[agi] Posting Strategies - A Gentle Reminder
Dear Fellow AGI List Members: Just thought I'd remind the good members of this list about some strategies for dealing with certain types of postings. Unfortunately, the field of AI/AGI is one of those areas where anybody with a pulse and a brain thinks they can design a program that thinks. Must be easy, right? I mean, I can do it so how hard can it be to put me in a can? Well, that's what some very smart people in the 1940's, '50's and into the 1960's thought. They were wrong. Most of them now admit it. So, on AI-related lists, we have to be very careful about the kinds of conversations on which we spend our valuable time. Here are some guidelines. I realize most people here know this stuff already. This is just a gentle reminder. If a posting makes grandiose claims, is dismissive of mainstream research, techniques, and institutions or the author claims to have special knowledge that has apparently been missed (or dismissed) by all of the brilliant scientific/technical minds who go to their jobs at major corporations and universities every day (and are paid for doing so), and also by every Nobel Laureate for the last 20 years, this posting should be ignored. DO NOT RESPOND to these types of postings: positively or negatively. The poster is, obviously, either irrational or one of the greatest minds of our time. In the former case, you know they're full of it, I know they're full of it, but they will NEVER admit that. You will never win an argument with an irrational individual. In the latter case, stop and ask yourself: Why is somebody that fantastically smart posting to this mailing list? He or she is, obviously, smarter than everyone here. Why does he/she need us to validate his or her accomplishments/knowledge by posting on this list? He or she should have better things to do and, besides, we probably wouldn't be able to understand (appreciate) his/her genius anyhow. The only way to deal with postings like this is to IGNORE THEM. Don't rise to the bait. Like a bad cold, they will be irritating for a while, but they will, eventually, go away. Cheers, Brad --- 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=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Posting Strategies - A Gentle Reminder
Good advice. There are of course sometimes people who are ahead of the field, but in conversation you'll usually find that the genuine inovators have a deep - bordering on obsessive - knowledge of the field that they're working in and are willing to demonstrate/test their claims to anyone even remotely interested. On 14/04/2008, Brad Paulsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear Fellow AGI List Members: Just thought I'd remind the good members of this list about some strategies for dealing with certain types of postings. Unfortunately, the field of AI/AGI is one of those areas where anybody with a pulse and a brain thinks they can design a program that thinks. Must be easy, right? I mean, I can do it so how hard can it be to put me in a can? Well, that's what some very smart people in the 1940's, '50's and into the 1960's thought. They were wrong. Most of them now admit it. So, on AI-related lists, we have to be very careful about the kinds of conversations on which we spend our valuable time. Here are some guidelines. I realize most people here know this stuff already. This is just a gentle reminder. If a posting makes grandiose claims, is dismissive of mainstream research, techniques, and institutions or the author claims to have special knowledge that has apparently been missed (or dismissed) by all of the brilliant scientific/technical minds who go to their jobs at major corporations and universities every day (and are paid for doing so), and also by every Nobel Laureate for the last 20 years, this posting should be ignored. DO NOT RESPOND to these types of postings: positively or negatively. The poster is, obviously, either irrational or one of the greatest minds of our time. In the former case, you know they're full of it, I know they're full of it, but they will NEVER admit that. You will never win an argument with an irrational individual. In the latter case, stop and ask yourself: Why is somebody that fantastically smart posting to this mailing list? He or she is, obviously, smarter than everyone here. Why does he/she need us to validate his or her accomplishments/knowledge by posting on this list? He or she should have better things to do and, besides, we probably wouldn't be able to understand (appreciate) his/her genius anyhow. The only way to deal with postings like this is to IGNORE THEM. Don't rise to the bait. Like a bad cold, they will be irritating for a while, but they will, eventually, go away. Cheers, Brad -- *agi* | Archives http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ | Modifyhttp://www.listbox.com/member/?;Your Subscription 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=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Posting Strategies - A Gentle Reminder
Bob Mottram writes: Good advice. There are of course sometimes people who are ahead of the field, Like Ben Goertzel (glad to send him a referral recently from South Africa on the OpenCog list :-) but in conversation you'll usually find that the genuine inovators have a deep - bordering on obsessive - knowledge of the field that they're working in and are willing to demonstrate/test their claims http://mind.sourceforge.net/Mind.html has just been updated to demonstrate the claim that AI has been solved. to anyone even remotely interested. Arthur -- http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/mind4th.html http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/m4thuser.html --- 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=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Posting Strategies - A Gentle Reminder
