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Software Science

Happy Fifth Birthday GAC and Mindpixel! 119

Posted by timothy from the you-think-you-can-you-think-you-can dept.
mindpixel writes "GAC is five today! Wow, that was fast! To celibrate, I am releasing 80,000 mindpixels with their corresponding probability of truth for research use."
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Happy Fifth Birthday GAC and Mindpixel! More

Happy Fifth Birthday GAC and Mindpixel!

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  • celibrate? (Score:3, Funny)

    by enrico_suave ( 179651 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:38PM (#12996859) Homepage
    is that like a party without any nookie?

    e.
  • ... completely and utterly lost by this post? I have no idea what it's about or what the acronym means!

    • Some help (Score:3, Informative)

      by mopslik ( 688435 )

      You're not alone. The GAC link leads to a minimal MindPixel front page, which reads "Digital Mind Modeling Project" and prompts me to log in. The blog link informs me that MindPixel is "a map of common sense". The 80,000 link initially crashed Firefox on my Win2K machine here at work, but on a retry, gave me a page which begins "Is ice cream cold? Is earth a planet? Is green a color?"

      Fortunately, Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] gave some insight. But yeah, the article summary was a bit too vague for my liking.

  • Yeesh (Score:2)

    by Otter ( 3800 )
    I'd wonder snidely if "celibrate" is a Freudian slip, but then I'm the dweeb who not only read the product of your bong session but is complaining that the probability of "isHelium a gas?" is <1.00.

    • Re:Yeesh (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TopShelf ( 92521 )
      You have to wonder about the quality of the data involved here, given lines like:

      0.04 Can a fantasy beast can utter juniper bushes?
      0.04 can you speak russian?
      0.04 Will answer number 7 actually give you cheese?
      0.04 Does an hour consist of 30 minutes?

      • Dude. probabily is 0.04!!

        WHICH MEANS FALSE!
        • Wouldn't false be 0.00??? Also, some of those don't even form logical statements that are worth assigning a probability too.

          I assume the 0.04 is because one validator gave a smart-ass response, which could skew the data, wouldn't it?
          • No. It is what it was measured as. We live in a noisy world. The data is real. Do not think in absolutes. Think of the mind as caccading through a geometry of continuous shades of grey.

            0.04 is very week semantic gravity and the chance of you ending up in this attractor basic is well 0.04.

            See the space not the stars. Feel the semantic gravity. Thoughts bend!
            • Wow. "Feel the semantic gravity." You should be in marketing.
            • SOmething that is provably false should have a 0.00. Does 1+1=5? is provable false, for instance. The answer on Russian may make sense (if 4% of the worlds population speaks it, than a truth probability of .04 is reasonable.) But things like "Does an hour consist of 30 minutes?" should be absolute, or you're working on garbage data to begin with.
              • Nothing is absolute. There is noise in the universe my friend.

                Now the very interesting thing about the noise in the mindpixel corpus is it is PINK NOISE! Or 1/f noise! That is the signature of complexity my friend.

                Take you absolutes to church because you can't have them in science.
                • Yes, we do have them in science and mathematics. Basic math is proven. Calculus is proven. The halting problem is proven, etc. While not everything can be, a great many can. There is no set of circumstances in which 1+1=5. Ever. Its an absolute.
                  • Not true. 1+1=5 if I am hurried or not paying attention or if I am being an asshole. But if you look at the majority of responses you can see what the truth most likely is.

                    Have you ever run a psychology experiment?

                    Data is noisy.

                    • Psychology isn't science. And making a math mistake doesn't make 1+1=5. It means you made a mistake. It doesn't change what the truth is.
                    • Oh fuck off.

                      Listen dude. I had the keys to the VLT for four years. That's a $1 billion space ship. We took thousands and thousands of images and in not a single one was there an absolute anything. Don't tell me about science.

