IP: COMMON-SENSE COMPUTING

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>

COMMON-SENSE COMPUTING

Computer scientists have been working with linguists, theologians,
mathematicians and philosophers since 1984 in a project they hope will
transform human existence -- teaching a computer common sense. The group
has spent the last 18 years building the Cyc database, feeding it 1.4
million truths and generalities about daily life that they hope eventually
will give computers supercharged reasoning abilities -- which could enable
humans to work more efficiently, understand one another better, and even
help predict the previously unforeseeable. This spring, Cyc's developer --
Cycorp Inc. -- created a Web link to enable the public to download Cyc's
knowledge base and teach it a few things, too. Cycorp founder and president
Doug Lenat says that if enough people log in to share their wisdom, Cyc
could quickly become vastly more useful -- doing duty as an instant
language translator, annotating e-mails to put them in better context for
their recipients, or even offering humans advice from varying points of
view. Inventor Ray Kurzweil thinks Lenat is taking the right approach
toward educating Cyc, combining pattern recognition with a rule-based
foundation. "We're not going to spoon-feed all of our knowledge one rule at
a time. I do think we could take Cyc as the seed for a self-organizing
system that would then learn on its own." (AP/CNN.com 9 Jun 2002)

<http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/06/09/common.sense.computer.ap/index.htm
l>

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