Steve Richfield said:
If I understand you correctly, Cycorp's code should be public domain, and as such, I should be able to simply mine for the features that I am looking for. It sounds like Cycorp doesn't have a useful product (yet) whereas it looks like I do, so it is probably I who should be doing this, not Cycorp. Regretfully, the KRAKEN source code is not public domain, despite the fact that US tax dollars paid for it. While at Cycorp, John DeOliveira and I lobbied for an open-source version of Cyc, that one of us dubbed "OpenCyc". Doug Lenat saw the advantages of releasing a limited form of Cyc technology, especially to preclude some other possible ontology from becoming the de facto standard ontology, e.g. for the Semantic Web. However, Cycorp is bedeviled by its own traditional, proprietary nature and Lenat did not want to release the source code for the object store, lisp runtime, inference engine, applications and utilities. The first release of OpenCyc that I prepared contained many, but not all, of the full Cyc concept terms, and their defining assertions. No rules, nor numerous other commonsense assertions about these concepts were released. The provided OpenCyc runtime was binary only, without source code, and with its HTML browser as its sole released application. A Java API to Cyc, that I wrote, was also released with its source code under the Apache License. The KRAKEN application is not provided with OpenCyc, and it was growing stale from lack of maintenance when I was let go from the company in August 2006. -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ________________________________ From: Steve Richfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, December 1, 2008 10:22:37 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Seeking CYC critiques Steve, If I understand you correctly, Cycorp's code should be public domain, and as such, I should be able to simply mine for the features that I am looking for. It sounds like Cycorp doesn't have a useful product (yet) whereas it looks like I do, so it is probably I who should be doing this, not Cycorp. Any thoughts? Who should I ask for code from? Steve Richfield ================== On 12/1/08, Stephen Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Steve Richfield said: KRAKEN contains lots of good ideas, several of which were already on my wish list for Dr. Eliza sometime in the future. I suspect that a merger of technologies might be a world-beater. I wonder if the folks at Cycorp would be interested in such an effort? If you can find a sponsor for the effort and then solicit Cycorp to join in collaboration, I believe that they would be interested. The Cycorp business model as I knew it back in 2006, depended mostly upon government research sponsorship to (1) accomplish the research that the sponsor wanted, e.g. produce deliverables for the DARPA Rapid Knowledge Formation project, and (2) incrementally add more facts and rules to the Cyc KB, write more supporting code for Cyc. Cycorp, did not then, and likely even now does not have internal funding for non-sponsored enhancements. -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ________________________________ From: Steve Richfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, December 1, 2008 3:19:37 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Seeking CYC critiques Steve, The KRAKEN paper was quite interesting, and has a LOT in common with my own Dr. Eliza. However, I saw no mention of Dr. Eliza's "secret sauce", that boosts it from answering questions to solving problems given symptoms. The secret sauce has two primary ingredients: 1. The syntax of differential symptom statements - how people state a symptom that separates it from similar symptoms of other conditions. 2. Questions, the answers to which will probably carry #1 above recognizable differential symptom statements. Both of the above seem to require domain experienced people to code, as book learning doesn't seem to convey what people typically say, or what you have to say to them to get them to state their symptom in a differential way. Also, I suspect that knowledge coded today wouldn't work well in 50 years, when common speech has shifted. I finally gave up on having Dr. Eliza answer questions, because the "round trip error rate" seemed to be inescapably high. This is the product of: 1. The user's flaws in their world model. 2. The user's flaws in formulating their question. 3. The computer's errors in parsing the question. 4. The computer's errors in formulating an answer. 5. The user's errors in understanding the answer. 6. The user's errors from filing the answer into a flawed world model. Between each of these is: x.5 English's shortcomings in providing a platform to accurately state the knowledge, question, or answer. While each of these could be kept to <5%, it seemed completely hopeless to reduce the overall error rate to low enough to actually make it good for anything useful. Of course, everyone on this forum concentrates on #3 above, when in the real world, this is often/usually swamped by the others. Hence, I am VERY curious. Has KRAKEN found a worthwhile/paying niche in the world with itsw question answering, where people actually use it to their benefit? If so, then how did they deal with the round trip error rate? KRAKEN contains lots of good ideas, several of which were already on my wish list for Dr. Eliza sometime in the future. I suspect that a merger of technologies might be a world-beater. I wonder if the folks at Cycorp would be interested in such an effort? BTW, http://www.DrEliza.com is up and down these days, with plans for a new and more reliable version to be installed next weekend. Any thoughts? Steve Richfield ================== On 11/29/08, Stephen Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi Robin, There are no Cyc critiques that I know of in the last few years. I was employed seven years at Cycorp until August 2006 and my non-compete agreement expired a year later. An interesting competition was held by Project Halo in which Cycorp participated along with two other research groups to demonstrate human-level competency answering chemistry questions. Results are here. Although Cycorp performed principled deductive inference giving detailed justifications, it was judged to have performed inferior due to the complexity of its justifications and due to its long running times. The other competitors used special purpose problem solving modules whereas Cycorp used its general purpose inference engine, extended for chemistry equations as needed. My own interest is in natural language dialog systems for rapid knowledge formation. I was Cycorp's first project manager for its participation in the the DARPA Rapid Knowledge Formation project where it performed to DARPA's satisfaction, but subsequently its RKF tools never lived up to Cycorp's expectations that subject matter experts could rapidly extend the Cyc KB without Cycorp ontological engineers having to intervene. A Cycorp paper describing its KRAKEN system is here. I would be glad to answer questions about Cycorp and Cyc technology to the best of my knowledge, which is growing somewhat stale at this point. Cheers. -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ________________________________ From: Robin Hanson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Saturday, November 29, 2008 9:46:09 PM Subject: [agi] Seeking CYC critiques What are the best available critiques of CYC as it exists now (vs. soon after project started)? Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Research Associate, Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 ________________________________ agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ________________________________ agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ________________________________ agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ________________________________ agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ________________________________ agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
