9 ms·

Artificial intelligence just lost a leader

152 points by furcyd 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
magoghm 4y ago
Roger Schank was one of the pioneers in Natural Language Understanding with his work on Conceptual Dependencies. I remember reading, in the late 70s, about his SAM (Script Applier Mechanism) and PAM (Plan Applier Mechanism) and be amazed that a computer program could answer questions about natural language text. I still have my copy of his book "Inside Computer Understanding, Five Programs Plus Miniatures" which gave detailed explanations of how they were implemented.
1024core 4y ago
A buddy of mine went to Yale in the late 80s, and used to tell some tall tales about (grad student) parties in Schank's basement, with free flowing booze and weed. Sounded like a guy who worked hard and partied hard.
SeanLuke 4y ago
A colleague of mine told me a story about Roger Schank, whom he knew well. I'd like to think this was apocryphal but I suspect it is not! As soon as Schank's PhD students graduated, he would start talking trash about them. The colleague asked Schank why in the world he would do something like this, and the response was that Schank had realized that whenever he bad-mouthed someone, others would come to assume that the person's work had to be impressive. So this was his approach to promote his students and increase their hiring prospects.
- jimbo9991 4y ago
  That's hilarious. I guess it does seem that it is probably true that I would be impressed if somebody applying for a job had managed to elicit such great interest by their advisor that said advisor would publicly denounce them, in turn risking their own reputations and careers. At a certain point a bad reference becomes a good one I guess.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Why would you want to hire someone who the leading expert in their work says is wrong?
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      Certain decision makers are attracted (in a hiring sense) to contrarians or an underdog. Followers rarely revolutionize an industry (or so I’ve been told the thought process goes). To rely on a leading expert as an appeal to authority might get you blindsided.
      - hackernewds 4y ago
        I'm struggling to grasp this logic still. An incompetent person is more likely to be admonished publicly
        eric-burel 4y ago
        Researchers logic stops to their research, they are bad at HR
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    >At a certain point a bad reference becomes a good one I guess. "There is no such thing as bad publicity."
  - lordgrenville 4y ago
    Kind of the inverse of the Talmud's rule that the sin of speaking badly about someone also covers praising them excessively, on the theory that this will usually lead to pushback.
- NicoJuicy 4y ago
  Ironically, this would be something that IA would not adapt too, i guess.
- jagrsw 4y ago
  Probably a bad sign? It's concerning to see young scientists' job prospects being manipulated based on personal relationships rather than merit. This form of tribalism goes against the principles of the academic system. If this behavior is deemed as "pragmatism," it's a sign of a larger issue within the academic community.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    That's not surprising. The academic community has more issues than Reader's Digest. The academia is a small, petty world full of inflated egos and prone to political hysteria, with people eternally locked into zero sum games. When I moved to the private sector, it felt like a breath of fresh air. There, people will "only" try to rip you off, but given that their reputation precedes them, you will orient yourself pretty quickly and stop cooperating with the nasties, unless they are as dominant as Google or Microsoft are. You cannot do this in rigid hierarchies of the academic world.
    - bongoman37 4y ago
      [dead]
  - rebolek 4y ago
    wow, it's like academic system is some sort of divine intervention and not people doing people's stuff
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    > the principles of the academic system Lmao. Those being what, signing one's name under as many bullshit papers and articles as physically possible to get tenure and then doing the bare minimum till you retire while your students hate you? Today's academia has no principles left, it's a rat race to the bottom.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
versteegen 4y ago
A huge loss. Here is the chapter Roger Schank wrote for the 1997 book, The Third Culture (ed. John Brockman) https://www.edge.org/conversation/information-is-surprises https://www.edge.org/conversation/information-is-surprises At the bottom of the page are a number of comments about Schank and his work by other chapter authors: Steven Pinker, Danny Hillis, Marvin Minsky, etc. E.g. > It was quite hard to persuade our colleagues to consider these kinds of theories. Sometimes, it seems, the only way to get their attention is by shocking them. Roger Schank is good at this. His original discussion of conceptual dependency used such examples as "Jack threatened to choke Mary unless she would give him her book." ... I once asked Roger why so many of his examples were so bloodthirsty. He replied, "Ah, but notice how clearly you remember them!" -- Minsky
- abhgh 4y ago
  I wasn't aware of this! It's funny because when we were taught Conceptual Dependency (in a GOFAI course as part of my Masters), this is something we used to joke about, that so many of the examples are violent. Yes, a great loss. I had hoped that Conceptual Dependency (CD) would be revived by marrying it to deep learning systems - I still hope someone works on it. I still own a copy of the CD book "Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry Into Human Knowledge Structures".
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Why is it a great loss? He was 77 years old (a fairly normal age to die), had lived a rich and productive life, had some real impact on his chosen field, and was no long actively working. Why do we keep talking about people's death as a loss when they've already made their contributions to the world, and leave behind them a wide and/or deep legacy for the future?
  - b112 4y ago
    It is a way to say all you said, and more, is now gone.
    - versteegen 4y ago
mythz 4y ago
Also informative is the article's 1 comment is from Alan Kay: > Roger and I were “friends” — kind of “New York friends” — since we met at the Stanford AI project in late 69 or early 70 — so about 53 years or so. He was really great at thinking things out from scratch — like an ancient Greek — and some of his insights really helped make progress.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  Can someone explain what Kay means by "New York friends"? My Google-fu is weak this morning, so I'm just getting a bunch of stuff about the old television show.
musesum 4y ago
To be honest, I wasn't smart enough to wrap my head around Schank's semantic graphs. However, was/am inspired by this: "best way to make a machine think is to first make it teach" [1] [1] https://www.wired.com/1994/08/schank/ https://www.wired.com/1994/08/schank/
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  > "best way to make a machine think is to first make it teach" That applies to humans too. Richard Feynman said that if you can't explain something to someone else you don't really understand it yourself. "Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.” David Goodstein: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/563/2/Goodstein.pdf http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/563/2/Goodstein.pdf
cactusplant7374 4y ago
> Like Marvin Minsky, he takes the strong AI view, but rather than trying to build an intelligent machine he wants to deconstruct the human mind. He wants to know, in particular, how natural language— one’s mother tongue — is processed, how memory works, and how learning occurs. Which led me to the "Chinese room" argument which is rather interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
fumeux_fume 4y ago
This is first time I've read about Roger Schank. From what little I know about him, I suspect he believed, like me, that the quest to understand AI is also a quest to understand ourselves and what makes us human.
jonathanstrange 4y ago
Roger Schank happened to be the reason why I got interested in AI in the first place. I read a German translation of a popular science book in high school - I've tried to find out the title and author again without success. (Maybe Schank was the co-author?) It was about his group and how they watched Mork & Mindy on Friday afternoons because Mork made so many interesting, intelligent mistakes. This book and Schank & Riesbeck's Conceptual Dependency Theory was the reason I decided to study "AI." Unfortunately, we only had a new line of study called cognitive science then, and the psychologists didn't really integrate well. So I ended up studying Philosophy and General Linguistics (at a center for computational linguistics). Fast forward 30 years and I'm now organizing my own seminar series on Friday afternoons and participate in a EU project on XAI. However, I should have stayed in computational linguistics, going into philosophy was a mistake. Anyway, I wish I had met Schank to tell him how much his early work on CD influenced me.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
I believe he built the “Cognitive Arts” company for learning software. That was an early influence on my own company. So I remember when I met him and showed him our games for teaching kids fractions. His response: “why the hell should we teach kids fractions?”
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

