Word: lenat
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...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...
...Lenat might say the same, though for less flattering reasons. As far as he's concerned, Brooks is headed down a blind alley, trying futilely to retrace evolution's steps. The simple tricks that made Brooks' earlier, insectlike robots work will never "scale up" to the complexity of human-level reasoning, Lenat insists. And as for those bugbots? "As far as I can tell," he says, "the world has enough insects...
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...
There might be a market for inferential power like that, especially if it could be yoked to some of the autonomous semi-intelligent agents that are already buzzing around on the Internet. But Lenat isn't the only researcher poised to bring real intelligence to intelligent agents. If anybody is likely to beat him to market, it's a former student of Brooks' named Patricia Maes, founder of the M.I.T. MediaLab's Autonomous Agents group and of Agents, Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Maes and her students have devised imaginative ways to use bottom-up AI to personalize information delivery...