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Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

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Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#121

Post by DonaldFisk »

astrange wrote: post #76

I have a vague memory in the 90s of a website that was trying to collect crowdsourced somewhat-structured facts about everything that would be used to build GOFAI. Was trying to find it the other day and AI searches suggested Cyc; I feel like that's not it, but maybe it was? (It definitely wasn't Everything2.)

It might have been one of these two projects

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Mind_Common_Sense

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindpixel

The leaders of both these projects committed suicide.

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#122

Post by astrange »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #121
astrange wrote: post #76

I have a vague memory in the 90s of a website that was trying to collect crowdsourced somewhat-structured facts about everything that would be used to build GOFAI. Was trying to find it the other day and AI searches suggested Cyc; I feel like that's not it, but maybe it was? (It definitely wasn't Everything2.)

It might have been one of these two projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Mind_Common_Sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindpixel The leaders of both these projects committed suicide.

GAC! Yeah, it was Mindpixel.

I guess that's what happens when you learn too many facts.

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#123

Post by galaxyLogic »

genrilz wrote: post #102
galaxyLogic wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the problem with symbolic inference is that from a single inconsistent premise logic can produce any statement possible. If that is so then symbolic AI does not easily scale because you cannot feed inconsistent information into it. Compare this to how humans and LLMs learn, they both have no problem with inconsistent information. Yet statistically speaking humans can easily produce "useful" information.

Based on the article, it seems like the Cyc had ways to deal with inconsistency. I don't know the details of how they did it, but Paraconsistant Logics [0] provide a general way to prevent any statement from being provable from an inconsistency. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic

Interesting, from the article:

"Mathematical framework and rules of paraconsistent logic have been proposed as the activation function of an artificial neuron in order to build a neural network"

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#125

Post by p_l »

gumby wrote: post #99
guenthert wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which was unusual in those days, even though cloud computing was ubiquitous at PARC I don't want to rob you of your literary freedom, but that threw me off. Mainframes were meant, yes?

> Mainframes were meant, yes? No not at all. We’re talking early-mid 1980s so people in the research community (at least at the leading institutions) were by then pretty used to what’s called cloud computing these days. In fact the term “cloud” for independent resources you could call upon without knowing the underlying architecture came from the original Internet papers (talking originally about routing, and then th…

Sockets were essentially a crash development program to deal with TOPS-20 being discontinued by DEC

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#126

Post by brendonwong »

ragebol wrote: post #73

Are there any efforts to combining a knowledge base like Cyc together with LLMs and the like? Something like RAG could benefit I suppose. Have some vector for a concept match a KB entry etc, IDK :).

This is a significant part of my vision for Web 10! https://www.web10.ai/p/web-10-in-under-10-minutes

One of the immediate things I'm working on is a text to knowledge graph system. Yohei (creator of BabyAGI) is also working on text to knowledge graphs: https://twitter.com/yoheinakajima/status/1769019899245158648. LlamaIndex has a basic implementation.

This isn't quite connecting the system to an automated reasoner though. There is some research in this area, like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35735375

Cyc + LLMs is vaguely related to more advanced "cognitive architectures" for AI, for instance see the world model in Davidad's architecture, which LLMs can be used to help build: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jRf4WENQnhssCb6mJ/davidad-s-...

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#127

Post by m463 »

gumby wrote: post #11

This is a pretty good article. I was one of the first hires on the Cyc project when it started at MCC and was at first responsible for the decision to abandon the Interlisp-D implementation and replace it with one I wrote on Symbolics machines. Yes, back then one person could write the code base, which has long since grown and been ported off those machines. The KB is what matters anyway. I built it so different peop…

I remember reading about cyc.

I had learned about "AI" in the 80's. The promise was that with lisp and expert systems and prolog and more.

the article said cyc was reading the newspaper every day.

I thought, wow, any day now computers will leap forward. The japanese 5th generation computing will be left in the dust. :)

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#128

Post by eschaton »

famouswaffles wrote: post #108
blacklion wrote: post #100

I was born in late USSR and my father is software engineer. We had several books that were not available for "general public" (they were intended for libraries of science institutions). One of the book was, as I understand now, abridged translation of papers from some "Western" AI conference. And there were description if EURISCO (with claims that it not only "win some game" but also that it "invented new structure o…

>Looks like such systems are good for generating marketing texts, but can not be used as diagnosticians by definition. That's not true https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10425828/ >Why did all these (slice of) world model approaches dead? Because they don't work

How do you know?

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#129

Post by eschaton »

breck wrote: post #35
mepian wrote: post #3

I wonder what is the closest thing to Cyc we have in the open source realm right now. I know that we have some pretty large knowledge bases, like Wikidata, but what about expert system shells or inference engines?

I tried to make something along these lines ( https://truebase.treenotation.org/ ). My approach, Cyc's, and others are fundamentally flawed for the same reason. There's a low level reason why deep nets work and symbolic engines are very bad.

And what is that reason?

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#130

Post by breck »

xpe wrote: post #43
breck wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think before 2022 it was still an open question whether it was a good approach. Now it's clear that knowledge graphs are far inferior to deep neural nets, but even still few people can explain the _root_ reason why. I don't think Lenat's bet was a waste. I think it was sensible based on the information at the time. The decision to research it largely in secret, closed source, I think was a mistake.

> but even still few people can explain the _root_ reason why. _The_ (one) root reason? Ok, I’ll bite. But you need to define your claim. What application?

> _The_ (one) root reason? Ok, I’ll bite.

A "secret" hiding in plain sight.

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