These things of course require a balance. In many academic or corporate fora, radical innovation is frowned upon so profoundly (in spite of sometimes being praised and desired, on the surface, but in a confused and not fully sincere way), that it's continually necessary to remind people of the need to open their minds and consider the possibility that some of their assumptions are wrong. OTOH, in **this** forum, we have a lot of openness and open-mindedness, which is great ... but the downside is, people who THINK they have radical new insights but actually don't, tend to get a LOT of attention, often to the detriment of more interesting yet less radical on the surface discussions. I do find that most posters on this list seem to have put a lot of thought (as well as a lot of feeling) into their ideas and opinions. However, it's frustrating when people re-tread issues over and over in a way that demonstrates they've never taken the trouble to carefully study what's been done before. I think it can often be super-valuable to approach some issue afresh, without studying the literature first -- so as to get a brand-new view. But then, before venting one's ideas in a public forum, one should check one's ideas against the literature (in the idea-validation phase .. after the idea-generation phase) to see whether they're original, whether they're contradicted by well-thought-out arguments, etc. -- Ben G -- Ben On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Bob Mottram [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Good advice. There are of course sometimes people who are ahead of the field, but in conversation you'll usually find that the genuine inovators have a deep - bordering on obsessive - knowledge of the field that they're working in and are willing to demonstrate/test their claims to anyone even remotely interested. On 14/04/2008, Brad Paulsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear Fellow AGI List Members: Just thought I'd remind the good members of this list about some strategies for dealing with certain types of postings. Unfortunately, the field of AI/AGI is one of those areas where anybody with a pulse and a brain thinks they can design a program that thinks. Must be easy, right? I mean, I can do it so how hard can it be to put me in a can? Well, that's what some very smart people in the 1940's, '50's and into the 1960's thought. They were wrong. Most of them now admit it. So, on AI-related lists, we have to be very careful about the kinds of conversations on which we spend our valuable time. Here are some guidelines. I realize most people here know this stuff already. This is just a gentle reminder. If a posting makes grandiose claims, is dismissive of mainstream research, techniques, and institutions or the author claims to have special knowledge that has apparently been missed (or dismissed) by all of the brilliant scientific/technical minds who go to their jobs at major corporations and universities every day (and are paid for doing so), and also by every Nobel Laureate for the last 20 years, this posting should be ignored. DO NOT RESPOND to these types of postings: positively or negatively. The poster is, obviously, either irrational or one of the greatest minds of our time. In the former case, you know they're full of it, I know they're full of it, but they will NEVER admit that. You will never win an argument with an irrational individual. In the latter case, stop and ask yourself: Why is somebody that fantastically smart posting to this mailing list? He or she is, obviously, smarter than everyone here. Why does he/she need us to validate his or her accomplishments/knowledge by posting on this list? He or she should have better things to do and, besides, we probably wouldn't be able to understand (appreciate) his/her genius anyhow. The only way to deal with postings like this is to IGNORE THEM. Don't rise to the bait. Like a bad cold, they will be irritating for a while, but they will, eventually, go away. Cheers, Brad agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms. -- Henry Miller --- 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=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Comments from a lurker...
Steve Perhaps you can relate your own experiences in this area. Argument from Authority . . . . but what the heck . . . . :-) Earliest scientific computing papers (one from the science side, one from the computing side) Computer Modeling of Muscle Phosphofructokinase Kinetics Journal of Theoretical Biology, Volume 103, Issue 2, 21 July 1983, Pages 295-312 Mark R. Waser, Lillian Garfinkel, Michael C. Kohn and David Garfinkel A Computer Program for Analyzing Enzyme Kinetic Data Using Graphical Display and Statistical Analysis Computers and Biomedical Research, Volume 17, Issue 3, June 1984, Pages 289-301 Serge D. Schremmer, Mark R. Waser, Michael C. Kohn and David Garfinkel Hardware Integration Project - True Omni-font OCR device (1983-1984) Developed software turning any Apple IIe and any fax machine into a true Omni-font OCR reader pages were solved as cryptograms so even *random* fonts were interpretable used 6502 assembly; unloaded the Apple IIe operating system as necessary (memory problems? what memory problems?) AI Project - Case Method Credit Expert System Shell Builder (1984-1985) Developed in Pascal for Citicorp's FastFinance Leasing System Used by technophobic executives without any problems AI Project - Expert System for Army Logistics Procurement (1986-1987) Developed for/Deployed at Fort Belvoir, VA; Presented at Army Logistics Conference in Williamsburg Part of the Project Manager's Support System AI Project - Project Impact Advisor (1986-1987) Rewrote boss's prototype system implemented in Lisp on special hardware as a PC-based Prolog system Part of the Project Manager's Support System AI/Hardware Project - Neural Network for Diagnosing Thallium Images of the Heart (1987-1988) Successfully convinced top Air Force brass that Air Force doctors were misdiagnosing test pilot check-up images Used Sigma Neural Network hardware boards Hardware Project - Fax Network Switch (1990-1991) Developed for/Deployed by the Australian Government/Embassy for all traffic between Canberra and Washington Subsequently sold to Sony Created multiple terminate-and-stay-resident