[alicebot-archcomm] Computerizing Common Sense

[Dr. Richard S. Wallace]

Doug Lenat has been working on CYC for at least 15 years.  One problem is
that the CYC engine has never been peer reviewed.  A journalist I know wrote
a story about CYC, but he found it difficult to get any other A.I.
scientists to comment on it because, it is a proprietary, closed, black box.
One researcher said, for all we know there is a dwarf inside, providing the
answers.

The release of "Open" CYC does include this inference engine part, which
they still distribute only in binary form.  A few months back on the
alicebot-style mailing list I reported on a demonstration of "commonsense
reasoning" with ALICE using an external Prolog program and the <system> tag.
I called my program "PSYCH".  Recently a grad student from NZ who is working
on a Prolog thesis asked to continue that work, and I sent him the latest
version of the Prolog code.  Hopefully he will report back on a new PSYCH
system soon.

More than anything, CYC is a corporate welfare project.  It a sweathsop for
Ph.D.s whose job it is to write five proposals for government funding, on
the odds that one of them will be funded.  Their output is a series of
government reports showing how they applied CYC to this or that important
problem, which over the years has ranged from a Soviet invasion of western
Europe to Anthrax terrorism.  In other words, whatever the government has
money for, CYC can solve.

But I applaud whatever effort Doug Lenat is making to place portions of CYC
under the GNU LGPL.  To that extent it is worth studying to see if there is
anything we can use.  I would like to think that the existence of free
software projects like ours is putting pressure on CYC to release all their
code under the GPL.   Their embarassing secret is most likely that the code
doesn't really exist at all, or that it is a hopless tangled mess.

Rich

----- Original Message -----
From: Eugene Lebedev
To: alicebot-archcomm@list.alicebot.org
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 9:32 AM
Subject: Re: [alicebot-archcomm] Computerizing Common Sense


I would like to get some understanding too. Does it mean something for ALICE
or not?

The simplest ideas are :
 - That knowledge base could be quite useful for Alice.
 - Possible integration could give ALICE additional publicity.

But do we need it? Do we have to consider integration with other technology
at all?

I'm sure that other members could bring more interesting idea than these.
----- Original Message -----
From: Jon Baer
To: alicebot-archcomm@list.alicebot.org
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 12:14 PM
Subject: Re: [alicebot-archcomm] Computerizing Common Sense


good article, but what in the world does this mean? lol
<snip>
Won't input from the public bring in a lot of garbage? I'll have an OpenCyc
committee to help vet
                   knowledge that is suggested. Also, we've developed the
notion of local consistency, which is
                   analogous to our everyday notion of the earth as being
locally flat and globally spherical.
</snip>
- Jon
Eugene Lebedev wrote:
Hi everybody, I think the link below could bring us a lot of inspiration
andmay be some fresh strategic ideas.
http://www.idg.net/ic_844402_1794_9-10000.html Eugene
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