...more recent posts
On the verge of AI? Cyc "is powered by an immense multi-contextual knowledge base and an efficient inference engine. The knowledge base is built upon a core of over 1,000,000 hand-entered assertions (or "rules") designed to capture a large portion of what we normally consider consensus knowledge about the world."
"HAL killed the ['2001'] crew because it had been told not to lie to them, but also to lie to them about the mission," [Douglas B. Lenat] observes. "No one ever told HAL that killing is worse than lying. But we've told Cyc."I hope they mentioned the thing about opening the pod bay doors too. (Amazingly, the LA Times doesn't even link to the Cycorp site.)
Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel Escher Bach fame) takes the other side of the debate: "I don't believe in the idea that intelligence is founded upon having vast amounts of facts about the world." I can see both sides. I don't really have a strong intuition about who's right, but this is clearly cool stuff.
Someday I'm going to collect all the links to articles of the "what's a weblog?" variety in one place. Someday. Real soon now. Anyway, here's another.