                      You need to learn some statistics. Statistics is the language of science. Absolutes is the language of religion.
      • I found some interesting self references; if you search for 'this', you come up with many gems, including these:

        0.78 Judging by this database, then truth is relative?
        0.78 Will this AI be used for peaceful purposes?
        0.78 should i waste my hours on this instead of computer games?
        0.78 Do some people think GAC is more than it is?
        0.77 can this question be answered "yes" or "no" ?
        0.77 does this just log the questions, and ask other people?
        0.77 Will we ever s

  • I love /. (Score:5, Informative)

    by mindpixel ( 154865 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:50PM (#12996980) Homepage Journal
    For five years now, more than 50,000 people have been working to make a map of common sense. The project is known as Mindpixel. It was launched on July 6, 2000. On August 24, 2000 Chris McKinstry (me) and Mindpixel were profiled [pbs.org] by Robert X. Cringely. In September of 2000 Both Time [time.com] and Wired [wired.com] magazines carried news of the merger of Mindpixel with the MIT Media Labs Open Mind Common Sense Project.

    Now, what can you do with this data? Well, once it is in the google index - tomorrow, I suspect. Then the 3.5mb page of 80k validated pieces of knowledge will be able to do for consensus internal knowledge what wikipedia does for consensus external knowledge. I hope that eventually, google will trust Mindpixel as it does Wikipedia. Then commercial applications of semantic spectrum based technology can proceed, and the 50,000 owners of the

    • Don't you think that it may have been helpful to include that at the beginning? Not all of us have the time to go look it up in time and wired et al.

    • Re:I love /. (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This advertisement has been brought to you by Mindpixel. "Over 5 years of paying Timothy to post about us"
      • You kidding? Fuckin' hell, the signal-to-noise ratio of this article is beyond insane:

        - What exactly is GAC ? Shurely shome mistake...

        - Summary ????

    • ...50,000 owners of the data can start making some money...

    • Re:I love /. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TigerNut ( 718742 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @03:05PM (#12997134) Homepage Journal
      Google may trust Mindpixel, but I sure don't have to. Not when you're claiming that blue and yellow make green (about 0.95 probability), without qualifying that it only applies to pigments.
      • GAC is a model of an average person. You have to look at the geometry of the whole forest, not just the funny looking trees.

        Play with the data...

        For example...pull out the semantic spectrum for aardvark...What is it? What is it not? This information is everything google is missing.
        • WTFO?

          The link given for GAC is nothing but 80,000 poorly written "questions" (many of which have misspellings and poor grammar, and many of which are not questions) with an arbitrary number before them. They are meaningless.

          1.00 is the earth round??????????

          No, it's not. It's a triaxial ellipsoid. What's with all the question marks?

          1.00 Are unripe banans green?

          What is a banan?

          1.00 Would you find a closet in a h?use?

          What is a h?use?

          1.00 do chillies make your mouth bur
          • Just wait til you read the utter crap [kuro5hin.org] he posts on K5.
            • Thanks, I really needed to waste more time on this.
              [/sarcasm]

              Wow. Just wow.

              This is like the timecube (which appears to be four dimensional, but I can't really tell--I must be evil).
              I wonder. . .
              Since time is four dimensional and the brain (mind?) is seven dimensional, why can't we visualize/understand the whole of time? Clearly it's within our capacity to do so since our minds completely contain the whole of time!

              Ah, well, back to science.
            • Gahhhh!
              I just wasted a few minutes of my life reading his utter crap.
              Damn you! Damn you to hell!

              -
              • Here's what I pulled out of my log for a few hours this afternoon:

                University Of Oklahoma
                Us Dept Of Justice
                Advanced Acoustics Concepts
                General Electric Company
                Cornell University
                Naval Research Laboratory
                Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
                Google
                Microsoft
                Rutgers University
                Storage Technology Corporation
                U.s. Environmental Protection Agency
                Electronic Arts Inc
                United Parcel Service
                National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration (noaa)
                University Of Calgary
                Ohio State University
                Bowe Bell And Howell International
                Nati
                • Here's what I pulled out of my log for a few hours this afternoon:

                  It's nice to know that even people in the DOJ and at Microsoft are sneaking over to Slashdot while they're at work. (Though I find it hard to believe anybody at Electronic Arts can find the time.)
    • How is it useful for Joe Sixpack to lookup "Bill Clinton" on Google, and find the following line:

      1.00 Is Bill Clinton the President of the United States?

      Joe's looking for an answer, not a question. He doesn't know what the 1.00 at the beginning of line means either. And even if he does, it's wrong anyway. I'd hardly call that validated.