152 points by furcyd 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Roger Schank was one of the pioneers in Natural Language Understanding with his work on Conceptual Dependencies. I remember reading, in the late 70s, about his SAM (Script Applier Mechanism) and PAM (Plan Applier Mechanism) and be amazed that a computer program could answer questions about natural language text. I still have my copy of his book "Inside Computer Understanding, Five Programs Plus Miniatures" which gave detailed explanations of how they were implemented.

1024core 4y ago

A buddy of mine went to Yale in the late 80s, and used to tell some tall tales about (grad student) parties in Schank's basement, with free flowing booze and weed. Sounded like a guy who worked hard and partied hard.

SeanLuke 4y ago

A colleague of mine told me a story about Roger Schank, whom he knew well. I'd like to think this was apocryphal but I suspect it is not! As soon as Schank's PhD students graduated, he would start talking trash about them. The colleague asked Schank why in the world he would do something like this, and the response was that Schank had realized that whenever he bad-mouthed someone, others would come to assume that the person's work had to be impressive. So this was his approach to promote his students and increase their hiring prospects.

jimbo9991 4y ago
That's hilarious. I guess it does seem that it is probably true that I would be impressed if somebody applying for a job had managed to elicit such great interest by their advisor that said advisor would publicly denounce them, in turn risking their own reputations and careers. At a certain point a bad reference becomes a good one I guess.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  Why would you want to hire someone who the leading expert in their work says is wrong?
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Certain decision makers are attracted (in a hiring sense) to contrarians or an underdog. Followers rarely revolutionize an industry (or so I’ve been told the thought process goes). To rely on a leading expert as an appeal to authority might get you blindsided.
    - hackernewds 4y ago
      I'm struggling to grasp this logic still. An incompetent person is more likely to be admonished publicly
      - eric-burel 4y ago
        Researchers logic stops to their research, they are bad at HR
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >At a certain point a bad reference becomes a good one I guess. "There is no such thing as bad publicity."
- lordgrenville 4y ago
  Kind of the inverse of the Talmud's rule that the sin of speaking badly about someone also covers praising them excessively, on the theory that this will usually lead to pushback.
NicoJuicy 4y ago
Ironically, this would be something that IA would not adapt too, i guess.
jagrsw 4y ago
Probably a bad sign? It's concerning to see young scientists' job prospects being manipulated based on personal relationships rather than merit. This form of tribalism goes against the principles of the academic system. If this behavior is deemed as "pragmatism," it's a sign of a larger issue within the academic community.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  That's not surprising. The academic community has more issues than Reader's Digest. The academia is a small, petty world full of inflated egos and prone to political hysteria, with people eternally locked into zero sum games. When I moved to the private sector, it felt like a breath of fresh air. There, people will "only" try to rip you off, but given that their reputation precedes them, you will orient yourself pretty quickly and stop cooperating with the nasties, unless they are as dominant as Google or Microsoft are. You cannot do this in rigid hierarchies of the academic world.
  - bongoman37 4y ago
    [dead]
- rebolek 4y ago
  wow, it's like academic system is some sort of divine intervention and not people doing people's stuff
- moffkalast 4y ago
  > the principles of the academic system Lmao. Those being what, signing one's name under as many bullshit papers and articles as physically possible to get tenure and then doing the bare minimum till you retire while your students hate you? Today's academia has no principles left, it's a rat race to the bottom.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

