Cyc • Hacker News Board

Re: Cyc

#81

Post by Jeff_Brown » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

randomidiot666 wrote: post #73

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are aspects of quantum that we don't understand, but we have no reason to believe intelligence relies on them, any more than bridges do.

We actually do have reason to believe that, since our current understanding of consciousness is very incomplete. Human consciousness extends far beyond our current understanding. I am referring to the full extent of the capabilities of the human mind, not some isolated aspects of it. The physics of bridges is well known. That is basically a solved problem. Human consciousness/intelligence is an open problem, and may…

> We actually do have reason to believe that [intelligence relies on quantum properties]

Are you leaving the reason unsaid, or am I in fact reading your argument correctly: "We don't understand consciousness, and we don't understand quantum, therefore it is likely consciousness relies on quantum." There's already plenty of mystery in an ordinary deterministic computation-driven approach to intelligence.

Re: Cyc

#82

Post by catpolice » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 9:10 PM UTC

m0zg wrote: post #77

catpolice wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cyc has a few ways of dealing with fallibility. Cyc doesn't do anything Bayesian like assigning specific probabilities to individual beliefs - IIRC they tried something like that and it had the problem where nobody felt very confident about attaching any particular precise number to priors and also the inference chains can be so long and involve so many assertions that anything less than 1 probability for most assert…

Thank you for the answer, I thought it was simpler than that, I'm glad the assumption was wrong. I understand that any practical system of this kind would have to be very coarse, but even at the coarse level, does it have any kind of "error bar" indicator, to show how "sure" it is of the possibly incorrect answer? And can it come up with pertinent questions to narrow things down to a more "correct" answer?

I'm not sure I'm able to answer that in a satisfying way just because my memory is fallible. The degree to which the system is unsure of something (to the degree to which that can be coarsely represented) certainly shows up in the results, and I suspect the underlying search heuristics tend to prioritize things with a represented higher confidence level.

The latter thing sounds like something Doug Lenat has wanted for years, though I think it mostly comes up in cases where the information available is ambiguous, rather than unreliable. There are various knowledge entry schemes that involve Cyc dynamically generating more questions to ask the user to disambiguate or find relevant information.

Re: Cyc

#83

Post by catpolice » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

TheDonut wrote: post #78

catpolice wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are current employees reading, they might be able to give a better answer than me. Basically, the project is to build a huge knowledge base of basic facts and "common sense" knowledge and an inference engine that could use a lot of different heuristics (including ones derived from semantic implications of contents of the knowledge base) to do efficient inference on queries related to its knowledge. One way o…

Thanks for the reply. A 10% improvement in anything is usually immensely valuable but I know that you're using an arbitrary number in that 10%. I think the trick would be to make Cyc less complicated. It sounds like Cyc would do best sitting inside of a university or a foundation where they wouldn't have to worry about corporate clients. Or inside a massive tech company like Google where its budget would just be a dr…

All the programmers at Cycorp, and most of the ones who've gone on to do other things, have a dream of re-writing the inference engine from scratch. Its just that those dreams don't necessarily align in the details, and the codebase is so, so, so big at this point that it's a herculean undertaking.

Re: Cyc

#84

Post by yters » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

13415 wrote: post #72

yters wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mind may be nonphysical.

That's one position, but there are three problems with it: 1. You have to solve the interaction problem (how does the mind interact with the physical world?) 2. You need to explain why the world is not physically closed without blatantly violating physical theory / natural laws. 3. From the fact that the mind is nonphysical, it does not follow that computationalism is false. On the contrary, I'd say that computationa…

1. No I don't. I don't have to explain how gravity works to know that it does and make scientific claims about its operation. Likewise, I can scientifically demonstrate the mind is non physical and interacts with our physical world without explaining how.

2. If the world is not physically closed then physical theory and natural laws are not violated, since they would not apply to anything beyond the physical world.