      Also, what's semantic spectrum based technology?
      • Presumably, google will use their massive server farm to parse the "1.00 Is Bill Clinton the President of the United States." into something that more resembles an answer to a question.

        Temporal things, like "who is the president right now" or "how is the weather" need to be updated more often. It is entirely possible that when that question was entered into the truth table, however, the answer to the question was indeed true.

        No idea about the semantic spectrum bit. I could use an explanation there too.
    • University Of Oklahoma
      Us Dept Of Justice
      General Electric Company
      Cornell University
      Naval Research Laboratory
      Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
      Google
      Microsoft
      Rutgers University
      Storage Technology Corporation
      U.s. Environmental Protection Agency
      Electronic Arts Inc
      United Parcel Service
      National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration (noaa)
      University Of Calgary
      Ohio State University
      Bowe Bell And Howell International
      National Institute Of Standards And Technology
      Energis Uk
      Brigham Young University
      University Of Water
      • Umm, you had a post on slashdot. I wouldn't be surprised if you had employees 90% of the corporations and universities in the US on their within 2 hours. You could have the same if they linked to a 404 error on your server. It doesn't mean anything either way about your project.

  • not a lot of comments yet (Score:3, Informative)

    by zerkon ( 838861 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @02:55PM (#12997027)
    everyone elses browser must be choking to death on the 80,000 lines of text like mine is...
    • that wasn't my problem. my issue was trying to figure out what the hell it means to assign a /question/ a truth value. i can understand what it means when you're operating on statements, but the semantics of an 80% correct answer to a 5% true question kinda boggles me.

      as a random fun fact, there are at least 13 references to semen in their list of facts and several random references to sex acts. i suspect that when gac grows up, it's going to turn into the average irc luser...
      • vagina is listed 61 times, breast 113 times, and penis 198 times (i think i may have lost count around 160 though) thus proving more men use the internet, although mind pixel returns FALSE to "more men use the internet" thus proving i just wasted 15 minutes of my time on something stupid, thanks /.
      • Is the probability of a brain states when you sample 20 random people.

        This data self-organizes beautifully with a variation on the DTW-SOM.

        But, the reason I posted it, is it is GACs fifth birthday. I donot expect many people to understand what this very large page means.

        But you will start to get it when it starts turning up in all your search results.
        • Why on earth would anyone want this crap in their search results? To me this looks like a huge spam e-mail for some reason. In summary:

          1.00 Is GAC a waste of time?
        • I think that the idea is VERY interesting.

          There are obvious things, that GAC is certain (or nearly certain) about.
          There are relatively obsure things that GAC is unsure about.
          Other things that GAC is likely to be wrong about.

          It is a very interesting way to get a sample of common knowledge.

          The hard part seems (to me) to be to figure out how to use it.

  • Many of these are inaccurate... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Muad'Dave ( 255648 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @03:04PM (#12997116) Homepage

    ...given the vagaries of English. For example:

    Is rape a good thing?

    Most people would say 0%, but rape [wikipedia.org] is also a type of seed-bearing plant, so rape is a good thing for getting rapeseed (canola) oil. For this assertion to be useful, there must be a way to distinguish from the plant and the crime.

    In fact, 3 of the first 5 are ambiguous or subject to interpretation:

    1. 1.00 is icecream cold?
    2. 1.00 is earth a planet?
    3. 1.00 Is it hot during the summer?
    Is ice cream cold cold relative to liquid nitrogen? no.
    Earth is also a collection of organic and non-organic substances that plants grow in.
    Hot, relative to what? At the north pole, it's never 'hot'.

    • Re:Many of these are inaccurate... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wishus ( 174405 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @03:36PM (#12997464) Journal
      Inaccurate, and weird.

      0.97 Is Jerry Garcia dead?
      0.90 Did Jerry Garcia die in 1995?
      0.85 Was Jerry Garcia a member of "the Grateful Dead" before he died?
      0.76 Did Jerry Garcia play guitar for the Grateful Dead?
      0.32 Did Jerry Garcia have 9.5 fingers?

