Steve Richfield said:

If I understand you correctly, Cycorp's code should be public domain,
and as such, I should be able to simply mine for the features that I am
looking for. It sounds like Cycorp doesn't have a useful product (yet)
whereas it looks like I do, so it is probably I who should be doing
this, not Cycorp.

Regretfully, the KRAKEN source code is not public domain, despite the fact that 
US tax dollars paid for it.

While at Cycorp, John DeOliveira and I lobbied for an open-source version of 
Cyc, that one of us dubbed "OpenCyc".  Doug Lenat saw the advantages of 
releasing a limited form of Cyc technology, especially to preclude some other 
possible ontology from becoming the de facto standard ontology, e.g. for the 
Semantic Web.  However, Cycorp is bedeviled by its own traditional, proprietary 
nature and Lenat did not want to release the source code for the object store, 
lisp runtime, inference engine, applications and utilities.  The first release 
of OpenCyc that I prepared contained many, but not all, of the full Cyc concept 
terms, and their defining assertions.  No rules, nor numerous other commonsense 
assertions about these concepts were released.   The provided OpenCyc runtime 
was binary only, without source code, and with its HTML browser as its sole 
released application.  A Java API to Cyc, that I wrote, was also released with 
its source code under the Apache
 License.

The KRAKEN application is  not provided with OpenCyc, and it was growing stale 
from lack of maintenance when I was let go from the company in August 2006.

-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




________________________________
From: Steve Richfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Sent: Monday, December 1, 2008 10:22:37 PM
Subject: Re: [agi] Seeking CYC critiques


Steve,
 
If I understand you correctly, Cycorp's code should be public domain, and as 
such, I should be able to simply mine for the features that I am looking for. 
It sounds like Cycorp doesn't have a useful product (yet) whereas it looks like 
I do, so it is probably I who should be doing this, not Cycorp.
 
Any thoughts?
 
Who should I ask for code from?
 
Steve Richfield
==================
On 12/1/08, Stephen Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 
Steve Richfield said:

KRAKEN contains lots of good ideas, several of which were already on my wish 
list for Dr. Eliza sometime in the future. I suspect that a merger of 
technologies might be a world-beater.
 
I wonder if the folks at Cycorp would be interested in such an effort?
If you can find a sponsor for the effort and then solicit Cycorp to join in 
collaboration, I believe that they would be interested.  The Cycorp business 
model as I knew it back in 2006, depended mostly upon government research 
sponsorship to (1) accomplish the research that the sponsor wanted, e.g. 
produce deliverables for the DARPA Rapid Knowledge Formation project, and (2) 
incrementally add more facts and rules to the Cyc KB, write more supporting 
code for Cyc.  Cycorp, did not then, and likely even now does not have internal 
funding for non-sponsored enhancements.

 
-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 

  



________________________________
 From: Steve Richfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Sent: Monday, December 1, 2008 3:19:37 PM
Subject: Re: [agi] Seeking CYC critiques
 


Steve,
 
The KRAKEN paper was quite interesting, and has a LOT in common with my own Dr. 
Eliza. However, I saw no mention of Dr. Eliza's "secret sauce", that boosts it 
from answering questions to solving problems given symptoms. The secret sauce 
has two primary ingredients:
1.  The syntax of differential symptom statements - how people state a symptom 
that separates it from similar symptoms of other conditions.
2.  Questions, the answers to which will probably carry #1 above recognizable 
differential symptom statements.
Both of the above seem to require domain experienced people to code, as book 
learning doesn't seem to convey what people typically say, or what you have to 
say to them to get them to state their symptom in a differential way. Also, I 
suspect that knowledge coded today wouldn't work well in 50 years, when common 
speech has shifted.
 
I finally gave up on having Dr. Eliza answer questions, because the "round trip 
error rate" seemed to be inescapably high. This is the product of:
 
1.  The user's flaws in their world model.
2.  The user's flaws in formulating their question.
3.  The computer's errors in parsing the question.
4.  The computer's errors in formulating an answer.
5.  The user's errors in understanding the answer.
6.  The user's errors from filing the answer into a flawed world model.
 
Between each of these is:
 
x.5  English's shortcomings in providing a platform to accurately state the 
knowledge, question, or answer.
 
While each of these could be kept to <5%, it seemed completely hopeless to 
reduce the overall error rate to low enough to actually make it good for 
anything useful. Of course, everyone on this forum concentrates on #3 above, 
when in the real world, this is often/usually swamped by the others. Hence, I 
am VERY curious. Has KRAKEN found a worthwhile/paying niche in the world with 
itsw question answering, where people actually use it to their benefit? If so, 
then how did they deal with the round trip error rate?
 
KRAKEN contains lots of good ideas, several of which were already on my wish 
list for Dr. Eliza sometime in the future. I suspect that a merger of 
technologies might be a world-beater.
 
I wonder if the folks at Cycorp would be interested in such an effort?
 
BTW, http://www.DrEliza.com is up and down these days, with plans for a new and 
more reliable version to be installed next weekend.
 
Any thoughts?

Steve Richfield
==================
On 11/29/08, Stephen Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 
Hi Robin,
There are no Cyc critiques that I know of in the last few years.  I was 
employed seven years at Cycorp until August 2006 and my non-compete agreement 
expired a year later.   

An interesting competition was held by Project Halo in which Cycorp 
participated along with two other research groups to demonstrate human-level 
competency answering chemistry questions.  Results are here.  Although Cycorp 
performed principled deductive inference giving detailed justifications, it was 
judged to have performed inferior due to the complexity of its justifications 
and due to its long running times.  The other competitors used special purpose 
problem solving modules whereas Cycorp used its general purpose inference 
engine, extended for chemistry equations as needed.

My own interest is in natural language dialog systems for rapid knowledge 
formation.  I was Cycorp's first project manager for its participation in the 
the DARPA Rapid Knowledge Formation project where it performed to DARPA's 
satisfaction, but subsequently its RKF tools never lived up to Cycorp's 
expectations that subject matter experts could rapidly extend the Cyc KB 
without Cycorp ontological engineers having to intervene.  A Cycorp paper 
describing its KRAKEN system is here.

 
I would be glad to answer questions about Cycorp and Cyc technology to the best 
of my knowledge, which is growing somewhat stale at this point.

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 

 



________________________________
 From: Robin Hanson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Sent: Saturday, November 29, 2008 9:46:09 PM
Subject: [agi] Seeking CYC critiques
 

What are the best available critiques of CYC as it exists now (vs. soon after 
project started)?


Robin Hanson  [EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://hanson.gmu.edu 
Research Associate, Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University
Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323
  

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