[HN Gopher] Doug Lenat has died ___________________________________________________________________ Doug Lenat has died Author : snewman Score : 339 points Date : 2023-09-01 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (garymarcus.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (garymarcus.substack.com) | brundolf wrote: | Doug was at times blunt, but he was fundamentally a kind and | generous person, and he had a dedication to his vision and to the | people who worked alongside him that has to be admired. He will | be missed. | | I worked at Cycorp (not directly with Doug very often, but it | wasn't a big office) between 2016 and 2020 | | An anecdote: during our weekly all-hands lunch in the big | conference room, he mentioned he was getting a new car (his old | one was pretty old, but well-kept) and he asked if anybody could | use the old car. One of the staff raised his hand sheepishly and | said his daughter was about to start driving. Doug gifted him the | car on the spot, without a second thought. | | He also loved board games, and was in a D&D group with some | others at the company. I was told he only ever played lawful good | characters, he didn't know how to do otherwise :) | | Happy to answer what questions I can | zitterbewegung wrote: | I would expect lawful good because it would be the most | logical. | late25 wrote: | I don't know much about him. What makes you start by saying | he's blunt? | brundolf wrote: | It was a part of his personality, as it is for many people | who are intelligent and opinionated, and some can mistake | that for unkindness. But I wanted to emphasize that in his | case it wasn't. | late25 wrote: | Got it. I was merely curious if there were any particular | stories, rumors, or legends about his bluntness (like there | is Linus). | brundolf wrote: | No, it was never anything at that level. I would describe | (pre-reformed) Linus as more than just "blunt" | Rochus wrote: | He was a hero of knowledge representation and ontology. A bit odd | that we learn about his sad passing from a Wikipedia article, | while at the time of this comment there is still no mention on | e.g. https://cyc.com/. | Rochus wrote: | Thirteen hours later still no mention on the Cycorp website. | Also the press doesn't seem to notice. Pretty odd. | | The post originally pointed to Lenat's Wikipedia page; now it's | an obituary by Gary Marcus which seems more appropriate. | dang wrote: | Related. Others? | | _Cyc_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33011596 - Sept | 2022 (2 comments) | | _Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work (1983) [pdf]_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343118 - Aug 2021 (17 | comments) | | _Early AI: "Eurisko, the Computer with a Mind of Its Own" | (1984)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27298167 - May | 2021 (2 comments) | | _Cyc_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21781597 - Dec 2019 | (173 comments) | | _Some documents on AM and EURISKO_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443607 - Nov 2018 (10 | comments) | | _One genius 's lonely crusade to teach a computer common sense | (2016)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510766 - March | 2018 (1 comment) | | _Douglas Lenat 's Cyc is now being commercialized_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300567 - March 2016 (49 | comments) | | _Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work (1983) [pdf]_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9750349 - June 2015 (5 | comments) | | _Ask HN: Cyc - Whatever happened to its connection to AI?_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9566015 - May 2015 (3 | comments) | | _Eurisko, The Computer With A Mind Of Its Own_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111826 - Jan 2011 (9 | comments) | | _Open Cyc (open source common sense)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1913994 - Nov 2010 (22 | comments) | | _Lenat (of Cyc) reviews Wolfram Alpha_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510579 - March 2009 (16 | comments) | | _Eurisko, The Computer With A Mind Of Its Own_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396796 - Dec 2008 (13 | comments) | | _Cycorp, Inc. (Attempt at Common Sense AI)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20725 - May 2007 (1 comment) | symbolicAGI wrote: | Doug Lenat, RIP. I worked at Cycorp in Austin from 2000-2006. | Taken from us way too soon, Doug none the less had the | opportunity to help our country advance military and intelligence | community computer science research. | | One day, the rapid advancement of AI via LLMs will slow down and | attention will again return to logical reasoning and knowledge | representation as championed by the Cyc Project, Cycorp, its | cyclists and Dr. Doug Lenat. | | Why? If NN inference were so fast, we would compile C programs | with it instead of using deductive logical inference that is | executed efficiently by the compiler. | nextos wrote: | Exactly. When I hear books such as _Paradigms of AI | Programming_ are outdated because of LLMs, I disagree. They are | more current than ever, thanks to LLMs! | | Neural and symbolic AI will eventually merge. Symbolic models | bring much needed efficiency and robustness via regularization. | optimalsolver wrote: | The best thing Cycorp could do now is open source its | accumulated database of logical relations so it can be ingested | by some monster LLM. | | What's the point of all that data collecting dust and | accomplishing not much of anything? | halflings wrote: | > If NN inference were so fast, we would compile C programs | with it instead of using deductive logical inference that is | executed efficiently by the compiler. | | This is the definition of a strawman. Who is claiming that NN | inference is always the fastest way to run computation? | | Instead of trying to bring down another technology (neural | networks), how about you focus on making symbolic methods | usable to solve real-world problems; e.g. how can I build a | robust email spam detection system with symbolic methods? | symbolicAGI wrote: | The point is that symbolic computation as performed by Cycorp | was held back by the need to train the Knowledge Base by hand | in a supervised manner. NNs and LLMs in particular became | ascendant when unsupervised training was employed at scale. | | Perhaps LLMs can automate in large part the manual operations | of building a future symbolic knowledge base organized by a | universal upper ontology. Considering the amazing emergent | features of sufficiently-large LLMs, what could emerge from a | sufficiently large, reflective symbolic knowledge base? | detourdog wrote: | That what I have settled on. The need for a symbolic library | of standard hardware circuits. | | I'm making a sloppy version that will contain all the symbols | needed to run a multi-unit building. | nikolay wrote: | Even being a controversial figure, he was one of my heroes. | Getting excited about Eurisko in the '80s and '90s was a big | driver for me at the time! Rest in piece, dear computer pioneer! | brador wrote: | Anyone know how he died? I can't find any information about it | but someone mentioned heart attack on Reddit? | detourdog wrote: | I still intend to integrate OpenCyc. | mindcrime wrote: | If anybody wants to hear more about Doug's work and ideas, here | is a (fairly long) interview with Doug by Lex Fridman, from last | year. