I spent some time with Lenat's crew in Austin circa 2000 as part of my deal with HP's "Internet Chapter 2" project ala "eSpeak". In tha tdeal I rather insisted that I be permitted my own resources to pursue some fallback plans in the event that their primary "vision" failed. What I was interested in pursuing with Cyc was an application development platform based on first order logic, utilizing their extensive "ontology" as a standard library. It was actually a really great potential that could have headed off all kinds of brain noise in the industry since then. I even got one of Paul Allen's quantum computer language designers from Interval Research involved to revive Russell's Relation Arithmetic toward that end. The root problem with FOL as a programming language is similar to the problem with functional programming. Time is treated as a second class citizen. The quantum core is time symmetric but at least it is a solid foundation formal foundation for introducing time as a first class citizen.
Lenat went back to HP HQ with me to do a presentation on their "ontology" but the folks running the project weren't really serious. They were more interested in importing H-1bs thatn delivering on the $500M got dumped on things like 4 page center spreads in the WSJ, etc. I had to threaten to resign to get the Interval guy when the management said I could only hire H-1bs. The big practical problem with the Cyc engine was the lack of incremental tabling -- a problem that didn't even get addressed in Prolog until some years later with XSB. We had a Prolog engine company from UK on staff along with Guido, but I couldn't peel off enough resources to get the incremental tabling done. There's still some potential for Cyc I think, but only as a programming platform -- at least until a more principled approach to logic-program synthesis work along the lines pursued by Richard Evans <https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02227> advances to the point that it can bring the Cyc ontology to heel within a principled machine learning platform. On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 9:36 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 7:40 PM <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Thursday, February 20, 2020, at 7:02 PM, Matt Mahoney wrote: > > > > Cyc was a failure. But it is interesting that in 34 years we haven't > found something better. > > > > > > How so? Is Cyc that good? Show me, I've never seen Cyc in action. > > I have, and it was pretty bad. But coding millions of common sense > rules by hand in first order logic made sense when computers had 64 KB > of memory and there was no internet. Cyc might have been useful with a > natural language interface, but that would have been millions of more > rules, and we know how those attempts have gone. > > Now that we have terabytes of text and the hardware to process it, > statistical language models make sense. But that still isn't enough. > Half of what you know (about 1 Gb) is knowledge you were born knowing, > encoded in your DNA. A lot of that knowledge is still likely to > require hand coding. > > -- > -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T887757e45bfd1342-Mdc3b313e3dfa803d5b1bd584 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
