On Mon, Nov 12, 2007 at 01:49:52PM -0500, Mark Waser wrote: > >> What I thought you meant was, if a user asked "I'm a small farmer in New > >> Zealand. Tell me about horses" then the system would be able to disburse > >> its relevant knowledge about horses, filtering out the irrelevant stuff. > >> What did you mean, exactly? > > That's a good simple, starting case. But how do you decide how much > knowledge to disburse? How do you know what is irrelevant? How much do your > answers differ between a small farmer in New Zealand, a rodeo rider in the > West, a veterinarian is Pennsylvania, a child in Washington, a > bio-mechanician studying gait? And horse is actually a *really* simple > concept since it refers to a very specific type of physical object. > > Besides, are you really claiming that you'll be able to do this next year? > Sorry, but that is just plain, unadulterated BS. If you can do that, you are > light-years further along than . . . .
Eh? I can demo a system to you today, that does a very lame version of this. And it's probably only the umpteenth system to do this, and it does it in only a few thousand lines of code (not counting modules pulled off the net). Its a bot on #opencyc on freenode.net (seems to be crashed at the moment) When you ask it about Abraham Lincoln, it will respond with a grade-school like essay that Abe is a person and a male person and a historical person and is famous. All it knows is from the opencyc db. It will happily include "irrelevant" facts like "Abe is a person and a male person", but it has some ability to prune these; when you ask again, it'll refuse to answer, with an "I already told you" response. Its not AI, but it does demonstrate those things you are calling BS. As to talking about horses, even I am not capable of maintaining a conversation with a rodeo rider, and I live in Texas. I once talked to a professional blacksmith; turns out they are required by law to have a degree in veternary medicine; bet you didn't know that. If and when you find a human who is capable of having conversations about horses with small farmers, rodeo riders, vets, children and biomechanicians, I'll bet that they won't have a clue about galaxy formation or enzyme reactions. Don't set the bar above human capabilites. --linas ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=64386951-c91d87
