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genx
[Guest] |
| | | | | | posted 8/25/2001 14:44 |  | | | | | | | | | The Cyc Project is about to go open source any day now (I think. The release was planned for July and then postponded to August). I am wondering how this release will change the world of AI (if at all). Will it revolutionazie the field of NLU? Speech technology? This release will include lexical terms, and most likely assertions that link them to concepts that describe their meaning. But will it also include grammar rules, or templates that define different types of sentences and parts of speech? And what will be the mosat natural implimentations of such a system?
| | |  http://www.opencyc.org/index.html | | |
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genx
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michelle |
| | | | | | posted 9/2/2001 11:02 | | | | | | | | | | This is from the article "Machines in the Myths:
The State of Artificial Intelligence" be DeAnne DeWitt, published at chipcenter.com:
"Reading consumer-level science journals and corporate press releases can lead one to believe that AI is making huge leaps towards self-aware machines. It is as though mere moments separate us from being able to find out why the answer is 42. [i] Recently, Dr. Douglas Lenat, the AI visionary and world-renowned computer scientist leading the Cyc project, gave interviews that suggested that Cyc had achieved consciousness and that they were busy programming hard logic moral rules for it.
Cyc, (pronounced Psych), is a project working on a "commonsense" approach to AI that has been quietly under development for almost 2 decades. When I asked John DeOliveira, the marketing director at Cycorp, to define "commonsense", he said: "If you look at an encyclopedia, you'll see a great deal of knowledge of the world represented in the form of articles. Common sense is exactly not this knowledge. Common sense is the complement of this knowledge. It is the white space behind the words. It is all of the knowledge that the article writer assumed all of his/her readers would already have prior to reading the article -- knowledge that could be put to use in order to understand the article. Cyc is about representing and automating the white space." (I love that answer.)
Large portions of the Cyc knowledge base will be released to the world at large in August 2001, in the form of OpenCyc, which may be the largest open-source collection of inferentially categorized data in the world. [ii] According to the company, it will have a knowledge base of "6,000 concepts: an upper ontology for all of human consensus reality and 60,000 assertions about the 6,000 concepts, interrelating them, constraining them, in effect (partially) defining them." The main, nonpublic Cyc knowledge base has over 1.4 million assertions and took approximately 500 person-years and $50 million dollars to develop.
Cyc is not the only "commonsense" project out there. MIT and Mindpixel both have projects [iii] that are similar, although Cyc appears to be considerably more sophisticated. Dr. Lenat was quoted in the Los Angeles Times [iv] as saying "Cyc has goals, long and short-range. It has an awareness of itself. It doesn't care about things in the same sense that we do, but on the other hand, we ourselves are only a small number of generations away from creatures who operated solely on instinct." In the same article Dr. Lenat went on to say, "No one ever told HAL that killing is worse than lying. But we've told Cyc."
Well, I don't know about you, but I found that statement kind of spooky. Even with a couple dozen philosophers on board, how do you set non-contextual rules for that sort of thing? Whose morals are you going to use? For example, is all killing worse than all lying? What if it's the state doing the killing in an execution? Is it wrong to kill someone who wants to die? Is it wrong to kill to protect yourself? These are the types of questions I wanted to ask Cyc. If they were building a machine with morals, I wanted to understand what sort of context it was using for moral ontology. [v]
I was curious as to whether I could "talk" to the prime knowledge base, Cyc itself, in Natural Language format. Now, when I say talk to it, I didn't expect it to be an Alicebot chat clone. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but I figured that any machine that had been hand-coded by philosophers had to be the closest we've come to a conscious machine, and I wanted to do an interview with it. (Yes, I can hear you laughing...and it's not very nice.)
In my chat and email conversations with John DeOliveira at Cycorp, he was kind enough not to giggle when I stated my desire to interview Cyc. He provided a lot of information and access to DARPA tests of Cyc so I could see how the query process and information addition worked. But he said that it wouldn't be possible for me to "play" with Cyc. A trained skill-set is required to be able to efficiently interface with the Cyc engine, and naturally, they're reluctant to let random people come bang on a keyboard. Mr. Oliveira answered many questions that I had, but he was reluctant to answer questions about Dr. Lenat's assertion of consciousness, the topic in which I was most interested."
| | | Machines in the Myths: The State of Artificial Intelligence | | |
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IMHO, Cycorp is a scam.
[Guest] |
| | | | | | posted 8/5/2002 05:13 | | | | | | | | | | Cycorp receives its funding from Darpa, but Cycorp never seems to produce any product that Darpa can use. The company has a terrible reputation for ill treatment of employees. Could it be that Darpa is just a good ol' boy network, primed to funnel funds into the gut of those who are connected?
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The Indian Guy
[Guest] |
| | | | | | posted 10/8/2007 00:35 | | | | | | | | | | CyCorp is a corporate welfare program financed by the U.S. Government for the benefit of Doug Lenat, a low talent, big ego corporate welfare recipient. His wife, Mary Shepherd was married to Doug at sea in order to avoid tax complications and it is not a matter of public record that they are married. Doug and Mary run CyCorp as their on private kingdom. Doug keeps doing is poor job of research and Mary protects his reputation by stalking former employers online, using her full access to personal information collected during employment. Stay away from this place. It is a very dysfunctional evironment.
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tkorrovi
[Guest] |
| | | | | | posted 11/17/2007 20:48 | | | | | | | | | | Cyc was a crazy idea, it is not possible to hardcode all the rules how the human mind works, and it's frenzy to start an effort to do that, so also there is not much good to expect from the people who do that. They repeatedly said that the bottom up approach is bad because it is very difficult to make any more developed system that way. So must this be the reason to end the research of one possibility completely? I think to the contrary, by researching the bottom up systems, we can achieve at least some important results with the most simple systems, which are theoretically important, while with the dop down approach the work which we have to do in creating all the necessary rules would be almost infinite, until we would even find anything theoretically important. This is, at least, a very bad approach for science, it's something similar to saying that we cannot do any theoretical research in astronomy, before we map all the stars in the universe.
| | | Artificial Consciousness ADS Project | | |
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tkorrovi
[Guest] |
| | | | | | posted 11/17/2007 21:10 | | | | | | | | | | I mean, the crazy idea is not the top down approach, but the crazy idea is to achieve a true AI through the top down approach.
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