It's a bit out of date (we started in '89), but even so, we were told it was too late to get into the software startup game. We had no business plan. Yet we managed to beat our Microsoft competition (MS Works), with no venture capital, in fact without even incorporating... of course, getting bought by Claris helped. But I think keeping everything ultra-low overhead was essential - *all* of our time was spent designing and developing, and none on coming up with a business plan, a "failure plan", etc., as described on the MSDN article. YMMV...
There are still plenty of great ideas out there, waiting to see the light of day.
Not that far, I'm afraid! Most of the machinery will be similar to the project I did for my Master's thesis, but I'm still designing the language to represent the machinery.
No, I don't have a name for it. Any suggestions?:-)
Re:Society of Mind strides
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That's what my thesis work is about; see my web page for details.
The thing about "Society of Mind" is that it's very difficult to take literally. Each page is its own concept - there's not a lot of high-level organization to the book. The concepts interrelate, of course, but formalizing and implementing them is tricky.
The book has certainly served as high-level inspiration for quite a lot of people. A couple of examples would be Michael Travers's LiveWorld and Mark Humphrys's "World-Wide-Mind" project.
But as far as I know nobody prior to me has really tried to make K-lines, polynemes, pronomes, frames, etc., and hook them all together, as described in "Society of Mind".
Here's some perspective from an MIT AI lab grad student who's been inspired by both Minsky and Brooks. (Minsky is on my Ph.D. committee.)
"AI has been brain-dead since the 1970s."
I agree, unfortunately. At least, what was traditionally meant by "AI" has been brain-dead. There is very little focus in the field today on human-like intelligence per se. There is a lot of great work being done that has immediate, practcal uses. But whether much of it is helping us toward the original long-term goal is more questionable. Most researchers long ago simply decided that "real AI" was too hard, and started doing work they could get funded. I would say that "AI" has been effectively redefined over the past 20 years.
"The worst fad has been these stupid little robots."
Minsky's attitude towards the direction the MIT AI lab has taken (Rod Brooks's robots) is well-known. And I agree that spending years soldering robots together can certainly take time away from AI research. But personally, I find a lot of great ideas in Rod's work, and I've used these ideas as well as Marvin's in my own work. Most importantly, unlike most of the rest of the AI world, Rod *is*, in the long run, shooting toward human-level AI.
Curiously, just last month I gave a talk at MIT, tited "Putting Minsky and Brooks Together". (Rod attended, but unfortunately Marvin couldn't make it.) The talk slides are at
In particular, I shoot down some common misperceptions about Minsky, including that he is focused solely on logical, symbolic AI. Anyone who has read "The Society of Mind" will realize what great strides Minsky-style AI has made since the early days. I also show what seem like some surprising connections to Brooks's work.
I do however have an app that hijacks the audio stream before the speakers and allows you to play with equalizers, balance, etc. Oh, and it lets you save the result as an MP3 as well as playing it through the speakers.
Just as Mac users would be worse off if Windows didn't exist,
Huh?! Apple would be places you can't imagine if Windows didn't exist. That's Microsoft's biggest crime, IMHO. Their illegal tactics have kept Apple safe in a little, harmless niche.
I ordered one the day they came out, but sent it back when I discovered it required IE. Their website had no mention of this requirement at that point. One other discovery that made it useless to me was the fact that it doesn't work in Canada - I'm moving to Vancouver.
Does anyone know of any PVRs that do work in Canada? I don't think I can watch regular TV again.
From the replies, I guess I came across as pessimistic on computer go.
On the contrary, I'm optimistic that go is in fact interesting, that this one simple problem does somehow have something useful to say about the nature of intelligence.
I'm also optimistic about AI. I think that the average PC has enough computing power to play world-class go, given the right program, and these will be forthcoming within the next couple of decades.
My point was that trying to tackle AI through go is dangerous, because it's so easy to be led astray into inappropriate representations and algorithms. I think the general problem will be easier to solve, because the false paths will not look so inviting.
I'd been under the impression that Hofstadter had made that claim, in Godel, Escher, Bach. But I just looked it up. Here's what he had to say in 1979:
"Perhaps someday, a look-ahead program with enough brute force will indeed overcome the best human players - but that will be a small intellectual gain, compared to the revelation that intelligence depends crucially on the ability to create high-level descriptions of complex arrays, such as chess boards..."
If he did in fact make a stronger claim earlier, I'd be interested in a reference.