programs to provide simultaneous 16-fax and dual T1-modem capability under MS-DOS Used Brooktrout 4-port fax boards Hardware Project - Secure Telephone Unit (1991-1992) Developed initial prototype marrying COTS 80286 motherboard, modem, and TI TMS C32000 FPU with custom hardware and software Enhanced and integrated commercially available TI TMS C32000 software for various voice codecs Developed all control software (80286 assembly) Developed all software for debugging custom integrating hardware developed by other company employees Hmmm . . . that's not even ten years with over fifteen to go . . . and I'm boring *myself* to tears despite skipping a bunch of non-relevant stuff . . . . ;-) Mark Good thing that you're smarter than that and know how to trash a machine so your stuff will work. Steve Given that apparently no one else has been able to make commercial speech-to-text work with real-time AI, I'll accept that as a complement. You shouldn't have. It was pure sarcasm. You need to look harder at what is available out there. Real-time speech-to-text is not the problem (though the accuracy rate is still below what is to be preferred -- a problem which your solution does *NOT* address). Fitting real-time speech-to-text into a small enough, friendly enough footprint to work with real-time AI is not the problem (although *you* do seem to be having problems doing it with a *GOOD* engineering solution). Coming up with a worthwhile AI is the problem BUT I haven't seen any sign of such a thing from you. Steve It is unclear what happened for you to make your comments in the tone that you used. On first glance it appears that you simply didn't carefully read the article. For example, did you notice that Nuance actually has a patent on how they suck up 100.0% of the CPU, leaving nothing for concurrent AI programs? How about constructively addressing the technical ISSUES instead of sounding like an idiot by making snide comments. If you can't prevent a program from sucking up 100% of your CPU, you aren't competent to be working at this level. There are *all sorts* of ways to stop evil behavior like this to include: a.. pre-allocating memory to yourself (or your AI) before firing up the offending programming b.. replacing the operating system pointers to the memory allocation routines to your routines which will then lie to the offender about the amount of memory available c.. working on multiple linked boxes The kludges that you are resorting to are just plain *BAD* engineering. There are *ALWAYS* clean work-arounds -- if you're competent enough to find them. Steve Then there is the fact that Dr. Eliza
Re: [agi] Comments from a lurker...
Well, that's embarrassing . . . . flame somebody and realize that you got part of it wrong yourself . . . . ;-) __ Mark If you can't prevent a program from sucking up 100% of your CPU, you aren't competent to be working at this level. There are *all sorts* of ways to stop evil behavior like this to include: a.. pre-allocating memory to yourself (or your AI) before firing up the offending programming b.. replacing the operating system pointers to the memory allocation routines to your routines which will then lie to the offender about the amount of memory available c.. working on multiple linked boxes Duh. Nothing like proposing memory solutions for a CPU problem . . . . ;-) How about the easily applicable solutions (without any work on your part) of running multiple virtual machines on the same box OR (as proposed before) multiple linked boxes. - Original Message - From: Mark Waser To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, April 14, 2008 10:48 AM Subject: Re: [agi] Comments from a lurker... Steve Perhaps you can relate your own experiences in this area. Argument from Authority . . . . but what the heck . . . . :-) Earliest scientific computing papers (one from the science side, one from the computing side) Computer Modeling of Muscle Phosphofructokinase Kinetics Journal of Theoretical Biology, Volume 103, Issue 2, 21 July 1983, Pages 295-312 Mark R. Waser, Lillian Garfinkel, Michael C. Kohn and David Garfinkel A Computer Program for Analyzing Enzyme Kinetic Data Using Graphical Display and Statistical Analysis Computers and Biomedical Research, Volume 17, Issue 3, June 1984, Pages 289-301 Serge D. Schremmer, Mark R. Waser, Michael C. Kohn and David Garfinkel Hardware Integration Project - True Omni-font OCR device (1983-1984) Developed software turning any Apple IIe and any fax machine into a true Omni-font OCR reader pages were solved as cryptograms so even *random* fonts were interpretable used 6502 assembly; unloaded the Apple IIe operating system as necessary (memory problems? what memory problems?) AI Project - Case Method Credit Expert System Shell Builder (1984-1985) Developed in Pascal for Citicorp's FastFinance Leasing System Used by technophobic executives without any problems AI Project - Expert System for Army Logistics Procurement (1986-1987) Developed for/Deployed at Fort Belvoir, VA; Presented at Army Logistics Conference in Williamsburg Part of the Project Manager's Support System AI Project - Project Impact Advisor (1986-1987) Rewrote boss's prototype system implemented in Lisp on special hardware as a PC-based Prolog system Part of the Project Manager's Support System AI/Hardware Project - Neural Network for Diagnosing Thallium Images of the Heart (1987-1988) Successfully convinced top Air Force brass that Air Force doctors were misdiagnosing test pilot check-up images Used Sigma Neural Network hardware boards Hardware Project - Fax Network Switch (1990-1991) Developed for/Deployed by the Australian Government/Embassy for all traffic between Canberra and Washington Subsequently sold to Sony Created multiple terminate-and-stay-resident programs to provide simultaneous 16-fax and dual T1-modem capability under MS-DOS Used Brooktrout 4-port fax boards Hardware Project - Secure Telephone Unit (1991-1992) Developed initial prototype marrying COTS 80286 motherboard, modem, and TI TMS C32000 FPU with custom hardware and software Enhanced and integrated