On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, Dennis Gorelik wrote: > From my point of view CYC in on the same level of intelligence as > MS Word. Well, probably MS Word is even more intelligent. > At least MS Word works and produce nice and intelligent results (not > super-intelligent though). > Does CYC have any practical use at all?
Speaking with my own opinion, and not that of my employer Cycorp, I would say that the Cyc approach to AI at a meta level is the same as that taken by other individuals and groups creating an AI. The approach is to identify the hard AI problem first and solve it, then move on to the rest of the required behaviors. In the mid-1980's Doug Lenat identified commonsense knowledge as the hard AI problem, that once solved would enable otherwise brittle domain-specific expert systems to work together robustly and be easily extendible. Cyc's commonsense knowledge is organized into an ontology suitable for symbolically representing the full range of human thoughts. Cyc's current behavior is fact entry and question answering, with additional web based tools for rule creation and knowledge base browsing. The recent release of OpenCyc 0.9 contains three times as many facts as the prior release. A new product, ResearchCyc, is available for academic/commercial research (without a fee), that contains even more content (e.g. the lexicon) and the full set of tools. Presently the greatest practical use of Cyc in my opinion is it's ontology, which may be applied to organize concepts and relations in any application. We have provided specialized ontology exports to government entities for a few years, and have recently published the entire OpenCyc ontology in OWL (the Web Ontology Language) format on our web site. Our government sponsors have provisions for Cyc applications to be tested this year with user organizations, so that will be a test of practical use. Beyond question answering, a wider range of intelligent behavior is possible. My own ambition for example, is to enable Cyc to be curious, to take the initiative, to seek required knowledge and improve its own behavior using a hierarchical goal-oriented command structure. Dennis, I have toured your web site and have the following points about features that Cyc has that you might have to eventually incorporate into your own architecture: 1. Distinction between individuals (CityOfAtlantaGA) and types of individuals (USCity) 2. Type taxonomy of concepts so that specific types have one or more supertypes (including a taxonomy of relationships) 3. Context. This is the ability to group assertions that have shared assumptions, and to exclude wrong contexts when answering questions 4. Meta assertions, in which a concept in a relationship is itself a relationship between other concepts 5. First order rules - "every bat has two wings", in which quantified variables concisely represent what would otherwise be a large number of ground facts 6. Complex objects, notably events and situations. Cyc treats these according to the philosophy of Donald Davidson, all actions are rich events that entail various actors (e.g. a robbery event has a robbed entity even if you are only told about the robber). Cyc has a rich vocabulary of actor roles for thousands of situation and event types. 6. Truth maintenance. This is Cyc's ability to automatically retract all the associated facts when a concept is removed from the knowledge base 7. Lexicon. This the association of natural language (mostly English) words and multi-word strings with concepts, and in the case of event and situation concepts the lexicon contains verb frames (e.g. how are the sentence subject and object related?) 8. Inference. Forwards deductive inference automatically asserts new derived facts when certain antecedent facts are asserted (using marked forwards-firing implication rules). Backwards deductive inference uses rule back-chaining to answer queries when the ground facts cannot be simply looked-up. There are numerous special cases to optimize. For example many relationships are transitive (greaterThan). 8a. Temporal inference - the ability to reason about time intervals, time points (e.g. What World War II movies starred John Wayne?) 8b. Modal inference - represent and answer questions about assertions with modal logical operators, e.g. "John ought to get enough sleep." 8c. Abduction - when directed, hypothesize the best answers to queries Cheers. -Steve -- =========================================================== Stephen L. Reed phone: 512.342.4036 Cycorp, Suite 100 fax: 512.342.4040 3721 Executive Center Drive email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Austin, TX 78731 web: http://www.cyc.com download OpenCyc at http://www.opencyc.org =========================================================== ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