Of course I can't be sure there won't be a good go program that's not a real AI. But it is pretty clear that Moore's law alone will not be enough for a brute-force search go program to beat humans in the next century. The branching factor is just too high, and decent static evaluation is almost impossible.
If the first good go program is not a general AI, it will at least be much more interesting and sophisticated than Deep Blue.
I love go (I'm a 2 kyu player), and I'm an AI researcher. But I don't work on go-playing programs. Much as I'd like to, I don't think it would be a productive activity for me.
I think that the minute you start to write a game-playing program, you're trapped by the very natural structures you have to use to make the program even play a legal game. You can't help but start to use minimax search. With go, you add modules for life & death evaluation, influence generation functions, the list goes on and on.
But all these things are just hard-coded approximations of some of the ways people think about go when they play, ripped out of their essential representational context. Real people have rich conceptual networks linking all of these skills together, which multiplies their power enormously. Give a beginning human player a perfect black-box life and death evaluator, like go programs ideally have, and he will never become a strong player. Only by solving life and death problems yourself (to take just one example) can you integrate that kind of knowledge into your total go knowledge. I maintain that this integration is essential.
Will computers ever beat people at go? Sure. But I'll bet the first program to do so will be a general-purpose near-human level AI, that thinks of board positions in terms of physical metaphors. It will have a rich mental landscape.
First, Clarus the dog-cow was a play on Claris the company, not vice-versa. (ACIUS was created at the same time Claris was, to market 4D. It was a running joke at ACIUS to refer to Claris as BCIUS - Bill Campbell Inherits Used Software.)
Second, when Apple created Claris, ClarisWorks did not exist. ClarisWorks has nothing to do with the original, text-based program called AppleWorks.
Third, the name wasn't changed "back" to AppleWorks - it was confusingly changed to match the name of the other programs (since it was no longer at Claris).
Finally, all of the original authors and other early developers of ClarisWorks started Gobe.
There's a lot of confusion about the history of AppleWorks/ClarisWorks.
You just referenced three different programs, each with entirely different codebases.
The first AppleWorks was text-based, in the days of the IIe. I associate the name Rupert Lissner with early versions of this; Beagle Bros. was involved in later versions, I think. I think there's also some connection to the early MSWorks team.
AppleWorks GS was an independent project, written by StyleWare, and originally to be called GSWorks. Claris bought StyleWare, and it became AppleWorks GS. This was a fairly typical module-based integrated app (i.e. mostly separate programs with a wrapper around them), but you would not believe the challenge of doing something like this with a color GUI on a 2.8 MHz machine. (One unusual feature was an integrated paint/draw environment: objects retained their integrity, but you could e.g. lasso or erase parts of them.)
Two of us from StyleWare (myself and Scott Holdaway) later left Claris, wrote what was to become ClarisWorks, and sold it to Claris. Comepletely independent codebase from AppleWorks GS, and a completely different design, much more integrated. (That's right, Claris was there long before ClarisWorks, although people sometimes say "Claris" when they mean "ClarisWorks" - always confuses me.)
Some subsets of the two of us and the other early CW developers worked on ClarisWorks through version 5. Most of this group was later at Gobe, writing Gobe Productive (originally for BeOS, now for Windows as well).
Eventually Apple dismantled Claris. What was left became FileMaker Inc.; ClarisWorks transitioned to Apple, renamed (confusingly) AppleWorks. None of the original ClarisWorks developers are involved with AppleWorks at this point.
Although I'm somewhat depressed at what's become of ClarisWorks, I'm hopeful that StarOffice will be good for the Mac. (Either that, or I'll have to go write another integrated app - I won't use MS software.)
I second this. ClarisWorks (now AppleWorks) was done in Metrowerks (1.0 and 2.0 were in Think C) - on the Mac at least, it is a great environment. And Apple would have really been screwed if Metrowerks hadn't come around - there was no other reasonable way to port programs to the PPC architecture. I've been thinking about getting the Linux version. Anyone tried it with LinuxPPC? And that review was kind of short on specifics. How does the Linux version really compare to the Mac version?
From someone peripherally involved in this, the machine runs BeOS, but with Microworkz' own window dressing on it. I don't know what the "hybrid" deal is - as someone mentioned, BeOS is POSIX compliant, so many Unix or Linux apps could be provided. However, no X windows.
