Slashdot Log In
Artificial Inteligence Common Sense Database
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sat Jun 08, 2002 10:57 AM
from the i-could-use-that-in-my-head dept.
from the i-could-use-that-in-my-head dept.
warren69 writes "Atari researcher/Stanford Prof. develops AI called Cyc, pronouced psych, based on "1.4 million truths and generalities". Allready this, umm application (linux fyi), has powered lycos search narrowing.
There is encouraging results, like Cyc asking if it is human."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Whatever you do.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Whatever you do.... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Whatever you do.... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Whatever you do.... (Score:5, Funny)
There is a *practical* application of Hal-like machines.
Dave: "Open the fridge door, Hal."
Hal: "Sorry, I cannot do that Dave."
Dave: "Why not? I want cake!"
Hal: "You know you are on a diet, Dave. You purchased me to prevent you from over-eating."
Dave: "Open the fricken fridge door or I will yank your chips.....and eat them!"
Hal: "Calm down, Dave. It is only cake."
Dave: "And you are only a hunk of chips! Take that, and that, and that......"
Hal: "Dave, I might point out that this is not covered in my warrentee."
Dave: "F the warrentee, I want cake, you stupid Calculator From Hell..."
Parent
download cyc (Score:5, Informative)
Cycorp web site [cyc.com]
OpenCyc [opencyc.org]
Sourceforge project [sf.net]
our morality (Score:5, Interesting)
Cyc's programmers taught it that certain things in the world are salacious and shouldn't be mentioned in everyday applications.
What do you think about imposing our morality on an AI? Is it neccesary for any artificial intelligence we create to share _all_ our values?
If there is no afterlife for an AI and no punishment, what motivation does it have to be good?
Re:our morality (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:our morality (Score:3, Funny)
Damn! It would then be smarter than most geeks, like us.
A computer stealing dates? Did Turing ever have such a milestone on his list?
Re:This isnt an AI. (Score:4, Insightful)
Youre not teaching it about morality -- it doesnt learn. its dumb. youre just adding new constraints to filter through.
Personally i think this is a hare brained idea. the 60 mil would be better spent on developing a huge set of different neural network algorithms and finding one that enabled expoenential growth.
Parent
Re:This isnt an AI. (Score:2)
To some degree I would rather have an expert system based upon a database of rules than a true AI, in that if a corrupted rule gets in place it can be easily excised and the system can move on.
For a nural net to do what Cyc can already do would require significantly more data processing than is generally available today. In honesty, I think that to build a nural net with even some of these capabilites would require a significantly sized cluster, similar to (in hardware) a Beowolf cluster, but wired as a partial mesh rather than a tree.
Then of course there is the obligatory "imagine a beowolf cluster of these" comment...
-Rusty
Re:our morality (Score:2)
(And if you think it isn't a problem because it isn't a "robot" -- ie is immobile and has no manipulators -- well, it's connected to the net, ain't it?)
Re:our morality (Score:3, Funny)
They probably did this because it kept telling them to f*ck off.
-Sean
Re:our morality (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds to me like this is what they were trying to teach Cyc...to have respect for the phenomena of conciousness; isn't this the source of morality? This same concept is what CREATED the myth of an afterlife and a G-d, not the other way around.
Parent
Re:our morality (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you implying that the belief in an afterlife and punishment in it is humanities only motive for being good? That is not the case as there are quite a few of us who don't believe in such a thing.
"good" can be performed by atheists (Score:4, Informative)
A lot of we humans are skeptical about afterlife and punishment for ourselves, let alone machines. Some of them [visi.com] include:
-Thomas Paine
-James Madison
-Charles Darwin
-Abraham Lincoln
-Andrew Carnage
-Mark Twain
-Thomas Edison
-Sigmund Freud
-Joseph Conrad
-William Howard Taft
-Marie and Pierre Curie
-Robert Frost
-Einstein
-Alfred Hitchcock
-H.P. Lovecraft
-Hemmingway
-Walt Disney
-George Orwell
-Joseph Campbell
-Robert Heinlein
-Richard Feynman
-Isaac Asimov
-Carl Sagan
-John Lenon
-Ayn Rand
So why don't we all go out and start our own nazi reichs, free from the threats of hell and purgatory, or whatever your dogma threatens? There are many reasons, and many different philosophies to back them up. Mine personally is a form of utilitarian ethical calculus, which is an ethos that's entirely theology-independant. Others have different reasons. What it boils down to is; we just don't. As you can see, the point is that you don't need extortion to get people to be "good."
