Thanks Aaron, points well made, and point taken. I do think I have the reification aspect covered.
By the way, I did acknowledge you in the Premise Language Guide, https://www.academia.edu/9813254/The_Premise_Language_Guide (that and $5 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks I suppose, but it is a mention). Cheers. ~PM Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 15:54:58 -0600 Subject: Re: [agi] IS From: [email protected] To: [email protected] For "a green coat" I would attach a "green" attribute descriptor directly to the "coat" object descriptor as an attribute. For, "The coat is green," I would create an "is" event descriptor and make the "coat" object descriptor its subject and the "green" attribute descriptor its object. This is functionally the same as attaching the attribute descriptor directly to the object descriptor, except that additional timing information is conveyed. Keep in mind that you can also say, "The coat was green," or, "The coat will be green." Most people seem to overlook this when designing their conceptual models. Don't ignore the temporal and other meta aspects of "static" knowledge. Set membership can't represent this for you, nor can other simple mathematical relations. The problem is that mathematical relationships can't be treated as first-class objects, and cannot be modified with additional information. In the standard mathematical treatment, you can assert or deny a statement, but you don't refer to the statement as an entity in its own right. You can refer to set membership as a mathematical construct in its own right, but you can't refer to the membership of a particular object to a particular set as a mathematical construct, nor can you provide additional details of that relationship on an ad hoc basis as they become available. How, in your system, are you going to talk about the coat being green, and relate that to other facts and events? How are you going to apply time constraints ("It was green after I dyed it"), or say just how green the coat was, or what shade of green, or what quality of green (mottled, neon, dull, faded, etc.), or how certain you are/were of any of this additional information at any point in time? Set theory is grossly inadequate. You need a descriptive system that is capable of under- or over-specifying the current state and past/future history of reality, including talking about descriptions (and elements thereof) expressed in that system. You should be able to encode whatever information is available, regardless of its nature, and build an arbitrarily complex model or simulation of any scenario. You need to be able to do things like this: my_coat = ENTITY()my_coat.kind = KIND("coat")my_coat.owner = speaker mottled = ATTRIBUTE()mottled.kind = KIND("mottled") mottled_green = ATTRIBUTE()mottled_green.kind = KIND("green")mottled_green.attributes.add(mottled) my_coat_is_mottled_green = COPULA()my_coat_is_mottled_green.kind = KIND("be") my_coat_is_mottled_green.subject = my_coatmy_coat_is_mottled_green.attribution = mottled_greenmy_coat_is_mottled_green.certainty = .95 my_coat_is_mottled_green.times.add(now) I_believe_my_coat_is_mottled_green = EVENT()I_believe_my_coat_is_mottled_green.kind = KIND("believe")I_believe_my_coat_is_mottled_green.subject = speakerI_believe_my_coat_is_mottled_green.direct_object = my_coat_is_mottled_greenI_believe_my_coat_is_mottled_green.certainty = .99 I_believe_my_coat_is_mottled_green.times.add(now) This is an oversimplification, of course, but I hope it gets my point across nonetheless. Any system that deals with raw, static mathematical assertions is going to be insufficient. The system must be capable of change, it must be capable of self-reference, and it must be capable of arbitrary expressiveness, or it will ultimately be nothing more than a toy system. On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 10:59 AM, Piaget Modeler via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: For the NLP crowd. How do you represent IS ? Do you differentiate IS from TYPE-OF (i.e., IS-A), or INSTANCE-OF ? Take for example, IS(apple, fruit) - TYPE-OFIS(John_Smith, Politician) - INSTANCE-OFIS(my_coat, green) - ??? Cyc uses individuals and collection and treats generalization as set membership between the instance and the collection. They use Genls (generalizes) rather than IS-A. But I don't recall how they representIS. How do you represent these distinctions? ~PM 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/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
