Cyc
en.wikipedia.org
Cyc
1–10 of 176 posts
Re: Cyc
#2I think that this particular topic is evergreen because people are perennially surprised that this technology, which seems so reasonable and advanced at first blush, has failed to be useful in practice.
Re: Cyc
#3I can't believe this is still a thing.
Then again, I felt the same way when I studied it at university almost 20 years ago. It was pretty obviously a pipe dream then, too.
Re: Cyc
#4While this approach might seem dated and strange, at some point something will begin to approach the ability to do general learning like a human. I just wonder how long we have to wait.
Re: Cyc
#5Knowledge bases should work in principle. There are many issues with filling them manually: a) the schema/ontology/conceptual framework is not guaranteed to be useful especially when done with no specific application in mind b) high cost of adding each fact with little marginal benefit etc. But I don't think it outweighs the issues of "pure" machine learning that much: poor introspection, capricious predictability of what you will get, and if you want to have really structured and semi-reliable information you will probably have to rely, at some point, on something like Wikipedia meta-information (DBpedia). Which is really a knowledge base with its own issues.
I think what really stopped Cyc from getting a wider traction is its closed nature[0]. People do use Princeton WordNet, which you can get for free, even though it's a mess in many aspects. The issue and mentality here is similar to commercial Common Lisp implementations, and the underlying culture is similar (oldschool 80s AI). These projects were shaped with a mindset that major progress in computing will happen with huge government grants and plans[1]. However you interpret the last 30 years, it was not exactly true. It's possible that all these companies earn money for their owners, but they have no industry-wide impact.
I was half-tempted once or twice to use something like Cyc in some project, but it would probably be too much organizational hassle. Especially if it turned out to be something commercial I wouldn't want to be dependent on someone's licensing and financial whims, especially if it can be avoided.
[0] There was OpenCyc for a time, but it was scrapped.
[1] Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569098
Re: Cyc
#6Cyc was the last holdout of GOFAI in the 90's, its premise being that the traditional symbolic AI paradigm wasn't wrong, but that it was just a matter of scale.
Re: Cyc
#7Is it possible that the inherent context dependent ambiguities of human language make knowledge-based inference so difficult since most current knowledge is stored in human language ?
tangential question: is there a standard language for "knowledge", like how we describe math for "computation" ?
Are a part of our brains essentially compilers from human language to an internal definition of "knowledge" that leads to consciousness ?
Re: Cyc
#8Is it possible that the inherent context dependent ambiguities of human language make knowledge-based inference so difficult since most current knowledge is stored in human language ? tangential question: is there a standard language for "knowledge", like how we describe math for "computation" ? Are a part of our brains essentially compilers from human language to an internal definition of "knowledge" that leads to c…
There are a bunch of "standards" for representing knowledge. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
[Edit] Here's a wider overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation_and_r...
Re: Cyc
#9Is it possible that the inherent context dependent ambiguities of human language make knowledge-based inference so difficult since most current knowledge is stored in human language ? tangential question: is there a standard language for "knowledge", like how we describe math for "computation" ? Are a part of our brains essentially compilers from human language to an internal definition of "knowledge" that leads to c…
There are a bunch of "standards" for representing knowledge. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web [Edit] Here's a wider overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation_and_r...
Thanks for the link. It seems to talk about a knowledge graph type links between entities. It is however in a human language (here, english). I am interested in knowing if there's something analogous to "math" to represent knowledge.
Re: Cyc
#10in my experience, most people dismiss cyc as a failed science experiment. this shouldnt be! after all, many important deep learning concepts have their roots in the 80s, and it is possible that cyc could be revived too.