commercially available TI TMS C32000 software for various voice codecs Developed all control software (80286 assembly) Developed all software for debugging custom integrating hardware developed by other company employees Hmmm . . . that's not even ten years with over fifteen to go . . . and I'm boring *myself* to tears despite skipping a bunch of non-relevant stuff . . . . ;-) Mark Good thing that you're smarter than that and know how to trash a machine so your stuff will work. Steve Given that apparently no one else has been able to make commercial speech-to-text work with real-time AI, I'll accept that as a complement. You shouldn't have. It was pure sarcasm. You need to look harder at what is available out there. Real-time speech-to-text is not the problem (though the accuracy rate is still below what is to be preferred -- a problem which your solution does *NOT* address). Fitting real-time speech-to-text into a small enough, friendly enough footprint to work with real-time AI is not the problem (although *you* do seem to be having problems doing it with a *GOOD* engineering solution). Coming up with a worthwhile AI is the
Re: [agi] Between logical semantics and linguistic semantics
Lukasz, Thanks for the information about Word Grammar, which for anyone else interested, is described here, You asked: (4) I'm interested in how do you handle backtracking: giving up on application of a construction when it leads to inconsistency. Chart-based unification parsing can be optimized to share applications of constructions which are parallel, and this can be extended to operators which are (like unification) monotonic, e.g. cannot make unsatisfiable/inconsistent state a satisfiable/consistent one. Merging conjuncts new facts to old ones so it is monotonic in monotonic logics. (Default/defeasible logics are nonmonotonic.) My first solution to this problem is to postpone it by employing a controlled English, in which such constructions will be avoided if possible. Secondly, Jerry Ball demonstrated his solution in Double R Grammar at the 2007 AAAI Fall Symposium, Cognitive Approaches to NLP. His slide presentation is here, which I think fully addresses your issues. To summarize Dr. Ball's ideas, which I will ultimately adopt for Texai: Serial processing [word by word parsing] with algorithmic backtracking has no hope for on-line processing in real-time in a large coverage NLP system.The solution is serial processing without backtrackingIf current input is unexpected given the prior context, then accommodate the input by adjusting the representation [parse state] and coerce the input into the representationDr. Ball gives as an example, parsing the utterance no airspeed or altitude restrictions.Upon processing the word or, the conjunction is accommodated via function overriding in his grammar, not by backing up. (4a) Does the fact that your parser is incremental mean that you do early commitment to constructions? (Double R Grammar seems to support early commitment when there is choice, but backtracking is still needed to get an interpretation when there are only ones without it.) Yes, my parser makes the earliest possible commitment to a construction, but I allow subsequent elaboration of constructions as new constituents are recognized. For example, in my use case sentence the book is on the table, I recognize a initial Situation Referring Expression construction to cover the partial utterance the book is, which is elaborated to form the final Situation Referring Expression when the remaining utterance on the table is processed. I regret that some aspects of my implementation are difficult to follow because I am using Jerry Ball's Double R Grammar, but not his ACT-R Lisp engine, using instead my own incremental, cognitively plausible, version of Luc Steel's Fluid Construction Grammar engine. I combined these two systems because Jerry Ball's engine is not reversible, Luc Steel's grammar is not a good coverage of English, and the otherwise excellent Fluid Construction Grammar engine is not incremental. -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 - Original Message From: Lukasz Stafiniak [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2008 3:04:07 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Between logical semantics and linguistic semantics On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 6:03 AM, Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would be interested in your comments on my adoption of Fluid Construction Grammar as a solution to the NL to semantics mapping problem. (1) Word Grammar (WG) is a construction-free version of your approach. It is based solely on spreading activation. It doesn't have a sharp separation of syntax and semantics: there's only one net. Nodes representing subgraphs corresponding to constructions can be organized into inheritance hierarchies (extensibility). But pure WG makes things very awkward logics-wise, making it work would be a lot of research (the WG book doesn't discuss utterance generation IIRC, but reversing parsing-interpretation seems quite direct: select the most activated word which doesn't have a left landmark, introduce a word-instance node for it, include spreading its activation through a right-landmark (ignoring direction of the landmark) edge). Texai is impure by its very nature, perhaps it could be made more (than just sharing the spreading activation idea) of a mix WG*FCG. (2) FCG is closer to traditional apporaches a la computational linguistics than WG. (3) One could give up some FCG features to simplify it, for example by assuming one-to-one correspondence between constructions and atomic predicates. (4) I'm interested in how do you handle backtracking: giving up on application of a construction when it leads to inconsistency. Chart-based unification parsing can be optimized to share applications of constructions which are parallel, and this can be extended to operators which are (like unification) monotonic, e.g. cannot make unsatisfiable/inconsistent state a satisfiable/consistent one. Merging
Re: [agi] Comments from a lurker...
