Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project Operating In Near-Secrecy For 30 Years

Re:Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project Operating In Ne... by SilasX on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @08:48PM (#7980809)

Doug Lenat is, to me, the most confusing case of someone in AI. He programmed a general problem solver (Eurisko) to use (meta^n)-heuristics that solved a major strategy game, coming up wih a creative plan no human thought of, and yielding insights on the field of heuristics and the "Representation Language Language".

... and then "went dark", "officially" working on this tedious, brittle attempt to compile common sense into a graph, which yielded nothing in practical application.

It's like we're in a movie and we're about to get a big reveal that he's really been using Eurisko to solve major untouchable problems.

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Re:Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project Operating In Ne... by kolev on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @09:24PM (#7980944)

Since when people call him "Doug"? :) Eurisko had some amazing accomplishments, but some questioned their authenticity saying Douglas and students help it a bit. Anyway, Douglas Lenat is my all-times idol and I hope this prolonged "stealth mode" was the intermission of something great. Isn't Freebase.com his project as well?

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Re:Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project Operating In Ne... by candeira on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @09:53PM (#7981041)

> Since when people call him "Doug"?

One datapoint: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.04/cyc-o.html

So for more than 20 years.

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Re:Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project Operating In Ne... by kolev on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @10:06PM (#7981072)

When I was reading about his work, it was the 80s, early 90s. :)

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Re:Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project Operating In Ne... by kolev on Thursday July 03, 2014 @03:19AM (#7981907)

I'm not sure why I got downvoted, but, really, back at those times, maybe out of great respect, but he was "Douglas". :)

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Re:Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project Operating In Ne... by richardw on Thursday July 03, 2014 @12:52AM (#7981500)

Since when people call him "Doug"

He doesn't seem to mind:

http://www.cyc.com/about/team/doug-lenat

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Re:Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project Operating In Ne... by jfdixon on Thursday July 03, 2014 @02:56AM (#7981824)

> Isn't Freebase.com his project as well?

No, that was Danny Hillis. Freebase was purchased by Google and became the core of what is now known as the Google Knowledge Graph.

Interestingly, Ramanathan Guha[1] was originally involved in the Cyc project and is now at Google. He was also instrumental in the creation of RDF, the format central to the W3C's Semantic Web and LOD efforts.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanathan_V._Guha

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Re:Ambitious Artificial Intelligence Project Operating In Ne... by kolev on Thursday July 03, 2014 @03:18AM (#7981902)

I confused OpenCyc with Freebase, which was linking to OpenCyc at least in the past. I know Freebase got acquired, but thanks for the clarification! It's really nice that Google is aggregating a lot of AI power. Combined with the robotics companies they've acquired, too, the direction is clear.

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