They'll be bundling our BeOS office package, Gobe Productive. Which most definitely does NOT run on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bob/clarisworks.php
It's a bit out of date (we started in '89), but even so, we were told it was too late to get into the software startup game. We had no business plan. Yet we managed to beat our Microsoft competition (MS Works), with no venture capital, in fact without even incorporating... of course, getting bought by Claris helped. But I think keeping everything ultra-low overhead was essential - *all* of our time was spent designing and developing, and none on coming up with a business plan, a "failure plan", etc., as described on the MSDN article. YMMV...
There are still plenty of great ideas out there, waiting to see the light of day.
Not that far, I'm afraid! Most of the machinery will be similar to the project I did for my Master's thesis, but I'm still designing the language to represent the machinery.
:-)
No, I don't have a name for it. Any suggestions?
That's what my thesis work is about; see my web page for details.
The thing about "Society of Mind" is that it's very difficult to take literally. Each page is its own concept - there's not a lot of high-level organization to the book. The concepts interrelate, of course, but formalizing and implementing them is tricky.
The book has certainly served as high-level inspiration for quite a lot of people. A couple of examples would be Michael Travers's LiveWorld and Mark Humphrys's "World-Wide-Mind" project.
But as far as I know nobody prior to me has really tried to make K-lines, polynemes, pronomes, frames, etc., and hook them all together, as described in "Society of Mind".
Here's some perspective from an MIT AI lab grad student who's been inspired by both Minsky and Brooks. (Minsky is on my Ph.D. committee.)
"AI has been brain-dead since the 1970s."
I agree, unfortunately. At least, what was traditionally meant by "AI" has been brain-dead. There is very little focus in the field today on human-like intelligence per se. There is a lot of great work being done that has immediate, practcal uses. But whether much of it is helping us toward the original long-term goal is more questionable. Most researchers long ago simply decided that "real AI" was too hard, and started doing work they could get funded. I would say that "AI" has been effectively redefined over the past 20 years.
"The worst fad has been these stupid little robots."
Minsky's attitude towards the direction the MIT AI lab has taken (Rod Brooks's robots) is well-known. And I agree that spending years soldering robots together can certainly take time away from AI research. But personally, I find a lot of great ideas in Rod's work, and I've used these ideas as well as Marvin's in my own work. Most importantly, unlike most of the rest of the AI world, Rod *is*, in the long run, shooting toward human-level AI.
Curiously, just last month I gave a talk at MIT, tited "Putting Minsky and Brooks Together". (Rod attended, but unfortunately Marvin couldn't make it.) The talk slides are at
http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bob/dangerous.pdf.
In particular, I shoot down some common misperceptions about Minsky, including that he is focused solely on logical, symbolic AI. Anyone who has read "The Society of Mind" will realize what great strides Minsky-style AI has made since the early days. I also show what seem like some surprising connections to Brooks's work.
- Bob Hearn
I do however have an app that hijacks the audio stream before the speakers and allows you to play with equalizers, balance, etc. Oh, and it lets you save the result as an MP3 as well as playing it through the speakers.
What app is this?
Just as Mac users would be worse off if Windows didn't exist,
Huh?! Apple would be places you can't imagine if Windows didn't exist. That's Microsoft's biggest crime, IMHO. Their illegal tactics have kept Apple safe in a little, harmless niche.
I ordered one the day they came out, but sent it back when I discovered it required IE. Their website had no mention of this requirement at that point. One other discovery that made it useless to me was the fact that it doesn't work in Canada - I'm moving to Vancouver.
Does anyone know of any PVRs that do work in Canada? I don't think I can watch regular TV again.
From the replies, I guess I came across as pessimistic on computer go.
On the contrary, I'm optimistic that go is in fact interesting, that this one simple problem does somehow have something useful to say about the nature of intelligence.
I'm also optimistic about AI. I think that the average PC has enough computing power to play world-class go, given the right program, and these will be forthcoming within the next couple of decades.
My point was that trying to tackle AI through go is dangerous, because it's so easy to be led astray into inappropriate representations and algorithms. I think the general problem will be easier to solve, because the false paths will not look so inviting.
You make a valid point. However:
..."
I'd been under the impression that Hofstadter had made that claim, in Godel, Escher, Bach. But I just looked it up. Here's what he had to say in 1979:
"Perhaps someday, a look-ahead program with enough brute force will indeed overcome the best human players - but that will be a small intellectual gain, compared to the revelation that intelligence depends crucially on the ability to create high-level descriptions of complex arrays, such as chess boards
If he did in fact make a stronger claim earlier, I'd be interested in a reference.
Of course I can't be sure there won't be a good go program that's not a real AI. But it is pretty clear that Moore's law alone will not be enough for a brute-force search go program to beat humans in the next century. The branching factor is just too high, and decent static evaluation is almost impossible.
