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.  ... " 

Lucid AI and Cyc: Seeking Common Sense Reasoning

In support of reading Rebooting AI, been exploring where the implementation of CYC has taken place.    We saw it demonstrated in the 80s.   Followed it here since.    There are some mentions of applications like Glaxo and Cleveland Clinic in the WP article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc  But not much  mention of its use by Lucid.ai.   Is it possible to deliver a complete and usable common sense knowledge base, even for domain areas?  Where now is deep understanding?  Quotes below are interesting, but dated.  Our own use of machine learning before it was sexy keeps me a student.

An AI with 30 Years’ Worth of Knowledge Finally Goes to Work

An effort to encode the world’s knowledge in a huge database has sometimes seemed impractical, but those behind the technology say it is finally ready.
by Will Knight  Mar 14, 2016 Technology Review

Having spent the past 31 years memorizing an astonishing collection of general knowledge, the artificial-intelligence engine created by Doug Lenat is finally ready to go to work.

Lenat’s creation is Cyc, a knowledge base of semantic information designed to give computers some understanding of how things work in the real world.

Cyc has been given many thousands of facts, including lots of information that you wouldn’t find in an encyclopedia because it seems self-evident. It knows, for example, that that Sir Isaac Newton is a famous historical figure who is no longer alive. But more important, Cyc also understands that if you let go of an apple it will fall to the ground; that an apple is not bigger than a person; and that a person cannot throw an apple into space.

And now, after years of work, Lenat’s system is being commercialized by a company called Lucid.

“Part of the reason is the doneness of Cyc,” explains Lenat, who left his post as a professor at Stanford to start the project in late 1984. “Not that there’s nothing else to do,” he says. But he notes that most of what is left to be added is relevant to a specific area of expertise, such as finance or oncology.  ... "

Detecting Funny

The emergence of a New Yorker crowdsourcing system that tries to determine, with interaction and algorithm, what is funny.  In CNet.  Seems this could also be linked to Cyc and perhaps Lucid, to determine the subtlety of our knowledge about our world.    You can join in the crowd sourcing process here 

Lucid and Cyc for Pattern Recognition

Description of Lucid, which combines pattern recognition and learned AI using Cyc,

The Next Step 
Artificial Intelligence Has Been Waiting For
Over 800 AIs can crunch your data. Only one can understand it. ... 

No way shown that I can yet test it.  Can someone give me access?  We tested Cyc in the 90s for potential enterprise use.

See also their blog and more information.

( Historical note.  It came to mind I had heard of Lucid before.  Looked them up and they had existed as a Lisp based AI company we worked with before they morphed into an OOP approach.  Then apparently had connections to early Amazon.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_Inc.  )