On Wednesday, August 31, 2011 6:50 AM, John wrote:
"Cyc is probably the ultimate development of the classical AI paradigm of a
big ontology + knowledge base + inference engine(s).
About a dozen years ago, I was talking with Mike Genesereth, who said "Lenat
is probably the only one who doesn't know that Cyc has failed." (01)
This is an interesting phenomenon, meriting another special ontology, of
critical thinking, as a high-order thinking questioning assumptions and the
quality of methods, historically originated as Socratic method. Its about
willingness to critically evaluate your thinking, remain open to alternative
perspectives, to integrate new/revised perspectives into your ways of
thinking and acting, employing ontology and logic, formal and informal,
intelectual skills, as breadth and depth, credibility and relevance,
clarity, accuracy and precision, significance and fair-mindedeness, as well
as intellectual traits: integrity, tenacity, confidence, courage, empathy,
and i-humility .
If one's critical thinking, which is still not a creative thinking, is
devoid of the intellectual habits/traits of the mind, then the same subject
falls prey to his egoistic self-interests, he is manupulative, unethical,
and badly subjective.
There is a bad public side here as well, the cause why many academic and
semi-academic projects, well-promoted and well-funded by the government
agencies, are never delivering anything valuable for the public.
Azamat Abdoullaev (02)
----- Original Message -----
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2011 6:50 AM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Semantics of Natural Languages (03)
> Adrian,
>
> I agree with your comments:
>
>> I think John McCarthy once said words to the effect that what's needed
>> for the really big problems in AI (such as general computational NL
>> understanding), is to stop and _think_ for a very long time.
>
> Good advice. But every once and a while, it's useful to document
> your thinking, otherwise none of that thought ever gets recorded.
> But it's also important to recognize that no single publication
> is ever definitive. Each document is just one step along the way.
>
>> It's very tempting to hope that something in the philosophical or AI
>> literature, combined with the data structure du jour, plus the current
>> fashion for AI-style ontologies can somehow be glued together to 'solve'
>> general free NL understanding.
>
> I agree. Cyc is probably the ultimate development of the classical AI
> paradigm of a big ontology + knowledge base + inference engine(s).
> About a dozen years ago, I was talking with Mike Genesereth, who said
> "Lenat is probably the only one who doesn't know that Cyc has failed."
>
> I wouldn't say that Cyc is a total failure. I think that it has some
> useful components. But it is never going to achieve its original goals
> if it continues along its current trajectory.
>
>> However, the evidence points the other way: Watson being beaten by
>> Congressman Holt at Jeopardy [1] is only the latest in a painfully long
>> list. (Jeopardy competence is much less than full NL understanding
>> anyway)
>
> Jeopardy is less tightly structured than Cyc, and it therefore has a
> better chance to evolve into something useful. But with more thinking,
> it could have achieved much better results with much less hardware.
>
>> So, my money is on someone unexpected, like Einstein in his patent
>> office days, with lots of time to think, and not overly wedded to
>> current paradigms. Not rushing to implement. As they used to say at
>> IBM -- _Think_.
>
> I agree. The following slides, which I presented at ICCS 2011 in July,
> survey 5 different cognitive architectures, of which Cyc is the first:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/ca4cs.pdf
> Cognitive architectures for conceptual structures
>
> Each of the architectures is a moving target that has been evolving
> for 20 years or more. The fifth is the CS architecture, which I
> presented in my 1984 book, _Conceptual Structures_. Those slides
> discuss the original 1984 version, the developments since then,
> and the relationships to neuroscience.
>
> John
>
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