ROTFLMAO! Excellent! Thank you. - Original Message - From: Steve Richfield To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2008 6:09 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Comments from a lurker... Mark, On 4/13/08, Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I then asked if anyone in the room had a 98.6F body temperature, and NO ONE DID. Try this in a room with normal people. ~3/4 of the general population reaches ~98.6F sometime during the day. The remaining 1/4 of the population have a varying assortment of symptoms generally in the list of hypothyroid symptoms, even though only about 1/4 of those people have any thyroid-related issues. Then look at the patients who enter the typical doctor's practice. There, it is about 50% each way. Then, look at the patients in a geriatric practice, where typically NONE of the people reach 98.6F anytime during the day. You'll get almost the same answer. 98.6 is just the Fahrenheit value of a rounded Celsius value -- not an accurate gauge. Wrong. Healthy people quickly move between set points at ~97.4F, ~98.0F, and 98.6F. However, since medical researchers aren't process control people, they have missed the importance of this little detail. My standard temperature is 96.8 -- almost two degrees low -- and this is perfectly NORMAL. Thereby demonstrating the obsolescence of your medical information. NOW I understand! Simply resetting someone from 97.something temperature to 98.6F results in something like another ~20 IQ points. People usually report that it feels like waking up, perhaps for the first time in their entire lives. I can hardly imagine the level of impairment that you must be working though. NO WONDER that you didn't see the idiocy of making your snide comments. Any good medical professional understands this. Only if they have gray hair. This all comes from an old American Thyroid Association study that was published in JAMA to discredit Wilson's Thyroid Syndrome (Now Wilson's Temperature Syndrome, which has since been largely discredited for other reasons) that my article references. There, many healthy people had their temperatures taken at 8:00AM, and they found three groups: 1. People who were ~97.4F 2. People who were ~98.6F 3. People who were somewhere in between. However, if you take a healthy person and plot their temperature through the day, you find that they sleep at 97.4F, and pop up to 98.6F sometime during the first 3 hours after waking up. In short, the ATA study was ENTIRELY consistent with my model and observations. However, inexplicably, the authors concluded that people don't have any set temperature, without providing any explanation as to how they reached that conclusion. However, YOUR temperature is REALLY anomalous and WAY outside the range of the ATA's study, and possibly consistent with serious hypothyroidism. Have you had your TSH tested yet? If not, then fire your present incompetent doctor and find a board-certified endocrinologist. Don't criticize others for your assumptions of what they believe. Why not, when I have read the articles, tested dozens of healthy (and many more unhealthy) people myself, and seen that in light of the observable facts, that some conventional medical dogma absolutely MUST be wrong. Please, please get your temperature fixed before making any more snide postings here. I find your snide comments to be painful, and I strongly suspect that you too will see the errors of your ways and correct them when you finally wake up as discussed above. Steve Richfield --- 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=8660244id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html?_r=1oref=slogin --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)
Publishing computer-generated books on demand, aggregating many small profits, is an interesting illustration of The Long Tail. Considering an AGI, I anticipate that knowledge and skill acquisition will be facilitated by this principle. Obscure knowledge and skills can be acquired from, and delivered to, befriended users if the cost is sufficiently low (e.g. free). A related economic principle that might interest readers is Wikinomics. -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 - Original Message From: Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, April 14, 2008 11:29:12 AM Subject: [agi] He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html?_r=1oref=slogin agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)
This reminds me of Rod Brooks saying that AGI may already be here but nobody has noticed it yet. With an AGI running a nice little business for you there may be no great incentive to advertise the fact openly to the world. If done well with a suitably flexible AI this kind of automatic content generation could become a whole new business model. One potentially lucrative area is that aging and somewhat vain individuals may want to create their own autobiographies, using some semi-automated software system to help generate the book, which they can then leave to their descendants. --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
[agi] Logical Satisfiability...Get used to it.