versteegen 4y ago

A huge loss. Here is the chapter Roger Schank wrote for the 1997 book, The Third Culture (ed. John Brockman) https://www.edge.org/conversation/information-is-surprises https://www.edge.org/conversation/information-is-surprises At the bottom of the page are a number of comments about Schank and his work by other chapter authors: Steven Pinker, Danny Hillis, Marvin Minsky, etc. E.g. > It was quite hard to persuade our colleagues to consider these kinds of theories. Sometimes, it seems, the only way to get their attention is by shocking them. Roger Schank is good at this. His original discussion of conceptual dependency used such examples as "Jack threatened to choke Mary unless she would give him her book." ... I once asked Roger why so many of his examples were so bloodthirsty. He replied, "Ah, but notice how clearly you remember them!" -- Minsky

abhgh 4y ago
I wasn't aware of this! It's funny because when we were taught Conceptual Dependency (in a GOFAI course as part of my Masters), this is something we used to joke about, that so many of the examples are violent. Yes, a great loss. I had hoped that Conceptual Dependency (CD) would be revived by marrying it to deep learning systems - I still hope someone works on it. I still own a copy of the CD book "Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry Into Human Knowledge Structures".
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Why is it a great loss? He was 77 years old (a fairly normal age to die), had lived a rich and productive life, had some real impact on his chosen field, and was no long actively working. Why do we keep talking about people's death as a loss when they've already made their contributions to the world, and leave behind them a wide and/or deep legacy for the future?
- b112 4y ago
  It is a way to say all you said, and more, is now gone.
  - versteegen 4y ago

mythz 4y ago

Also informative is the article's 1 comment is from Alan Kay: > Roger and I were “friends” — kind of “New York friends” — since we met at the Stanford AI project in late 69 or early 70 — so about 53 years or so. He was really great at thinking things out from scratch — like an ancient Greek — and some of his insights really helped make progress.

Turing_Machine 4y ago
Can someone explain what Kay means by "New York friends"? My Google-fu is weak this morning, so I'm just getting a bunch of stuff about the old television show.

musesum 4y ago

To be honest, I wasn't smart enough to wrap my head around Schank's semantic graphs. However, was/am inspired by this: "best way to make a machine think is to first make it teach" [1] [1] https://www.wired.com/1994/08/schank/ https://www.wired.com/1994/08/schank/

kwhitefoot 4y ago
> "best way to make a machine think is to first make it teach" That applies to humans too. Richard Feynman said that if you can't explain something to someone else you don't really understand it yourself. "Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.” David Goodstein: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/563/2/Goodstein.pdf http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/563/2/Goodstein.pdf

cactusplant7374 4y ago

> Like Marvin Minsky, he takes the strong AI view, but rather than trying to build an intelligent machine he wants to deconstruct the human mind. He wants to know, in particular, how natural language— one’s mother tongue — is processed, how memory works, and how learning occurs. Which led me to the "Chinese room" argument which is rather interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

fumeux_fume 4y ago

This is first time I've read about Roger Schank. From what little I know about him, I suspect he believed, like me, that the quest to understand AI is also a quest to understand ourselves and what makes us human.

jonathanstrange 4y ago

Roger Schank happened to be the reason why I got interested in AI in the first place. I read a German translation of a popular science book in high school - I've tried to find out the title and author again without success. (Maybe Schank was the co-author?) It was about his group and how they watched Mork & Mindy on Friday afternoons because Mork made so many interesting, intelligent mistakes. This book and Schank & Riesbeck's Conceptual Dependency Theory was the reason I decided to study "AI." Unfortunately, we only had a new line of study called cognitive science then, and the psychologists didn't really integrate well. So I ended up studying Philosophy and General Linguistics (at a center for computational linguistics). Fast forward 30 years and I'm now organizing my own seminar series on Friday afternoons and participate in a EU project on XAI. However, I should have stayed in computational linguistics, going into philosophy was a mistake. Anyway, I wish I had met Schank to tell him how much his early work on CD influenced me.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

I believe he built the “Cognitive Arts” company for learning software. That was an early influence on my own company. So I remember when I met him and showed him our games for teaching kids fractions. His response: “why the hell should we teach kids fractions?”

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]