      I don't understand how it's 32% probable that Jerry Garcia had 9.5 fingers. Does that mean that, of all the Jerry Garcias in the world, 32% of them have lost half a finger? Or that Jerry Garcia of the Grateful dead had 9.5 fingers for 32% of his life?
      • My friends, your mind is a continus substrate. Read Michael Spivey from Cornell. It is a very recently PROVEN fact.

        You are looking at samples from a space. People can have weird ideas. Where do you think they come from?

        It is the geometry of the space.

        Remember, the most fundamental idea of Einstein's theory of gravitation in both the physical and philosophic senses is that the geometry of the universe is determined by the distribution of matter. My Specific Hypergeometric Hypothesis says that immediate me
        • Tell me the truth, Mindpixel, is this all just a huge prank? Seriously... do you even believe your own babble there? Do you seriously think that this collection of "facts" are going to be useful to any body for any purpose?
          • Yes.

            Read The Continuity of Mind by Michael Spivey...oh wait...you cannot it is still in press with Oxford Fucking University.

            But you will.
            • So a project you started in 2000 is only useful after reading a book by Michael Spivey that isn't being released until September 2005?

              Well, you've convinced me! ... that you're a looney.

              Seriously, though, you've been compiling these "mindpixels" for five years, and not yet have you found an actual use for the information? You can't even type out a quick example on a web forum?
          • Nope. He's for real. He's been posting on kuro5hin for a while.

            A new low for /. IMO.

      • No, it is intended for future use in creating and training an AI with "common sense". The value is intended to measure and represent how a genuine intelligence with typical human experience and typical common sense would answer a question if there were locked inside a black box and were forced to answer strictly with a YES/NO button.

        Some 97 percent of people would answer "Yes" to "Is Jerry Garcia dead". Most people know that fact and agree on it. Some 3% don't know and guess and get it wrong.

        Not only is i
    • You are looking at attractors in a high-d space. Look at the picture these mindpixels are sampling!

      Try to see the geometry!

      Think dynamically. Not symbolically!

      Read some Michael Spivey!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    • I especially like "1.00 Is Linux good OS?".
    • What about...

      0.96 Is sphere area is 3*Pi*r^2?

      I would make a snide comment about the American educational system, but then there's a nearby assertion about non-Americans thinking the US is self-centered, probability .98.

      Oh, and don't forget...

      0.96 Bill Clinton president of USA ?

      Now although Clinton's been pushing for a repeal of the presidential term limit, he hasn't even announced his recandidacy yet....
    • The project's goal is not to come up with a perfect robot brain, it is to research AI using statistics. If you talked about rape, the seed bearing plant, the AI would certainly be confused. By looking at the 33 lines containng the word 'rape', the AI would probably assume they had to do with the most used form of the word. Maybe by the overwhelming negative response it could determine that the "Is rape a good thing?" mindpixel was about the rape act and not the plant from the definition and other mindpix
  • "Is MicroSoft a basically ethical enterprise?" MindPixel's answer: 0.13
  • ...on this list that have a probablity that is in the .30 to .70 range or so speak volumes to the average knowledge level of the population that has been training this thing.
  • Do the /. editors have any clue what they just posted a story about? It's about a link to 80,000 dumb questions with subjectively determined probabilities attached. Really dumb questions mostly. It's meant to be a 'model' of a human mind.

    Maybe I'll try to submit /dev/random as a story.

  • Given that the universe is infinite and that God is also infinite, would you like a crumpet?
    a beautiful woman leading an ugly donkey asks you to kiss her ass ...... would you do it?
    Does Spiderman have a sticky penis?
    If you are a female between 18 - 25 years of age who is looking for love should you email legendlength@hotmail.com?
    Is vicadin a perfume?
    Do women have sex with cats?
    Is Kiro5hin currently up?
    Can tree stumps be used as baby carriges?
    Are children are much like firetrucks, only bigger?
    Was the film Ju
  • The editors usually think it is, so much so that they post many things twice!
  • Fortunatly Slashdot had an inteview [slashdot.org] with the project founder
  • Is icecream cold? Is ice cream cold? You owe us one more. Also, "Is sex nice?" cannot be proven to be true by slashdot readers...