3. True, but if the mind can be shown to perform physically uncomputable tasks, then we can infer the mind is not physical. In which case we can also apply Occam's razor and infer the mind is doing something uncomputable as opposed to having access to vast immaterial computational resources.

Finally, calling a position names, such as 'mystical', does nothing to determine the veracity of the position. At best it is counter productive by distracting from the logic of the argument.

Re: Cyc

#85

Post by hitekker » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

catpolice wrote: post #79

hitekker wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analysis of Cyc is insightful and resonates with my own experiences. Two general questions, if you don't mind: 1. How would you characterize the relationship between the politics and structure in your company? 2. Do feel that the layer of people actively isolating the top embodied the company's culture?

I don't work there anymore, though I know some folks that do. I suspect that they're reading this and don't want me to air out their dirty laundry too much. Here's what I'll say: the degree of isolation between different mindsets and disagreement (that was typically very amicable if it was acknowledged at all) is emblematic of the culture of the company. There are people there with raaadically different ideas of what…

> the degree of isolation between different mindsets and disagreement (that was typically very amicable if it was acknowledged at all) is emblematic of the culture of the company

A thoughtful perspective that is useful for my own understanding.

Thank you.

Re: Cyc

#86

Post by snowmaker » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 9:47 PM UTC

catpolice wrote: post #15

I worked for Cycorp for a few years recently. AMA, I guess? I obviously won't give away any secrets (e.g. business partners, finer grained details of how the inference engine works), but I can talk about the company culture, some high level technical things and the interpretation of the project that different people at the company have that makes it seem more viable than you might guess from the outside. There were s…

Are there any real world applications that are built on Cyc's knowledge base and actually in regular use? Is Cyc critical to those applications or could they have been more easily built some other way?

Re: Cyc

#87

Post by Rerarom » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

catpolice wrote: post #15

I worked for Cycorp for a few years recently. AMA, I guess? I obviously won't give away any secrets (e.g. business partners, finer grained details of how the inference engine works), but I can talk about the company culture, some high level technical things and the interpretation of the project that different people at the company have that makes it seem more viable than you might guess from the outside. There were s…

1) Do you think it's possible that Cyc would lead to AGI?

2) Do you think it's possible that Cyc would lead to AI advances that are impressive to the layman like AlphaGo or GPT-2?

Re: Cyc

#88

Post by Rerarom » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

yters wrote: post #37

coldcode wrote: post #4

While 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.

What if general learning is uncomputable?

General learning is uncomputable, it's called Solomonoff induction. You don't need general learning, you need something at least as powerful as the mess in a human brain.

Re: Cyc

#89

Post by The_rationalist » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #65

The_rationalist wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still no complete explanation on why it is a failure. What are the technical difficulties they can't overcome?

Maybe because the world and human knowledge are incredibly complex and difficult things to put into logical relations well enough to achieve more success? Consider that humans learn though having bodies to explore the world with, while forming a variety of social relations to learn the culture. Which is very different from encoding a bunch of rules to make up an intelligence.

Creating a software that learns the real world indeed seems like a really hard problem without a body.

I was referring to why a software that parse the semantics of Wikipedia articles and make them queryable through natural language questions, is something that humanity isn't able to do?

Re: Cyc

#90

Post by The_rationalist » Fri, Dec 13, 2019, 10:24 PM UTC

catpolice wrote: post #46

nathias wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you hire philosophers?

Yes, quite a few. The prerequisite is basically that you have to be able to do formal logic at the first order level and also Doug has to be in a good mood when you do the interview.

1) Is first order logic not expressive enough for some use cases? Do you need higher order logic?

2) Where can I found a complete explanation of why Cyc hasn't yet been enough to build true natural language understanding, which technical difficulties needs to be solved? Examples would be welcome.

3) Is would be really nice if you showed progress in real time and allowed community to contribute intellectually. You could make a github repository without the code. But where we could see all the technical issues per tag, so we could follow the discussions and eventually share useful knowledge with you in order to accelerate progress.