On 1/25/07, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
If there is a major problem with Cyc, it is not the choice of basic KR language. Predicate logic is precise and relatively simple.
I agree mostly, though I think even Cyc's simple predicate logic language can be made even simpler and better. For example, Cyc uses the classical quantifiers #$forAll and #$exists. In my version I don't use Frege-style quantifiers but I allow generalized modifiers like "many", "a few", in addition to "all", "exists".
Rather, the main problem is the impracticality of encoding a decent percentage of the needed commonsense knowledge!
Now I see why we disagree here. You believe we should acquire all knowledge via experiential learning. IMO we can do even better than the experiential route. We can let the internet "crowd" enter the commonsense corpus for us. This should be allow us to reach a functioning, usable AGI sooner.
And, on a more technical level, I think that Cyc's **ontology** is too complex and unwieldy. This is NOT an issue of the KR language, but rather of the chosen vocabulary of "semantic primitives". I don't feel that Cyc has a well-thought-out set of semantic primitives. They have a small number of basic logical primitives, and then a HUGE number of complex abstract concepts in their upper ontology. IMO an intermediate level is needed, involving a few dozen well thought out semantic primitives, and a few hundred additional basic semantic relationships.
I have a similar sense. As wikipedia puts it, Cyc has been criticized for "excessive reification". I think the problem is that Cyc creates artificial labels that are atomic and *non-compositional*. For example the label "#$rawFood" should be represented *compositionally* by the concepts "raw" and "food". I suggest not to use ontologies at all. John Sowa has spent lots of time on the ontology problem and his conclusion is: "We will never have a one-size fits all ontology for anything having to do with computer systems. Case closed" [ http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg12861.html ]. Perhaps this is one GOFAI feature we need to ditch. I think we can work bottom-up from a vast web of commonsense pixels, and the computer organize its own knowledgebase via clustering etc. So we don't need any man-made ontology.
Lojban IMO has done a great job of this. The Lojban language embodies a very well thought out commonsense ontology, which has been shaped evolutionarily thru the usage of the language by the Lojban community.
Not familiar with the Lojban community or the status of the language, so I can't comment. I still believe that introducing Lojban into AGI is spurious / redundant and it may alienate people from your projects if they don't know Lojban. It seems like just another man-made ontology that has its inadequacies.
However, this still doesn't solve the problem that there is too much commonsense knowledge to code-in explicitly ... so it has to be learned...
This is the main disagreement. Could an internet crowd codify all commonsense knowledge? It seems yes, especially if we're talking about the more *verbal* portion of commonsense. Perhaps we should combine the Codifiy strategy with the Experiential Learning strategy.... YKY ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