  • what? (Score:1)

    by Mahou ( 873114 )
    1.00 is earth a planet?
    1.00 is the Earth a planet?

    first of all why are such two similar questions so close to each other; and second, why is 'earth' lower case when it should be capitalized but capitalized when it should be lower case? you would say 'is Mars a planet?' but not 'is the Mars a planet?' geesh
  • "GAC" = "Good Army Chow"

    We sure love our TLA's.

  • ... after a quick investigation:

    1.00 What is slashdot? (Huh?)
    0.83 Is Slashdot actually a website?
    0.77 Does slashdot postings cause extra traffic for its mentioned websites?
    0.76 Is Slashdot a web site? (this one seems to vary a bit)
    0.39 Is slashdot.org good?
    0.35 Is the website at slashdot.org full of trolls and mindless linux bigots?
    0.30 Was mindpixel slashdotted?
    0.13 Is Slashdot the greatest site ever?
    0.05 Has the average person (e.g. your Mother) ever heard of Slashdot?
    and finally
    0.00 is slash

  • Ahh, wonderful (Score:3, Informative)

    by joto ( 134244 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @06:47PM (#12998983)
    We now can have a 5-year anniversary of bashing a completely useless project brought to you by some internet cook who thinks he has "solved" AI by writing a program that even a 5-year old would understand is useless.

    If you want a real database of "common-sense" knowledge, you should check out CYC [opencyc.org] instead. It might be harder to do it that way, but it sure pays off if you actually want to use it for something beyond spamming usenet groups and slashdot.

    • How do you know CYC isn't as bad? I know one guy who worked on the project who thought the whole thing was a scam. I'm yet to hear a report of Cyc actually doing anything interesting or useful. And Lenat's previous projects (eg. AM, Eurisko) seem very suspect to me. If they really could do what they did at the time (late 70s, early 80s) we should see some amazing stuff today along those lines. We don't.
      • How do you know CYC isn't as bad?

        Because it's based on pretty sound knowledge-base-engineering. That doesn't necessarily mean it's good, or even useful, or that first-order logic is a reasonable medium to teach computers common sense. All it means is that it's among the best we have for this kind of stuff.

        If you need a common-sense reasoning engine, combined with common-sense facts, mindpixels stuff won't help you at all. It's just a stupid program any child could write, and a bunch of useless sentence

        • Slight addendum: Cyc doesn't do first-order logic. Actually, I can't tell you what the precise semantics of CycL are, and as far as I can tell, neither can they. It's got all sorts of nonmonotonic stuff crammed in.

          Nor would I say it's based on "pretty sound knowledge-base-engineering". It's better than mindpixel (a LOT better than mindpixel), but there's a lot of crud in the Cyc knowledge base.

          So on a scale from Microsoft Bob to Google, Cyc is still well to the left of center; there are some good ideas
    • We now can have a 5-year anniversary of bashing a completely useless project brought to you by some internet cook who thinks he has "solved" AI by writing a program that even a 5-year old would understand is useless.

      I just submitted the matter to the Mindpixel system:
      I think the answer to: Mindpixel a completely useless project. is:
      TRUE

      So there you have it, Mindpixel is a completely useless project brought to you by some internet cook who thinks he has "solved" AI by writing a program that even the pr

  • mindpixel youre WRONG (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @09:46PM (#12999857) Homepage
    I signed into mindpixel, and submitted my first mp. As I was typing the second one, it dawned on me that the project was not free. I looked around and couldnt find a spot to download mindpixels. Later I read that people who submit 'enough' mindpixels will be given shares in a subsequent company.

    This is not only wrong, its surprising that you are posting it on slashdot of all the places. Youre planning to take public knowledge from the public, and what do you give back in return? I can come up with some algorithm, and try to parse mindpixels, but you own all the mindpixels in the first public frenzy, after which people will stop submitting mindpixels to every such database online.

    'Mindpixels' should be free, and I'll wait till I see a free (GPL or otherwise) site where I can both submit and download all the 'mindpixels'. You can develop some algorithim or neural network and thats all yours. But leave the public knowledge so generously given to you in the name of science, to the public.
  • Wow! In a Googlefight, Mindpixel wins over Mentifex! [googlefight.com] Whooda thunk it?

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