Ben G wrote: FWIW, I wasn't joking about your algorithm's putative divine inspiration in my role as moderator, but rather in my role as individual list participant ;-) Sorry that my sense of humor got on your nerves. I've had that effect on people before! Really though: if you're going to post messages in forums populated by scientific rationalists, claiming divine inspiration for your ideas, you really gotta expect **at minimum** some good-natured ribbing... ! -- Ben G I appreciate the fact that you did not intend your comments to be mean spirited and that you were speaking as a participant not as the moderator. I also appreciate the fact that Wasser realized that I misunderstood his comment and made that clear. I have annoyed quite a few people myself. I am a little too critical at times, but my criticisms are usually intended to provoke a deeper examination an idea of some kind. (I only rarely use criticism as a tool of wanton destruction!) Concerning beliefs and scientific rationalism: Beliefs are the basis of all thought. To imply that religious belief might be automatically different from rational beliefs is naïve. However, I think there is an advantage in defining what a rational thought is realitve to AI programming and how scientific rationalism is different from simple rationalism. I am going to write a few messages about this when I get a chance. By the way, I don't really see how a simple n^4 or n^3 SAT solver in itself would be that useful for any immediate AGI project, but the novel logical methods that the solver will reveal may be more significant. Jim Bromer --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Between logical semantics and linguistic semantics
On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 5:14 PM, Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My first solution to this problem is to postpone it by employing a controlled English, in which such constructions will be avoided if possible. Secondly, Jerry Ball demonstrated his solution in Double R Grammar at the 2007 AAAI Fall Symposium, Cognitive Approaches to NLP. His slide presentation is here, which I think fully addresses your issues. To summarize Dr. Ball's ideas, which I will ultimately adopt for Texai: Thanks, very interesting slides. I think he forgets to mention Dynamic Syntax (Ruth Kempson, Dov Gabbay). Serial processing [word by word parsing] with algorithmic backtracking has no hope for on-line processing in real-time in a large coverage NLP system. I think that Double R accomodation approach can be approximated by incremental right-to-left parsing. Something along the lines of http://www.speagram.org/wiki/Grammar/ChartParser but still needs much work (the approach was developed when I've been in computational semantics phase, it ignores cognitive linguistics, and is too fragmented: only categorical semantics (and agreement, by use of variables in types) are processed, with relational and referential semantics postponed to latter stages). The up side is that it can handle general Context Free Grammars. I didn't know that Microsoft uses some kind of right-to-left parsing, I thought it is my invention :-) I regret that some aspects of my implementation are difficult to follow because I am using Jerry Ball's Double R Grammar, but not his ACT-R Lisp engine, using instead my own incremental, cognitively plausible, version of Luc Steel's Fluid Construction Grammar engine. I combined these two systems because Jerry Ball's engine is not reversible, Luc Steel's grammar is not a good coverage of English, and the otherwise excellent Fluid Construction Grammar engine is not incremental. -Steve Perhaps you could get some linguist to capitalize on your work with a publication? Best Regards, Łukasz --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Between logical semantics and linguistic semantics
2008/4/14 Lukasz Stafiniak [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 5:14 PM, Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Serial processing [word by word parsing] with algorithmic backtracking has no hope for on-line processing in real-time in a large coverage NLP system. I think that Double R accomodation approach can be approximated by incremental right-to-left parsing. Something along the lines of http://www.speagram.org/wiki/Grammar/ChartParser but still needs much If you're confused by the equations, increments are left-to-right, and between increments, there's right-to-left accomodation-like stage. --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Between logical semantics and linguistic semantics
Łukasz wrote: Perhaps you could get some linguist to capitalize on your work with a publication? Coincidentally, my abstract for the Fifth International Conference on Construction Grammar has been accepted for presentation at its poster session this September. Because the conference this year is to be held in Austin, I can easily attend. My work on Construction Grammar has been previously discussed with Dr. Hans Boas at UT Austin, Dr. Jerry Ball, while attending the 2007 AAAI Fall Symposium, and with the technical staff at Cycorp in Austin which included two Ph.D computational linguists. Here is a link to the brief abstract. I hope that a successful demonstration of the Texai bootstrap English dialog system, sometime this year, will draw attention to construction grammar for natural language processing when semantics are the focus of the application. Likewise I hope to release an open source version of the Double R Grammar that has a good coverate of English. Reaching out to linguists, I already released on SourceForge what I believe is the world's largest freely available, open-source lexicon, derived from WordNet 2.1, Wiktionary, The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary and the OpenCyc lexicon. I announced this on the Linguists List. 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 - Original Message From: Lukasz Stafiniak [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Monday, April 14, 2008 2:11:31 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Between logical semantics and linguistic semantics On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 5:14 PM, Stephen Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My first solution to this problem is to postpone it by employing a controlled English, in which such constructions will be avoided if possible. Secondly, Jerry Ball demonstrated his solution in Double R Grammar at the 2007 AAAI Fall Symposium, Cognitive Approaches to NLP. His slide presentation is here, which I think fully addresses your issues. To summarize Dr. Ball's ideas, which I will ultimately adopt for Texai: Thanks, very interesting slides. I think he forgets to mention Dynamic Syntax (Ruth Kempson, Dov Gabbay). Serial processing [word by word parsing] with algorithmic backtracking has no hope for on-line processing in real-time in a large coverage NLP system. I think that Double R accomodation approach can be approximated by incremental right-to-left parsing. Something along the lines of http://www.speagram.org/wiki/Grammar/ChartParser but still needs much work (the approach was developed when I've been in computational semantics phase, it ignores cognitive linguistics, and is too fragmented: only categorical semantics (and agreement, by use of variables in types) are processed, with relational and referential semantics postponed to latter stages). The up side is that it can handle general Context Free Grammars. I didn't know that Microsoft uses some kind of right-to-left parsing, I thought it is my invention :-) I regret that some aspects of my implementation are difficult to follow because I am using Jerry Ball's Double R Grammar, but not his ACT-R Lisp engine, using instead my own incremental, cognitively plausible, version of Luc Steel's Fluid Construction Grammar engine. I combined these two systems because Jerry Ball's engine is not reversible, Luc Steel's grammar is not a good coverage of English, and the otherwise excellent Fluid Construction Grammar engine is not incremental. -Steve Perhaps you could get some linguist to capitalize on your work with a publication? Best Regards, Łukasz --- 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 Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Comments from a lurker...
