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It's about time. I wondered why no one had hooked up a learning AI to Wikipedia/dbpedia and the rest of the Internet. Cyc always semed like a good idea but bad
by chime 16y ago
It's about time. I wondered why no one had hooked up a learning AI to Wikipedia/dbpedia and the rest of the Internet. Cyc always semed like a good idea but bad execution to me. Manually feeding in data takes a lot of time and effort. Why not just let something soak up the entire Internet and correct it if it learns the wrong things? Good luck to CMU. Maybe this will become the search engine of the future.
- dandelany 16y agoSorry to single you out, but comments like this really get me. It's OBVIOUSLY MUCH harder than it looks to you. It's about time! I wondered why no one had hooked up a fuel cell to cleanly power a car. It's about time! I wondered why no one had proved P != NP. It's about time! I wondered why no one had used [insert pop science news headline] to solve [insert major science-related problem]. If you've got a simple solution to a complex problem, you're probably not seeing the whole picture. Or you should be implementing it yourself.
- tkahn6 16y agohttp://xkcd.com/793/ http://xkcd.com/793/ Edit: I thought this was highly relevant to what the parent was saying.
- chime 16y agoEven as I wss typing the above post, I knew I would be singled out because of how I said it. I understand the complexity of what they're trying to do (BS comp sci, coder for 20 years). What I meant to imply was that finally someone is tackling such difficult problems head on and out in the open. This is science fiction becoming a reality. This could be AI that does more than drive cars or fulfil my Netflix orders. So color me excited with optimism. But yes, I see your point and thanks for me calling out. I should have been more explicit in my comment.
- tbrownaw 16y ago> why no one had hooked up a learning AI to Wikipedia/dbpedia and the rest of the Internet. This is because Natural Language Processing is apparently #@!$%@^ hard. Sure it's easy for a computer to extract things from a pile of assertions, and it's not even that difficult to work with fuzzy/probablistic assertions. But turning ordinary everyday English (or Spanish or whatever) into a pile of assertions (with appropriate certainties) is something that's still being figured out.
- dennisgorelik 16y agoGoogle and many other programs learn from Internet for years now.
- _delirium 16y agoWell, Cyc comes from a somewhat different philosophical viewpoint. It is "commonsense reasoning" broadly, but its goal is more to encode "correct" knowledge for a whole range of basic things, rather than necessarily just common knowledge in the sense of knowledge that everyone has. Less "imitate humans" and more "analyze these domains correctly and consistently and encode them in the computer once and for all as a basic substrate on which other things can be built/learned". Part of the reason for that approach is that it uses a fairly standard logic, in which you really need some consistency, contradictions are a problem, etc.; whereas if you were to just collect the sum of what the average people on the street think, there are a ton of inconsistencies, outright contradictions, omissions, illogical beliefs, etc., which you'd need a completely different model from standard logic to deal with. It harkens back somewhat to the 19th-century dream of a "philosophy machine", where we'd formalize various kinds of concepts (Newtonian physics, different theories of causation, theories of time, etc.), then the computer could tell us which propositions are valid under which theories. So Cyc actually hires philosophers to encode some of its ontology, runs some things by physicists, etc. It's very much a non-psychological approach, attempting to build an ontology that in some sense is a "correct" representation of the world by consulting experts on each area to be formalized and making sure all the areas are consistent with each other.