Re: SUO: Sowa's comments about CNN article about Cyc
John,
Doug is away for a week, but I'll make sure he sees your message upon his
return.
John DeOliveira
Cycorp
At 09:12 AM 4/12/02 -0700, you wrote:
>
>Doug,
>
>Thanks for the note. I'm sorry if I mischaracterized your position
>based on the snippets taken from your interview with a CNN reporter.
>I believe that Cyc is a very important contribution to AI from which
>all of us have learned a great deal. And I hope that OpenCyc will make
>an even greater contribution to the progress of AI and related fields.
>
>However, I have a different vision for how AI projects should be
>developed. I realize that you have a right to pursue your vision,
>and I wish you the best in your endeavors. But I'd like to compare
>Cyc to Igor Sikorsky's four-engine bombers that he built for Russia
>during World War I. In principle, they were magnificent achievements,
>which made major contributions to the course of aviation, but in
>practice, they were large slow targets. His later contributions came
>after he made a 90 degree turn and designed the first successful
>helicopter.
>
>Perhaps someday you might make a 90 degree turn in your approach,
>but if I had my "druthers", I'd make a 90 degree turn right now,
>along the lines of my paper on architectures:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/arch.htm
>
>My emphasis would be on flexibility, modularity, and the ability to
>accommodate any and every kind of component within a common framework.
>As I say in the conclusion of that paper, it would include the complete
>POSIX utilities as the lowest-level starter, but with any kind of AI
>component added into the mix.
>
>What I would like do with OpenCyc is to take it apart -- both its
>ontology and its reasoning components. Then I'd reassemble them in
>a way that would encourage modular replacements, recombinations,
>extensions, and even deletions. There are many other activities
>going on in AI and computer science, and I would like to make room
>for everything.
>
>To clarify the difference in directions, I'd like to comment on
>points 5 and 6 of your note:
>
>
>> 5. ">Since 1984, he has been predicting that Cyc
>> >would reach human-like abilities in five years"
>> That's a little cruel; the horizon has approached several months per
>> year. Part of the problem here is the media, I think, since
>> the reporters ask where we'll be in 5 years, rather than what the
>> next qualitative state-change will be and when we'll be there.
>
>
>I apologize for the cheap shot. It is always easy to make humorous
>remarks at other people's expense, and I understand the difficulty
>in making progress on any major undertaking.
>
>
>> In our 1984 project plan at MCC, and talks based on it, I
>> would always show -- and in fact STILL show the same slide, but
>> now in color in PowerPoint -- a graph with 3 S-curves representing
>> three phases I thought (in 1984) would take about a decade each:
>> getting Cyc manually to the point where manual ontologizing would
>> yield to interactive dialogue and tutoring; then another decade to
>> virtually automated NLU (information extraction from text at a level
>> where the extracted information would be as good as a human
>> doing the manual translation of the same written material); and
>> then a third decade to "real" open-ended machinge learning. The
>> first decade happened to have taken 16 years, which just shows
>> I was thinking in hexadecimal all along. Seriously, that was longer
>> than planned but I consider getting within a factor of 2 pretty good.
>> I now believe that this second decade (getting the tutoring to be
>> easier and more automatic, approaching real NLU) will take less
>> than 10 more years, partly because of the Web, so we'll be starting
>> our focus on machine learning around 2007, a few years later than
>> planned in 1984.
>
>
>That is a nice orderly plan. But I don't believe in orderly plans
>for doing fundamental research. And for development, I believe in
>plans that can be achieved in much shorter time frames. That is
>another motivation for my modular proposal: accommodate any kind
>of research prototype that anyone might want to do, but when any
>component proves to be successful, spin off a commercial version
>as soon as possible.
>
>
>> 6. ">Instead, I believe that the organization of the knowledge base in a
>> >flexible, dynamically changeable structure is far, far more
important."
>> We have no ideological axe to grind here. We evolved from frames to
>> FOPC to HOL as we had to; we evolved away from cf's and to arguments
>> because we had to; we evolved the context mechanism because we had
>> to; etc.
>
>
>But what you have just proposed is a very big ideological axe.
>It might sound "practical" to ignore theory, but in engineering,
>a good theory is usually the best foundation for practice. And
>other ideologies, such as flexibility and modularity, have proved
>to be extremely practical many times over.
>
>> When you demonstrate something we can use, rest assured we
>> will add it into the mix. We view the inference engine, the logic, even
>> the CONTENT of the KB to be just scaffolding to facilitate the construction
>> of what will come later; much like building a sand castle where you get
>> the rough form in place and gradually get the details right. I don't
>> CURRENTLY believe that structure, as you mean it, is that important,
>> e.g. the sort of symmetry that Aristotle mystically ascribed great value
to,
>> nor do I believe the number of axioms is important. But I am willing to
>> be proven wrong empirically, and I will (hopefully) continue to evolve.
>> What I do believe is important is to get ENOUGH coverage (deductive
>> closure), and ENOUGH "traction" (some combination of consistency
>> and correct contextualization, plus efficient enough inference modules)
>> to get to the next stage: from manual entry to tutoring to automated
NL/ML.
>> Feeling too much like lungfish crawling from the sea, we're slowly,
painfully,
>> getting there.
>
>
>I am glad that you agree with God in the evolutionary approach to
>design and development. But God is also very flexible and modular,
>with "an inordinate fondness for beetles," as Haldane is supposed
>to have said. God tried many designs in parallel, most of which failed,
>and when He found a profitable design, such as the beetle, He took
>advantage of it while continuing to experiment in other directions.
>
>Bottom line: I would prefer a flexible modular approach to both
>
>ontology and system architecture -- while looking for profitable
>opportunities along the way. I have no compunctions against making
>a profit on beetles to support my research on higher intelligence.
>
>John
>
>