i have higher hopes for the project than richard, failing to see the circular causality alluded to... first, human intellect is quickly overwhelmed when trying to build logic structures with complex relationships or even many simple relationships strung together (we max at four or five recursions in our working memory e.g. unlike richard, we dont think that he didnt tell them what they couldnt do without us)... so we outsource the task to improved methods of abstraction/simplification, programming and more common analogies... second, its ALWAYS about the relationships between objects/concepts, and finding all possibly useful arrangements does appear to be a readily finite problem, one amenable to exhaustive search algorithms it appears...
as a side note, does anyone else feel that intelligence and compression (or less formally the ability to summarize) are identical? and the last bit: isnt this guy already doing the things NIST proposes? its just corporate IP and not too available? (not affiliated in any way): http://www.knowledgefoundations.com/Papers.html cheers, tudor On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 5:02 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Brad Paulsen wrote: > >> Fellow AGI-ers, >> >> At the risk of being labeled the list's newsboy... >> >> U.S. Plan for 'Thinking Machines' Repository >> Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 28, @07:19PM >> from the save-those-ideas-for-later dept. >> >> >> >> >> An anonymous reader writes "Information scientists organized by the U.S.'s >> NIST say they will create a "concept bank" that programmers can use to build >> thinking machines that reason about complex problems at the frontiers of >> knowledge - from advanced manufacturing to biomedicine. The agreement by >> ontologists - experts in word meanings and in using appropriate words to >> build actionable machine commands - outlines the critical functions of the >> Open Ontology Repository (OOR). More on the summit that produced the >> agreement here." >> > > > > Interesting, but I am araid that whenever I see someone report a project to > collect all the world's knowledge in a nice, centralized format (Cyc, and > Daughters-of-Cyc) I cannot help but think of one of the early chapters in > Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, were Wilkins, Leibnitz and others are trying > to form a universal grammar in which all the world's facts can be organized > in such a way that a (essentially) a thinking machine can be built. > > Stephenson illustrates the foolishness of this quest with humor, but it is > a deeply thought-provoking humor. > > The main thought that it provokes are these. If we can build something > that can use those facts, it must be smart enough to be able collect such > information by itself. Not only that, but the way that this hypothetical > machine would collect and use the facts might well be such that the format > in which the knowledge is represented will be critically dependent on the > way that the using and collecting processes operate, and not necessarily > like the format that we choose, ahead of time. > > Today, we most emphatically do not have a system that knows how to (fully) > use and collect such facts. > > Therefore... there is a great danger that any such collection will be > useless until the 'thinking machinery' itself is built, and then, when the > machinery does get built, the collection of facts will be superfluous. > > Rather like my 8-year-old son (bless his heart) who, confronted with an > essay project that he could not face, started off by spending four solid > hours getting the fonts, colors and backgrounds just right. > > Just my gut feeling, that's all: carry on with what you are doing. > > > > Richard Loosemore > > > > ------------------------------------------- > agi > Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now > RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ > Modify Your Subscription: > http://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com > ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
