Word: cog
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Douglas Lenat has similar hopes for his artificially intelligent brainchild--a sprawling, data-rich computer program called CYC (as in encyclopedic). But where Brooks expects Cog to teach itself about the world, Lenat is leaving nothing to chance. For more than a decade, his CYC development team in Austin, Texas, has been typing in the rules of "human consensus reality" (otherwise known as common sense) one thuddingly obvious assertion at a time. "Bread is a food," for example, or "You're wet when you sweat." CYC knows nearly a million of these rules now, and when it has another million...
Compared with beating the world's greatest chess player at his own game, of course, infant-like flailing or knowing about wetness might not sound like much. But programs like CYC and Cog, not chess machines like Deep Blue, currently define the cutting edge of applied artificial intelligence--the 40-year effort to build machines that think. Ten years ago, when AI was as hot as the Internet is today, researchers raced to build programs that showed deep expertise in a narrow field of endeavor--like chess, for example, or medical diagnosis. These days, however, it's the promise...
...with the proliferation of cheap, powerful computers and the rapid growth of the Internet, there's new interest in all kinds of "intelligent" machinery--not just chess-playing supercomputers or grandiose AI research projects like CYC and Cog. The past few years have seen a burst of entrepreneurial activity in what are called intelligent agents--programs of rather more modest IQ that are nonetheless smart enough to be released on the Internet to do small, useful chores like tracking stock prices or digging for nuggets of research data...
...Cog, on the other hand, embodies the principles of AI's breakaway faction, the so-called bottom-up school. Inspired more by biological structures than by logical ones, the bottom-uppers don't bother trying to write down the rules of thought. Instead they try to conjure thought up by building lots of small, simple programs and encouraging them to interact. Earlier in his career, Brooks helped put this approach on the AI map by building tiny, insectlike robots--"bugbots"--that wandered around his laboratory without the benefit of any single guiding program. Cog's "mind," similarly, is just...
Lenat may have the last word--at least for now. With its 10-year head start over Cog, the CYC project is much closer to spinning off practical applications, and its timing couldn't be better. The World Wide Web's chaotic infobloom is starting to strain the limits of today's popular but simpleminded search engines (which work, for the most part, by matching up key words). But CYC, with its ability to make commonsensical leaps of logic, can connect a request, say, for pictures of "happy people" with the caption, "A man watching his daughter learn to walk...