Steve Richfield asked:
what is a "construction"? By way of preface, any AGI developer will be initially ignorant of a great deal of the subject matter that will be required to build their AGI. There are so many fields to draw from, and also the great many sub-fields in narrow AI to master, at least to the degree of selecting applicable techniques. Although I took some linguistics back at college in 1970-73, very little of that theory is now current - or worse, considered wrong. Eighteen months ago I learned about Construction Grammar from Dr. Jerry Ball's web site here. A good introduction is the Wikipedia article here. In a nutshell a construction is a linguistic object that couples form with semantic content. You can find out more about my approach by reading my blog posts on grammar. Cheers, -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ----- Original Message ---- From: Steve Richfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, May 16, 2008 11:59:24 PM Subject: Re: [agi] AGI and Wiki, was Understanding a sick puppy Steve, On 5/16/08, Stephen Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I naively expect misunderstandings and ignorance on the part of the user to be reconciled via clarification dialog. What else is there besides misunderstandings and ignorance on the part of the user? Is there something else for computers to address?! Perhaps you accomplish this via regular expressions applied to the user's input. Actually, there are many regular expressions that are used to also identify negation (e.g. I do NOT have asthma) and time (I had asthma as a child). In my ideal system, constructions At the risk of expressing my ignorance, what is a "construction"? serve the function of your regular expressions, hopefully even capturing the entirety of the user's confusion. Probably not possible, because that confusion is more likely than not to be illogical, and computers don't do well at all in addressing the illogical. Everything that goes in and out must be paradigm-shifted to the illogic, which is a nearly impossible job even for a human. They offer PhDs in Psychology to people who develop skills in this area. Steve, I really do appreciate discussing your system as it implemented enough to comment about how it works in the real world, whereas I am not yet at that point. I suspect that some of my skepticism must be oozing from your screen. I have seen SO many efforts based on "I'll do the best that I can and see where I can get to" when there are impossible roadblocks that are sometimes never seen. The latest Wiki efforts seem doomed to this demise. After a while this has made me jaded even to new efforts that may not have the fatal flaws of past efforts. I think I now know what the "hard questions" are, so please grab hold of them and answer them the best you can, as hopefully when you see the difficulties in answering them, you will also see the same fatal flaws in your approach that I (think that I) see. Yes, I know, it IS difficult to compare real with planned systems. Steve Richfield ================= ----- Original Message ---- From: Steve Richfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, May 16, 2008 9:50:34 PM Subject: Re: [agi] AGI and Wiki, was Understanding a sick puppy Steve, The missing and apparently impossible to reconstruct information, without which your plan cannot hope to succeed in doing what I am doing (though you might have different achievable goals), is a syntactical expression of what people typically say that indicates that they do NOT understand the contents of an article, and that they have a problem built on that ignorance. Perhaps one of the greatest discoveries behind Dr. Eliza is that the regular expressions typically needed to recognize these statement of ignorance and SIMPLE, though they often take some thought to create. How are you planning to function without this information? Steve Richfield ================ On 5/16/08, Stephen Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Steve Richfield said: Does anyone else here share my dream of a worldwide AI with all of the knowledge of the human race to support it - built with EXISTING Wikipediaand Dr. Eliza software and a little glue to hold it all together? Hi Steve, I share part of your dream, in that I am strongly attracted to Wikipedia as great corpus of commonsense knowledge that should be incorporated into my AGI project, Texai. I've looked at the Freebase Wikipedia Extraction: The Freebase Wikipedia Extraction (WEX) is a processed dump of the English language Wikipedia. The wiki markup for each article is transformed into machine-readable XML, and common relational features such as templates, infoboxes, categories, article sections, and redirects are extracted in tabular form. Freebase WEX is provided as a set of database tables in TSV format for PostgreSQL, along with tables providing mappings between Wikipedia articles and Freebase topics, and corresponding Freebase Types. My plan: 1. Rather than deal with Wikimedia, collaborating on a AGI-style interface , I would simply process (i.e. parse and completely understand) their content. 2. One could then teach Texai how to edit a Wikipedia article to close the loop.FYI. Another great corpus of knowledge is an online patent database. In the US, patents include a section that describes the background of the invention. On the road to generally applicable machine vision, I can envision a facility that can read various types of patent diagrams. Cheers, -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ----- Original Message ---- From: Steve Richfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, May 16, 2008 9:31:58 AM Subject: [agi] AGI and Wiki, was Understanding a sick puppy Mike, Stan, et al, I have recently had some interesting off-line discussions that may be pulling things together, so I thought that I would run the emerging concept up the flagpole here and get any opinions. I have previously posted here the horrific problems trying to deal with the Wiki people, as they apparently perceive value in impeding a good AI/AGI interface to Wikipedia. Apparently, even their own internal people can't get help here, as it might lead to loosing control over the search business. However... The Wikipedia software is open source, and some companies even maintain their own domain-specific wikis as knowledge base. Further, the AI/AGI interface problem is certainly not their only problem. The 2nd biggest problem is their implicit insistence on a single model/paradigm behind every article, which limits Wiki to being of value only for grade-school support. Note in passing the value of faulty models. Often the most accurate model suggests no means of correction, whereas a less accurate model suggests corrections that quite often (but sometimes don't) work (see puppy update below). Limiting articles to single models destroys MOST of the potential value of Wikipedia, as does blocking an AI/AGI interface. Proposal: Start a new AI/AGI Wikipedia, starting with the present open-source Wikipedia software with minor mods to collect additional information from authors and build a database on an associated FTP site for anyone to download. This should soon take over the Wiki business from the present Wikipedia folks. A well placed patent application would impede their following suit, thereby seizing this entire marketplace. Unfortunately, this is too big of a project to be funded with my lunch money or built and maintained with my limited spare time. However, with an investor to cover miscellaneous expenses, a server to hold the site, and some co-conspirators to help make it go; and this could quite easily take over much/most of the Internet in a way that would be MUCH bigger than ever envisioned by Wikipedia. Does anyone else here share my dream of a worldwide AI with all of the knowledge of the human race to support it - built with EXISTING Wikipedia and Dr. Eliza software and a little glue to hold it all together? Note that unlike the present Internet, that Dr. Eliza is pretty much language-independent. You can even put in a problem statement in one language, and get the unanswered questions and analysis out in another language. The principles underlying this are similar to financial systems that keep the numbers in a database, and use different language versions of their program to access it, only in Dr. Eliza, nearly every record has a field to indicate language so that no software changes are needed to support different languages, though trivial enhancements ARE needed to support new languages with previously unsupported features, e.g. the differing use of periods and commas in numbers depending on which side of the pond that you reside on. With this, the WHOLE world would be automatically included, rather than just the English language part of it (with trivial separate participation by other languages) as is presently the case. No longer would the Internet be divided up according to languages. Puppy Update: The puppy is doing MUCH better, and is now starting to explore. Three new theories as to its problems have emerged: 1. Pus found on its fur pointed the way to an abscess in its armpit that had evaded previous inspection. The abscess seems to be too small to be life-threatening, but who knows? 2. It has an umbilical hernia that might be strangling some intestines. 3. Like some people, it would apparently rather die than eat puppy food, though it doesn't seem to be picky about eating minced leftovers. However, earlier theories, though probably incorrect, DID guide the way to treatment that, though not perfect (it would have been nice to lance the abscess), was sufficiently successful to save its life. This serves to highlight the value of incorrect theories, that they often provide the right answers in a timely manner, even when for the wrong reasons. 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