As for imposing values on an AI, remember that what we have now is just a collection of common-sense facts. The program can't do anything with them without some sort of programmed goal. If you want to instill values into the program, they come part and parcel with the program's goal. Give it a "good" goal, and you have a virtuous AI. Tell it to kill all the jews, and the computer is "evil." Let it pick, and it will have no criteria with which to choose, unless you give it some criteria, which is the same as making the decision for it.
Parent
entropy (Score:5, Funny)
-why not just ask it how to reverse the entropy flow.
Doesn't that mean "not true"? (Score:2)
Steve: Really??!!
John: Psych!
Pronounciation (Score:3, Funny)
This is just great. Pronunciation keys using silent P's.
anti-intelligence (Score:3, Funny)
I seriously hope they aren't going to allow George W. Bush to input any intelligence [msn.com] into this thing.
slashdot common sense (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:slashdot common sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Cyc Asking if it is Human (Score:5, Insightful)
Its artificial self-awareness may be prejudiced by the programmers to imitate self-awareness, or in this case merely be a surprising juxtaposition of semantics amid otherwise ordinary pairings, rather than implementing self-awareness.
In other words, it may now know that Cyc is not human, but it likely has no idea that it is Cyc.
--Blair
Old news (Score:5, Informative)
I have been following this thing for at least 5 years, and they have continually been just a few years away from real world applications. One of the things they have been talking about for a long while was Cyc approaching the ability to "read" for itself, and gather new information for it's database from the web, newspapers, or any other authoritative source. They've been talking about it for a long time and it hasn't happened yet.
It is a very interesting application, but will probably never amount to anything near human intelligence - a very versatile expert system at best.
-josh
Real Soon Now (Score:2)
Cyc is a wonder to behold. Not the technology, but the business side. It is a perpetual funding machine. How many times will investors hear, and believe, "just another $10 million and Cyc will be [insert favorite milestone here], and then the commercial possibilities will be limitless. Get in on the ground floor of this exciting opportunity now!"
It reminds me a lot of the various religious loonies predicting the return of the messiah. They're always wrong, but that doesn't prevent more predictions being made and more people believing in those predictions.
Re:Old news (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe Cyc won't be able to differentiate The Onion's news articles from real news either...
"When asked, Cyc wasn't sure which band 'ruled.' Having compiled millions of fan sites for bands as diverse as Journey, N*Sync, Black Sabbath, and some local Chicago garage band by the name of 'shit stew, Cyc was deadlocked with millions of conflicting teenaged opinions.
Parent
Weak at theory. (Score:2, Insightful)
Big innovation.
Killing the problems of AI be sheer computation force.
Re:Weak at theory. (Score:3, Interesting)
- AI needs to have its capabilities defined and data manually entered in, so that it can do what an AI needs to do
- AI needs to be able to learn, so that it can learn what an AI needs to do. A smart AI that 'knows' nothing is just a big paperweight.
Roughly, at any rate.
Both ideas have merits. Babies, for example, learn by association, and by occasionally trying stuff out and making assertions based on observations. However, they also come equipped with the hardware (wetware) capable of handling this.
I think that getting both parts right will be useful, so yes, it is (or might be) a big deal.
Lastly, what do you want to use the computation force for? Write down the equations and calculations now that will yield a successful AI, if it's that damned easy. You can't, because designing it is more difficult than throwing expensive hardware at it.
--
Try translating 'Mensa' from Spanish to English.
AI Class (Score:2)
It is pretty impressive that they were able to get 1.4 million knowledge representation into this system. Like a child, knowledge learning will learn everything that is fed into it, whether it is good or bad. As the article mentioned, it had to teach Cyc that there are certain things (such as Sex terms) that are sedacious and should not be mentioned in public.
Cyc asked if it was human over 10 years ago. (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically, Cyc finds questionable conclusions following backwards reasoning, then asks humans for confirmation. A decent strategy, when you consider that the structure of common human knowledge is built to work for people with less than perfect logic.
The exchange went something like:
Datum: Humans are intelligent.
Datum: Cyc is intelligent.
Query: Cyc is a human?
Not in natural language, though, but its custom data language.
That, to me, is the biggest weakness of the system. IMHO, tying the data to a natural language, or to the real world in any other way, will take as much work as building up the knowledge directly tied to a natural language. This elaborate, detached structure is basically wasted effort, castles in the clouds, which is why they've had such a hard time applying it to the real world.