If the first good go program is not a general AI, it will at least be much more interesting and sophisticated than Deep Blue.
I love go (I'm a 2 kyu player), and I'm an AI researcher. But I don't work on go-playing programs. Much as I'd like to, I don't think it would be a productive activity for me.
I think that the minute you start to write a game-playing program, you're trapped by the very natural structures you have to use to make the program even play a legal game. You can't help but start to use minimax search. With go, you add modules for life & death evaluation, influence generation functions, the list goes on and on.
But all these things are just hard-coded approximations of some of the ways people think about go when they play, ripped out of their essential representational context. Real people have rich conceptual networks linking all of these skills together, which multiplies their power enormously. Give a beginning human player a perfect black-box life and death evaluator, like go programs ideally have, and he will never become a strong player. Only by solving life and death problems yourself (to take just one example) can you integrate that kind of knowledge into your total go knowledge. I maintain that this integration is essential.
Will computers ever beat people at go? Sure. But I'll bet the first program to do so will be a general-purpose near-human level AI, that thinks of board positions in terms of physical metaphors. It will have a rich mental landscape.
Bob Hearn
Well, not quite. :-)
First, Clarus the dog-cow was a play on Claris the company, not vice-versa. (ACIUS was created at the same time Claris was, to market 4D. It was a running joke at ACIUS to refer to Claris as BCIUS - Bill Campbell Inherits Used Software.)
Second, when Apple created Claris, ClarisWorks did not exist. ClarisWorks has nothing to do with the original, text-based program called AppleWorks.
Third, the name wasn't changed "back" to AppleWorks - it was confusingly changed to match the name of the other programs (since it was no longer at Claris).
Finally, all of the original authors and other early developers of ClarisWorks started Gobe.
See my earlier post for details.
Bob Hearn
There's a lot of confusion about the history of AppleWorks/ClarisWorks.
You just referenced three different programs, each with entirely different codebases.
The first AppleWorks was text-based, in the days of the IIe. I associate the name Rupert Lissner with early versions of this; Beagle Bros. was involved in later versions, I think. I think there's also some connection to the early MSWorks team.
AppleWorks GS was an independent project, written by StyleWare, and originally to be called GSWorks. Claris bought StyleWare, and it became AppleWorks GS. This was a fairly typical module-based integrated app (i.e. mostly separate programs with a wrapper around them), but you would not believe the challenge of doing something like this with a color GUI on a 2.8 MHz machine. (One unusual feature was an integrated paint/draw environment: objects retained their integrity, but you could e.g. lasso or erase parts of them.)
Two of us from StyleWare (myself and Scott Holdaway) later left Claris, wrote what was to become ClarisWorks, and sold it to Claris. Comepletely independent codebase from AppleWorks GS, and a completely different design, much more integrated. (That's right, Claris was there long before ClarisWorks, although people sometimes say "Claris" when they mean "ClarisWorks" - always confuses me.)
Some subsets of the two of us and the other early CW developers worked on ClarisWorks through version 5. Most of this group was later at Gobe, writing Gobe Productive (originally for BeOS, now for Windows as well).
Eventually Apple dismantled Claris. What was left became FileMaker Inc.; ClarisWorks transitioned to Apple, renamed (confusingly) AppleWorks. None of the original ClarisWorks developers are involved with AppleWorks at this point.
Although I'm somewhat depressed at what's become of ClarisWorks, I'm hopeful that StarOffice will be good for the Mac. (Either that, or I'll have to go write another integrated app - I won't use MS software.)
Bob Hearn
Nothing's better for cranking out code than Led Zep, especially late at night when you need energy.
Bach or Vangelis when more deep thought is required.
I second this. ClarisWorks (now AppleWorks) was done in Metrowerks (1.0 and 2.0 were in Think C) - on the Mac at least, it is a great environment. And Apple would have really been screwed if Metrowerks hadn't come around - there was no other reasonable way to port programs to the PPC architecture. I've been thinking about getting the Linux version. Anyone tried it with LinuxPPC? And that review was kind of short on specifics. How does the Linux version really compare to the Mac version?
From someone peripherally involved in this, the machine runs BeOS, but with Microworkz' own window dressing on it. I don't know what the "hybrid" deal is - as someone mentioned, BeOS is POSIX compliant, so many Unix or Linux apps could be provided. However, no X windows.
They'll be bundling our BeOS office package, Gobe Productive. Which most definitely does NOT run on Linux.