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Cyc

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Re: Cyc

#21

Post by brundolf »

jes5199 wrote: post #13

last time I looked at OpenCyc's knowledge base, the information encoded was all strangely specific academic stuff - like very fine classifications and relationships between species of tapeworms and of fungus. There was very little daily-life common-sense knowledge, even though that's often the hook in interviews and articles about Cyc's purpose. I'm not sure why that's true - maybe it's hard to decide what the 'facts…

Employee of Cycorp here. A few thoughts:

- At least right now, we have a good amount of common-sense information about the world (I don't know when "last time" was for you).

- That said, we have a lot of highly specialized knowledge in various domains, so if you took a random sample of the knowledge base (KB) it may not be as common-sense-centric as you'd hope. But the KB is also incredibly large, so that doesn't mean we don't have much common-sense, just that we have even more other stuff.

- Often for contracts we get paid to construct lots of domain-specific knowledge, even if the project also uses the more general knowledge, so this biases the distribution some.

- Information that's already well-taxonomized is low-hanging fruit for this kind of system; its representation doesn't take nearly as much extra thought and consideration, so it's a faster process, which also biases the distribution some.

Re: Cyc

#22

Post by jey »

brundolf wrote: post #21
jes5199 wrote: post #13

last time I looked at OpenCyc's knowledge base, the information encoded was all strangely specific academic stuff - like very fine classifications and relationships between species of tapeworms and of fungus. There was very little daily-life common-sense knowledge, even though that's often the hook in interviews and articles about Cyc's purpose. I'm not sure why that's true - maybe it's hard to decide what the 'facts…

Employee of Cycorp here. A few thoughts: - At least right now, we have a good amount of common-sense information about the world (I don't know when "last time" was for you). - That said, we have a lot of highly specialized knowledge in various domains, so if you took a random sample of the knowledge base (KB) it may not be as common-sense-centric as you'd hope. But the KB is also incredibly large, so that doesn't mea…

What are some interesting examples of common-sense that has been formalized and encoded?

Re: Cyc

#23

Post by spirographer »

My 2 cents is that I can ask just about any question I can think of and absorb and internalize an amazing answer in 5 minutes of reading. Many of those same questions can be automatically asked and answered too. The web and search engines are realizing the promise far better than anything else.

Re: Cyc

#24

Post by zozbot234 »

jes5199 wrote: post #13

last time I looked at OpenCyc's knowledge base, the information encoded was all strangely specific academic stuff - like very fine classifications and relationships between species of tapeworms and of fungus. There was very little daily-life common-sense knowledge, even though that's often the hook in interviews and articles about Cyc's purpose. I'm not sure why that's true - maybe it's hard to decide what the 'facts…

> the information encoded was all strangely specific academic stuff - like very fine classifications and relationships between species of tapeworms and of fungus.

Even Wikidata mostly looks like that, despite being intended quite clearly as a "general purpose" knowledge base. Mostly because this sort of information is easily extracted from existing, referenced sources. The "general purpose" character of it all comes into play wrt. linking across those specialized domains.

Re: Cyc

#25

Post by wrnr »

The the following utterance, sort of looks like the triplet data structure used in graph/knowledge databases:

"Alive loves Bob"

What do you know? Nothing. Was it Alice who said she loves Bob, or was it Bob who said it is Alice who loves him, maybe Carol saw the way Alice looks at Bob and then conclude she must love him. What is love anyway? How exactly is the love Alice has for Bob quantitively different than my love of chocolate. It might register similar brain activity in a MRI scan, and yet we humans recognise them as qualitatively different.

A knowledge base is useless if you can't judge wether a fact is true or false. The response to this problem was for the semantic web community to introduce a provenance ontology, but any attempt to reason over statements about statements seem to go nowhere. IMHO you can't solve the problem of AGI without also having a way for a rational agent to embody its thoughts in the physical world.

Re: Cyc

#26

Post by _bxg1 »

jey wrote: post #22
brundolf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employee of Cycorp here. A few thoughts: - At least right now, we have a good amount of common-sense information about the world (I don't know when "last time" was for you). - That said, we have a lot of highly specialized knowledge in various domains, so if you took a random sample of the knowledge base (KB) it may not be as common-sense-centric as you'd hope. But the KB is also incredibly large, so that doesn't mea…

What are some interesting examples of common-sense that has been formalized and encoded?