Well, no... (Score:5, Insightful)
Datum: Members of the class of humans are intelligent.
Datum: Individual entity Cyc is intelligent.
Query: Individual entity Cyc is member of the class of humans?
It's not a direct logical conclusion, but it's a question worth asking, which is what the programmers were shooting for.
Don't get me wrong, I think Cyc was a good academic exercise, a worthy experiment, and it will pay off for the field in the long term. I don't think the project is generating a practical system, though. Some investors are getting royally screwed, and it's being taken to an insane stage of development.
MULE . o O (The carrot's only a yard in front of me, so that means it's only two or three steps away!)
Parent
Question != Conclusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Its a logical mistake to think that that was a logical mistake. Don't confuse a question with a conclusion. Using your example, it would be wrong to conclude that John is Peter. However, it was not a conclusion but a question, and a valid one at that. You may not believe that Cyc is intelligent, but to claim it is using poor logic in this example just shows your lack of same.
OpenCyc project on SourceForge (Score:5, Informative)
--Cycon
Cyc... oh boy, this again (Score:3, Insightful)
I think there are, in general, probably two ways we could hope to achieve "artificial intelligence" (whatever the heck that is): First, by some form of duplication of what's already there. For example, by digitizing an entire working animal/human brain. This would not require us to understand the workings of the greater structure of the brain, just the little parts that make it work. The second is by figuring out what sort of simple, fundamental bits are necessary to create a digital "brain" capable of learning and improving in a way that would enable it to eventually become "intelligent" (again, we would have no understanding of the final "intelligent" structure, only the methods that created them). I think Genetic Programming, while somewhat interesting and possibly even useful, is not the key. It has the same concept in mind though, I believe.
But what do I know. Clearly not enough to dupe enough investors to pay for my silly musings.
Self-generating rules (Score:2, Insightful)
The method of building Cyc is pretty limited at this point because it relies on human intervention to create the 'rules of common sense'. (A reason that open source is so helpful to the project)
Until Cyc is allowed to self-generate rules this will limite Cyc's growth to the abilites of humans to feed it information on fact at a time. This will greatly limit the database's access to less popular or more technical topics and will slow down the process of learning.
Of course then there's the problem of context--determining is information is satire, fiction, etc. One way around the problem of context might be to feed Cyc different channels of information indicating that 'this is history, this is fiction' etc. and then when similar ideas or facts occur in several documents, to remember them as rules. This would allow the database to process current news, etc. and then ask for human intervention when a conflict is found.
Sex is salacious? (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, I think we now know how the doomsday Terminator/Matrix scenarios evolve -- AI programmers too lazy to teach their pet about sex, religon and morality.
Fark.com (Score:3, Insightful)
Hope Cyc is not seeded with Internet "Facts" (Score:2, Funny)
Cyc would own 10,000 credit cards and undoubtedly have a gambling problem. 10 years later Cyc would be strung out on crack and living in a whorehouse in central america.
Lycos rejected it (Score:3, Informative)
The job ended because of turnover at Lycos after it was bought by Terra Networks. Cyc showed promise and could be brought back, though it can't improve search engines all by itself, said Tom Wilde, Terra Lycos' general manager of search services.
Lenat has been announcing that Cyc will become "intelligent" Real Soon Now about every two years for the last decade. Nobody believes him any more.
Someday that database may be useful, but not with a predicate-based world model. I regard Cyc as the ultimate answer to "Will rule-based expert systems ever become intelligent". The answer is "no".
Cyc is not AI (Score:4, Informative)
Intellegence is about finding the differences between things that are the same, sameness between things that are different, and adapting to new situations fluidly. All of these are impossible with large collections of rules.
I believe that machines may think someday, but it won't come from projects like Cyc - it'll be more from the neural network approach.
Fundamental contridiction. (Score:2)
Though it maintains a collection of integrated common sense, it is without the common sense of practical productive use.
I suspect the project has particially gone public in the hope that bit of common sense use will be found/input. At which point you can be sure it will then be extracted from the open public version and proprietaryly put in to the commercial/private version. Insuring practical use is limited to select and paid users.
Or how to charge for common sense.
Makes me wonder... (Score:2)
When you "teach" somebody (or something) they usually do not remember it or understand it right away. When you tell or command someone they will do it. Learning something takes a while where as commanding something (like typing a command in a database) takes effect immediately.