--- Steve Richfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Why go to all that work?! I have attached the *populated* Knowledge.mdb file that contains the knowledge that powers the chronic illness demo of Dr. Eliza. To easily view it, just make sure that any version of MS Access is installed on your computer (it is in Access 97 format) and double-click on the file. From there, select the Tables tab, and click on whatever table interests you. I looked at your file. Would I be correct that if I described a random health problem to Dr. Eliza that it would suggest that my problem is due to one of: - Low body temperature - Fluorescent lights - Consuming fructose in the winter - Mercury poisoning from amalgam fillings and vaccines - Aluminum cookware - Hydrogenated vegetable oil - Working a night shift - Aspirin (causes macular degeneration) - Or failure to accept divine intervention? Is that it, or is there a complete medical database somewhere, or the capability of acquiring this knowledge? Do you have a medical background, or have you consulted with doctors in building the database? BTW, regarding processes that use 100% of CPU in Windows. Did you try Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the task manager, then right click on the process and change its priority? -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Comments from a lurker...
On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 4:17 PM, Steve Richfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You've merely been a *TROLL* and gotten the appropriate response. Thanks for playing but we have no parting gifts for you. Who is the we you are referencing? Do you have a mouse in your pocket, or is that the Royal we? YOU are the only snide asshole/troll whom I have had the displeasure of observing on this forum. Can you point to anyone ELSE here who acts as you do? I don't want to participate in calling anyone a Troll. What I have observed of Matt's online presence, he was giving you an opportunity to disprove the Troll status rather than transparently ignoring you. I'm guessing he'll simply give up soon. I have little interest in downloading your software and tables and arcane howto for making it all work. In my opinion, you really can't call your product AGI until I can converse with it directly - either via it's own email address or (for a 'real-time' Turing test) an IRC channel. How difficult would it be for you to extend the Dr Eliza interface with an IRC bot frontend? If it is as accurate as you claim, it might help a lot more people by dispensing see a REAL doctor to get X checked out than as ... well, whatever it is now. Even with an accuracy rate that exceeds average doctors, I'll be as likely to dismiss it as I would dismiss a real doctor - but the machine doesn't need to play golf or drive expensive cars so it can devote the time that people can't (or won't). [I had a doctor say, Your iron level is too low, eat more red meat. followed immediately with, Your cholesterol is too high, eat less red meat. I was thinking, Your diagnosis is unusable, I want my co-pay back ] --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Logical Satisfiability...Get used to it.
Jim Bromer wrote: Ben G wrote: ... ... Concerning beliefs and scientific rationalism: Beliefs are the basis of all thought. To imply that religious belief might be automatically different from rational beliefs is naïve. However, I think there is an advantage in defining what a rational thought is realitve to AI programming and how scientific rationalism is different from simple rationalism. I am going to write a few messages about this when I get a chance. By the way, I don't really see how a simple n^4 or n^3 SAT solver in itself would be that useful for any immediate AGI project, but the novel logical methods that the solver will reveal may be more significant. Jim Bromer But religious beliefs *ARE* intrinsically different from rational beliefs. They aren't the only such belief, but they are among them. Rational beliefs MUST be founded in other beliefs. Rationalism does not provide a basis for generating beliefs ab initio, but only via reason, which requires both axioms and rules of inference. (NARS may have eliminated the axioms, but I doubt it. OTOH, I don't understand exactly how it works yet.) Religion and other intrinsic beliefs are inherent in the construction of humans. I suspect that every intelligent entity will require such beliefs. Which particular religion is believed in isn't inherent, but is situational. (Other factors may enter in, but I would need a clear explication of how that happened before I would believe that.) Note that another inherent belief is People like me are better than people who are different. The fact that a belief is inherent doesn't mean it can't be overcome (or at least subdued) by counter-programming, merely that one will need to continually ward against it, or it will re-assert itself even if you know that it's wrong. Saying that a belief is non-rational isn't denigrating it. It's merely a statement that it isn't a built-in rule. Even the persistence of forms doesn't seem to be totally built-in, though there are definitely lots of mechanisms that will tend to create it. So in that case what's built in is a tendency to perceive the persistence of objects. In the case of religion it's a bit more difficult to perceive what the built-in process is. Plausibly it's a combination of several tendency to perceive patterns shaped like ... in the world that aren't intrinsically connected, but which have been connected by culture. Or it might be something else. (The blame/attribute everything to the big alpha baboon theory isn't totally silly, but I find it unsatisfactory. It's at most a partial answer.) --- 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=8660244id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Comments from a lurker...
