(This post is a tangent to my "MACK basics" series, but it does
feed directly into the 3rd instalment which I had already been
preparing.) (01)
At
http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2008-01/msg00453.html
is this forum's first introduction to MACK (The Mainstream
Architecture for Common Knowledge) and Metaset (my current
work-in-progress programming, projected to be the first
implementation of MACK and designed as an AOS or Application
Operating System). (02)
MACK has a singularly abstract objective, namely: (03)
to help people simplify complexity together. (04)
Thanks to John Sowa's recent reference to Alan Bundy on this
list (Thank you John!), I have learnt of another project
pursuing an objective which seems very much the same: (05)
"to deal with an infinitely complex and ever changing world,
and to scale up to rich and complex applications." (06)
That is from the abstract of a paper by Bundy and McNeill,
"Representation as a Fluent: An AI Challenge for the Next Half
Century", at
http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/publications/online/0836.pdf. The full
abstract reads: (07)
"We argue that artificial intelligence systems must be able to
manipulate their own internal representations automatically in
order to deal with an infinitely complex and ever changing
world, and to scale up to rich and complex applications. Such
manipulation must go beyond the ability to change beliefs and
learn new concepts in terms of old; it must be able to change
the underlying syntax and semantics of the ontology. Initial
progress is being made and is now urgent, due to the demands
created by autonomous multi-agent systems. Understanding and
automating this ability must be a major focus of artificial
intelligence for the next 50 years." (08)
So let's do some comparing and contrasting between MACK and the
Bundy/McNeill program ("BM" here). (09)
Both clearly have the same starting-point in complexity (and
google '"infinite complexity" metaset' to see how I like to
carry on at length on what BM asserts is the infinite nature of
that complexity). (010)
But our respective aims seem significantly different: Are we to
aim for "rich and complex applications"? Or for
simplifications? (011)
I dismiss that apparent difference with the observation that all
applications are simplifications, however "rich and complex"
they may be. (I have carried on at some length also on that
aspect of applications and other such products at
http://jeffsutherland.com/oopsla97/SpottiswoodeByndBO.html#philo.) (012)
More striking, of course, is that B&M see a 50-year process
whereas I have explicitly targeted both Metaset and MACK at the
here and now! (013)
The evident reason for that contrast resides in this paragraph
from my above-linked ontolog posting: (014)
"But the prime context of my proposal is not automated reasoning
by non-human agents. It is the intersection of application
interoperability and human collaboration, that having been where
I have spent most of my professional life so far. It is
DP/IS/DBMS and internet-leveraging (hence also highly scalable!)
application development, rather than AI/NLP." (015)
Nonetheless, let us further compare this immediate IS/DBMS
project with that 50-year AI program. (B&M and I do after all
live on the same planet.) (016)
'People in the market' is the difference. Hence also the
"Democratic Web" name proposed for the universal medium aimed
at, very much in the sense of Lincoln's "government of the
people, by the people and for the people." (Yes, MACK _is_ very
mainstream, with its frequent reliance on such clichés.) (017)
Now, the people-driven market is where products are created and
legitimated. In an efficient market they are rejected (or
"refuted") sooner if they are not adequate simplifications - or
shapers and formers - of the demand they address. A suitable
public medium as an efficient marketplace or market vehicle will
boost the efficiency of the market itself and hence also of the
evolution of ever better simplifications, including its own
market vehicles. That is of course a formula for exponential
growth (or, more realistically, a series of sigmoid growth
curves as new constraints are encountered and overcome) (and I
was writing such plain things before I had ever heard of "The
Singularity"). (018)
And there is no need to wait 50 years for such a simple process
to be set going in a right and proper way. (019)
It is that process which Metaset and/or other MACK-AOSs will
seed and with which the market will bootstrap itself (as stated
even in the limerick at the start of the above-linked 1997
page). (020)
There is however a further parallel between BM and MACK. It's
even in the BM title, "Representation as a fluent", and in the
abstract's "systems must be able to manipulate their own
internal representations" (though I have snatched those words
out of their context to eliminate the "artificial intelligence"
phrase preceding them and the "automatically" word following
them). (021)
Thus in the next instalment you will begin to see how MACK's
much-vaunted "reflectivity" will be the basis of continual
automatic invocation and frequent AOS-supported but
people-driven fluidity of MACK Forms. I have also foreseen
(though I'll give you the references from the 1990s only later)
how even the most basic MACK structures will evolve beyond our
easy recognition. (022)
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