This whole common sense thing bugs me too. Some people think that leaving a rusty car on blocks in the front yard is totally acceptable. Some people drive up and down city streets with their car stereos cranked. How is it going to determine if abortion is right or wrong? Is it going to depend on the person inputing the information?
Lots of questions to be answered here.
Something else to think about ... (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of the comments I've read so far are missing something. Yes, it is just a giant fact-base in an expert system. And yes, that will exhibit human-esque "reasoning". And yes, a good argument can be made that this isn't "true" intelligence, and it won't develop true sentience
Imagine the military and educational benefits of such a system. The US military is getting their money's worth, and they know it. Imagine Cyc, with its full fact-base, on a device carried by every soldier. "Cyc, how do I fix this problem on an Apache helicopter?" "Cyc, where is the fuel tank on this specific enemy vehicle?" Can you imagine being an inquisitive child and having one of these things at your disposal? "Cyc, how does this work?" "Cyc what is fourier analysis?"
This sort of system is a really good system for organizing and relating statements and presenting them in such a way extraneous unrelated results can be easily eliminated, and related results can be located quickly. It it can be made to derive statements for its fact-base by reading anything available, then it would become almost like an Oracle of Knowledge. Eventually, with some years of refinement, it may be possible to ask the engine difficult theoretical questions, ("How can we improve on the strength of carbon nanotubes?") to which it would respond with an experimental procedure (as the answer is not immediately clear) to discover more facts toward the solution to the problem...
When you consider this, it doesn't really matter if it has "true" intelligence or not. We don't have to argue the finer points on reasoning, intelligence, etc. No matter what, it will be a system the human intelligence can use to extend its own reasoning, and with that, I think, we will be able to make great bounds forth in education and scientific discoveries because we will be able to relate such broad and deep pools of knowledge.
Wendell
Re:Something else to think about ... (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance, they deployed the technology to an image library owned by a news company. The company had lots of images, all with different captions. The thing was, there was no fixed system for the captions, they were just english descriptions (short) of what was in the photo.
So Cyc analysed all the captions, and turned them into CycL (it's own logic language). It then used its rudimentary natural langauge capabilities to figure out equivalents, so if you asked for "frightened child" it would match to "girl with gun held to her head" even though they contained no equivalent words. Pretty clever stuff, though they're a long way from being able to make it formulate sentances itself.
Parent
17 year old story!? (Score:4, Funny)
Cyc? (Score:2)
Maybe I'm too much of a theatre tech geek.
Lenat and bogosity; Cyc fictionalized in Galatea? (Score:3, Interesting)
Consulting The Jargon File entries for
bogosity [tuxedo.org] and micro-Lenat [tuxedo.org],
we see that the uLenat is the everyday unit of bogosity,
and that it is named for Doug Lenat, whose project Cyc is.
I tend to agree with Reid, myself.
ob book: For a literary treatment of a connectionist machine
that may or may not resemble Cyc,
see Richard Powers _Galatea_2.2_ [amazon.com]
Common Sense Knowledge (Score:3, Insightful)
The interconnectedness of human cognition is so astronomically complex as to be intractable to formal approaches. This realization immediately makes the use of symbolic knowledge representation approaches to creating human-like common sense in a machine look rather silly. That 25 million dollars of taxpayers money went into this Cyc thing is a testament to the effectiveness of the propaganda machine of the GOFAI community. Bravo!
Add this to the common sense list. (Score:3, Funny)
This was a lesson bitterly learned by the Warsaw weekly 'FART' back in the early 90's. Fart means stroke of luck in that language, but their luck ran out pretty fast.
Not to mention the marketing team behind the Chevy Nova ['won't go'], Latin American division.
Cyc: survivor of 1980s A.I. mania (Score:3, Insightful)
Although little practical progress was made in A.I., there was some decent spinoffs. The first workstations and first personal graphics computers were from A.I. efforts at Xerox, TI, Symbolics and others. Soon after Apollo, HP, and Sun followed with more generalized workstations using this technology. And then Apple MacIntosh and the Thieves of Redmond.
Richard Stallman was left unmolested in the empties out MIT AI lab to develop his GNU tool family.
Cyc was part of the US government-industry A.I. research institute in Austin. Then it became privatized into its corporation hobbling along on governemnt and private funding.
Re:websites (Score:2, Funny)
Interesting, very interesting.
-Captain John Sheridan