More Need for Common Sense

Good piece in Wired on the need for 'common sense'  reasoning to bring human Intelligence to AI.  Even a mention of CYC, and the years of work it has used to include human ideas.    But I have not heard any cases where it, or it successor Lucid, has suddenly sprung out in human common sense insight.   Some say that CYC just produced a very big, very brittle knowledge graph.   It just found lots and lots of patterns, sometimes useful, often not.     Its often not about the fact that patterns are there, but how humans can assemble them in useful ways.

How to Teach Artificial Intelligence Some Common Sense
We’ve spent years feeding neural nets vast amounts of data, teaching them to think like human brains. They’re crazy-smart, but they have absolutely no common sense. What if we’ve been doing it all wrong?

Five years ago, the coders at DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence company, watched excitedly as an AI taught itself to play a classic arcade game. They’d used the hot technique of the day, deep learning, on a seemingly whimsical task: mastering Breakout,1 the Atari game in which you bounce a ball at a wall of bricks, trying to make each one vanish.

1 Steve Jobs was working at Atari when he was commissioned to create 1976’s Breakout, a job no other engineer wanted. He roped his friend Steve Wozniak, then at Hewlett-­Packard, into helping him.

Deep learning is self-education for machines; you feed an AI huge amounts of data, and eventually it begins to discern patterns all by itself. In this case, the data was the activity on the screen—blocky pixels representing the bricks, the ball, and the player’s paddle. The DeepMind AI, a so-called neural network made up of layered algorithms, wasn’t programmed with any knowledge about how Breakout works, its rules, its goals, or even how to play it. The coders just let the neural net examine the results of each action, each bounce of the ball. Where would it lead?

To some very impressive skills, it turns out. During the first few games, the AI flailed around. But after playing a few hundred times, it had begun accurately bouncing the ball. By the 600th game, the neural net was using a more expert move employed by human Breakout players, chipping through an entire column of bricks and setting the ball bouncing merrily along the top of the wall.  ... "