One of our primary test suites is what we call "Common Sense Tests". They comprise a set of common-sense questions that require some leaps of reasoning to answer, and we use them as a metric of our common-sense knowledge. So for example:

  Would a human dislike touching a/an incandescent bulb while the electric lamp is powered on?

  Yes.

  ?HUMAN dislikes being a performer in the ?TOUCHING.
    • Embodied agents dislike performing acts that cause them discomfort.
    • ?HUMAN is an embodied perceptual agent.
      • ?HUMAN is a human.
        • Every human is an embodied perceptual agent.
    • ?HUMAN deliberately performed ?TOUCHING.
    • ?TOUCHING causes some discomfort.
      • Touching something that is too hot to touch causes pain.
      • The quantity range pain includes all points in some discomfort.
      • ?PART is too hot to touch.
        • When an incandescent bulb is on, it is too hot to touch.
        • ?PART is an incandescent bulb.
        • ?PART’s current state is powered on.
          • When a lamp with a bulb is on, so is the bulb.
          • ?PART is a physical part of ?DEVICE.
            • ?PART is a physical part of ?DEVICE.
            • ?PART is a physical part of ?PART.
          • ?DEVICE’s current state is powered on.
          • ?PART is a light bulb.
            • ?PART is an incandescent bulb.
            • Every incandescent bulb is a light bulb.
          • ?DEVICE is an electric lamp.
      • ?PART was affected during ?TOUCHING.
We have a couple thousand of these, which we've aimed to make as diverse as possible

Re: Cyc

#27

Post by dmix »

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…

Two easy ones for you:

1) How did they manage to make money for so long to keep things afloat? I'm guessing through some self-sustainable projects like the few business relationships listed in the wiki?

2) What's the tech stack like? (Language, deployment, etc)

Re: Cyc

#28

Post by emw »

stereolambda wrote: post #5

Knowledge 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…

> 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).

Wikidata is also worth considering for that task. It is:

* Directly linked from Wikipedia [1]

* The data source for many infoboxes [2]

* Seeded with data from Wikipedia

* More active and integrated in community

* Larger in total number of concepts

Wikidata also has initiatives in lexicographic data [3] and images [4, 5].

On the subject of Cyc: the CycL "generalization" (#$genls) predicate inspired Wikidata's "subclass of" property [6], which now links together Wikidata's tree of knowledge.

---

1. See "Wikidata" link at left in all articles, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_base

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Infobox_templates_usi...

3. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Lexicographical_data/...

4. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wikimedia_Commons/Dev...

5. See "Structured data" tab in image details on Wikimedia Commons, e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa,_by_Leonar...

6. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P279#Archived_cr...

Re: Cyc

#29

Post by kick »

brundolf wrote: post #21
jes5199 wrote: post #13

last time I looked at OpenCyc's knowledge base, the information encoded was all strangely specific academic stuff - like very fine classifications and relationships between species of tapeworms and of fungus. There was very little daily-life common-sense knowledge, even though that's often the hook in interviews and articles about Cyc's purpose. I'm not sure why that's true - maybe it's hard to decide what the 'facts…

Employee of Cycorp here. A few thoughts: - At least right now, we have a good amount of common-sense information about the world (I don't know when "last time" was for you). - That said, we have a lot of highly specialized knowledge in various domains, so if you took a random sample of the knowledge base (KB) it may not be as common-sense-centric as you'd hope. But the KB is also incredibly large, so that doesn't mea…

OpenCyc hasn't been a thing for something like a decade, so even if "last time" was yesterday, it'd still be on outdated information (because Cycorp keeps things proprietary, hidden and unauditable). Do you know when they last pushed it out? It's been a while.

Re: Cyc

#30

Post by kick »

one_electron wrote: post #10

in 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.

Cyc itself probably won't be: proprietary information is something that modern scientists tend to know better than to invest time in. Symbolic AI, though, hasn't really died.
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