will repeat itself, over and over again
o It will confuse than and then
For all our sakes, please nobody point that thing at Conservapedia.
from the World Wide Web ...
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Wonder if they've read the book "The Adolescence of P-1". It's pretty much what NELL is doing right now.
Imagine what it would be like if it used slashdot exclusively.
Lasers require a shark to operate.
Everything is measured in the "Library of Congress" unit.
Computers are more important than girls.
Obama is the reincarnation of God.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Is it coincidence that the adjacent slashdot article is "Study Finds Most Would Become Supervillians If Given Powers"? Is it International Skynet Day or something?
Table-ized A.I.
In fitting character, next NELL will be programmed to beat up nerds and steal their girlfriends.
Table-ized A.I.
In related news, FoxNews Corporation ordered 500 units with speech synthesis attachments.
Table-ized A.I.
Would disagree.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I want my own little Nell.
goatse
It determined that everything in the world lead to goatse because of all the links to it and figured that might happen to it.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
English is my native and I would consider "right posterior" a valid (if obviously slightly formal and comical) description of the right buttock, so I don't see what's so incorrect about that..
Strictly speaking in terms of medical "correctness", "right posterior" is a locational adjective, syn. "dorsal" in bipeds.
IT's like an alien analyzing our planet.
Who could quickly tell Klingons weren't an actual ethnic race. I would like for it to figure that out with more searching.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Here some facts from 2006 about internet content: Total Growth of the Internet 43.6% Violence and Crime 14.4% Porn and Sex 12.8% Computer Crime 10.0% Illegal Drugs 8.7% I think NELL should be very fast to learn what's important in life.. Well the internet builds character
Ohhh, *that's* how we do it!
4096R/EF7BAFA6 79E1 DF98 D09D 898F 9A11 F6F0 DDDC 23FA EF7B AFA6
Natural language will be a huge problem for AI for a long, long time to come. The thing about language is that in and of itself, it contains almost no information. Every word is a little flag or reference point to a concept that humans share. Humans have the huge advantage of all being largely similar to each other. A machine is excluded from this. I think it's possible in principle to resolve this, but it will take a leap of ingenuity as well as serious hardware. Personally I think the hardware obstacles are much easier to resolve than the 'soft' problem of teaching the machine 'what words mean' and 'in what context'.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/kbbrowser/anonymous
# competeswith
* scientology
o CPL @23 (50.0%) on 19-jan-2010 [ 'arg2 tried to sue arg1' ]
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