Word: cyc
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From my personal theological experience, I think it is problematic to ascribe human attributes to things that are not human. If two computer personalities like the ones being developed, Cog and CYC, were connected and left alone for 24 hours, would they initiate and carry on a meaningful conversation? What would they talk about? Would they need a translator? Are computers able to scheme and then justify their scheming? If computers acquire a brain or a mind, might they develop a psychosis? I shudder to reflect that computer creators will someday develop both good-think and bad-think machines that...
...side of orthodoxy stands Lenat. Though CYC's unabashedly more-is-more approach has raised eyebrows in the field, its design remains true to one of the central tenets of classical AI: symbolic knowledge makes the mind go round. In other words, if you can write down the logical structures through which we apprehend the world, you're halfway to re-creating intelligence. And if you can program what you've written into a machine, even better. Hence the 170 person-years CYC's handlers have devoted to codifying what any five-year-old already knows...
Brooks isn't much kinder about Lenat's work. "I don't think [CYC] can ever have a deep experience of the world," he sniffs, pointing out that without sensory input, the program's knowledge can never really amount to more than an abstract network of symbols...
Lenat may have the last word--at least for now. With its 10-year head start over Cog, the CYC project is much closer to spinning off practical applications, and its timing couldn't be better. The World Wide Web's chaotic infobloom is starting to strain the limits of today's popular but simpleminded search engines (which work, for the most part, by matching up key words). But CYC, with its ability to make commonsensical leaps of logic, can connect a request, say, for pictures of "happy people" with the caption, "A man watching his daughter learn to walk...
...their programming is gaining currency, especially in the biologically oriented milieu in which Brooks and Maes operate. Farsighted proponents of this school imagine huge populations of digital agents meeting and mating in increasingly complex global networks--creating in their progeny artificial intelligences that exceed even the descendants of CYC...