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I've been waiting for the Symbolic/NN pendulum to starting swinging back the other way and start settling in the center. NN/DL is great for the interface betwee

I've been waiting for the Symbolic/NN pendulum to starting swinging back the other way and start settling in the center. NN/DL is great for the interface between the outer world and the inner world of the mind (pattern recognition and re-construction), and symbolic AI more straightforwardly represents more "language of the mind" tasks, and easily handles issues like explanation and other meta-behaviors that with DL is difficult due to its black-box nature. DL's reliance on extension/training vs. intention/rules can develop ad-hoc intentional emergent theories which is their strength but also their weakness as these theories may not be correct or complete. Each can be brittle in their own way - so it'll be interesting to see more cross-pollination.

uoaei 7y ago
SAT solvers are really fast now. Some sort of "neural SAT problem definition" followed by solving it seems to be an interesting direction, but I'm relatively naive on it all. Not sure how training would work since there's no backprop through Boolean logic.
- w_t_payne 7y ago
  Differentiable SAT solvers is a thing.
  - ssivark 7y ago
    Pointers please; not just off-hand mentions leaving others to scratch their heads about what you mean! :-)
- skdotdan 7y ago
  https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12149 https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12149
brundolf 7y ago
My company is one of the only ones still pushing on symbolic AI: https://www.cyc.com/ https://www.cyc.com/
- thelazydogsback 7y ago
  Lenat's Cyc? I'm quite familiar. I hadn't looked at it in about 25 years until I just happened to come across the ATT-CYC docs a few days ago (I seem to be missing Part 2) and a printout of a PPT that he gave group of us at Microsoft in 1994/5 or so.
chillacy 7y ago
I'm not an expert but it seems like whatever symbolic reasoning humans have is pretty rudimentary anyways compared to what we're doing on computers already, so I could see the union being very powerful.
whytaka 7y ago
I've looked around but can't seem to find a good online primer on Symbolic AI. Any help?

uoaei 7y ago

SAT solvers are really fast now. Some sort of "neural SAT problem definition" followed by solving it seems to be an interesting direction, but I'm relatively naive on it all. Not sure how training would work since there's no backprop through Boolean logic.

w_t_payne 7y ago
Differentiable SAT solvers is a thing.
- ssivark 7y ago
  Pointers please; not just off-hand mentions leaving others to scratch their heads about what you mean! :-)
skdotdan 7y ago
https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12149 https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12149

brundolf 7y ago

My company is one of the only ones still pushing on symbolic AI: https://www.cyc.com/ https://www.cyc.com/

thelazydogsback 7y ago
Lenat's Cyc? I'm quite familiar. I hadn't looked at it in about 25 years until I just happened to come across the ATT-CYC docs a few days ago (I seem to be missing Part 2) and a printout of a PPT that he gave group of us at Microsoft in 1994/5 or so.

chillacy 7y ago

I'm not an expert but it seems like whatever symbolic reasoning humans have is pretty rudimentary anyways compared to what we're doing on computers already, so I could see the union being very powerful.

whytaka 7y ago

I've looked around but can't seem to find a good online primer on Symbolic AI. Any help?