Mike, On 4/14/08, Mike Dougherty [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have little interest in downloading your software and tables and arcane howto for making it all work. In my opinion, you really can't call your product AGI until I can converse with it directly - either via it's own email address or (for a 'real-time' Turing test) an IRC channel. I will concede that AGI has little interest in Dr. Eliza, and I have little interest in AGI as it seems to be individually defined here. Hence, I plead no contest to this statement. How difficult would it be for you to extend the Dr Eliza interface with an IRC bot frontend? I have looked extensively at this. There are a number of issues: 1. It won't be widely useful without a LOT more knowledge. Remember, my choice of CHRONIC illness - those conditions that doctors can do little/nothing for, yet with the advancement of various sorts of alternative health care approaches, many of these DO have effective interventions. People typically having these conditions fall into some particular social categories: a. The elderly, many of whom won't talk with anyone who doesn't have an MD. If they had only gone down to the nearest clinic and saw the naturopath on duty, many of them wouldn't have their chronic condition. b. The poor, who can only qualify for mainstream MD care without paying for it themselves, and they don't have the money for such risky investments. c. In any case, most people with chronic health conditions do NOT have Internet access! 2. conversing with Dr. Eliza can be frustrating, because it insists on talking about whatever it sees as pivotal, and has no internal ability to converse about whatever it is that the patient thinks is important. More often than not, some passing indirect mention of a seemingly irrelevant symptom will turn out to be the clue that puts it all together, so Dr. Eliza may start asking about that symptom to make sure that it is real since so much depends on it. I really can't imagine Dr. Eliza ever competing for ANY Turing-related prize, because it so completely lacks the personal touch. 3. My present front runner plan is to lurk on many health-related sites, analyze every posting, and wait until it sees enough to be really sure about saying something (has seen enough to propose a complete cure), and then post the questions or reply as appropriate. Alternatively, service emails, which encourages people to write carefully thought out problem statements. If it is as accurate as you claim, Obviously, it is no better than its knowledge base. it might help a lot more people by dispensing see a REAL doctor to get X checked out than as ... well, whatever it is now. I agree. An alternative plan that might be worth a LOT of money is to forge a relationship with a nationwide medical provider like Group Health. Dr. Eliza is pretty good at dragging out the details even if you don't look at its opinions about them. If you like the advice and it requires medication, then just click the button and show up at the Group Health pharmacy, show your ID, and pick up your meds. If you reject its advice, at least your doctor can read the health statement a LOT faster than he can listen to you talk. No matter what happens, the provider would come out ahead. There are a number of political pitfalls in this, but I am still looking for just the right provider to do this with. Even with an accuracy rate that exceeds average doctors, I'll be as likely to dismiss it as I would dismiss a real doctor - but the machine doesn't need to play golf or drive expensive cars so it can devote the time that people can't (or won't). The whole thing hinges around *difficult* problems, *chronic* illnesses, etc.If you doctor can fix a problem, then you don't need Dr. Eliza, though the price is certainly right. However, when your doctor tells you to cancel your magazine subscriptions, as mine once did, then at least some people open their minds to alternative advice. [I had a doctor say, Your iron level is too low, eat more red meat. followed immediately with, Your cholesterol is too high, eat less red meat. Please excuse me for a moment while I change hats... Iron (a pure free radical) levels are regulated by your central metabolic control system to keep the total free radical level where it wants it to be. Most doctors make such opinions without testing, and sometimes the levels are low FOR A GOOD REASON. One fellow from Australia was downwind from some British A-bombs that were tested, so he was full of free radicals from the fallout. His iron levels were regulated to be low. He could (and did for a while) eat iron pills like candy and his levels didn't move a bit. Most of the iron hype is obsolete by decades, and comes from old Geritol ads. I presume that your doctor had his/her share of gray hair? Drug companies have literally bought and paid for laboratories to lower the normal range for cholesterol in order to sell more pills.