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wMKoSRbGVs&pp=ygUabGV4IGZya... | mistrial9 wrote: | reading the bio of Lex Fridman on wikipedia.. "Learning of | Identity from Behavioral Biometrics for Active Authentication" | what? | modeless wrote: | Makes sense to me. He basically made a system that detects | when someone else is using your computer by e.g. comparing | patterns of mouse and keyboard input to your typical usage. | It would be useful in a situation such as if you left your | screen unlocked and a coworker sat down at your desk to prank | you by sending an email from you to your boss (or worse, | obviously). The computer would lock itself as soon as it | suspects someone else is using it instead of you. | dang wrote: | Please don't go offtopic in predictable/nasty ways - more at | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37355320. | lionkor wrote: | Like anything reasonably complex, it means little to you if | its not your field - that said, I have no clue either. | lern_too_spel wrote: | Just search for Doug Lenat on YouTube. I can guarantee that any | one of the other videos will be better than a Fridman | interview. | dang wrote: | Hey you guys, please don't go offtopic like this. Whimsical | offtopicness can be ok, but offtopicness in the intersection | of: | | (1) generic (e.g. swerves the thread toward larger/general | topic rather than something more specific); | | (2) flamey (e.g. provocative on a divisive issue); and | | (3) predictable (e.g. has been hashed so many times already | that comments will likely fall in a few already-tiresome hash | buckets) | | - is the bad kind of offtopicness: the kind that brings | little new information and eventually lots of nastiness. | We're trying for the opposite here--lots of information and | little nastiness. | | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | mindcrime wrote: | Only about two of them will be more contemporary though, and | both are academic talks, not interviews. I get that you don't | like Lex Fridman, which is a perfectly fine position to hold. | But there is something to be said for seeing two people just | sit and talk, as opposed to seeing somebody monologue for an | hour. The Fridman interview with Doug is, IMO, absolutely | worth watching. And so are all of the other videos by / about | Doug. _shrug_ | yarpen_z wrote: | I don't know this particular interview, but it's not | necessarily about not liking Lex. I listened to many | episodes of his podcast and while I appreciate the | selection of guests from the CS domain, many of these | interviews aren't very good. They are not completely | terrible but they should have been so much better: Lex had | so many passionate, educated, experienced and gifted | guests, yet his ability to ask interesting and focused | questions is not on the same level. | pengaru wrote: | He's a shitty interviewer. Often doesn't even engage with | his guest's responses, as if he's not even listening to | what they're saying, instead moving mechanically to his | next bullet-point. Which is completely ridiculous for | what's supposed to be a long-format conversational | interview. | | The best episodes are ones where the guest drives the | interview and has a lot of interesting things to say. | Fridman's just useful for attracting interesting domain | experts somewhere we can hear them speak for hours on | end. | | The Jim Keller episodes are excellent IMO, despite | Fridman. Guests like Keller and Carmack don't need a good | interviewer for it to be a worthwhile listen. | Jun8 wrote: | Ahh, another one of the old guard has moved on. Here are two | excerpts from the book _AI: The Tumultuous History Of The Search | For Artificial Intelligence_ (a fantastic read of the early days | of AI) to remember him by; | | "Lenat found out about computers in a a manner typical of his | entrepreneurial spirit. As a high school student in Philadelphia, | working for $1.00 an hour to clean the cages of experimental | animals, he discovered that another student was earning $1.50 to | program the institution's minicomputer. Finding this occupation | more to his liking, he taught himself programming over a weekend | and squeezed his competitor out of the job by offering to work | for fifty cents an hour less.31 A few years later, Lenat was | programming Automated Mathematician (AM, for short) as a doctoral | thesis project at the Stanford AI Laboratory." p. 178 | | And here's an count of an early victory for AI in gaming against | humans by Lenat's EURISKO system | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko): | | "Ever the achiever, Lenat was looking for a more dramatic way to | prove teh capabilities of his creation. The identified the | occasion space-war game called Traveler TCS, then quite popular | with the public Lenat wanted to reach. The idea was for each | player to design a fleet of space battleships according to a | thick, hundred-page set of rules. Within a budget limit of one | trillion galactic credits, one could adjust such parameters as | the size, speed, armor thickness, autonomy and armament of each | ship: about fifty adjustments per ship were needed. Since the | fleet size could reach a hundred ships, the game thus offered | ample room for ingenuity in spite of the anticlimactic character | of the battles. These were fought by throwing dice following | complex tables based on probability of survival of each ship | according to its design. The winner of the yearly national | championship was commissioned inter galactic admiral and received | title to a planet of his or her choice ouside the solar system. | | Several months before the 1981 competition, Lenat fed into | EURISKO 146 Traveler concepts, ranging from the nature of games | in general to the technicalities of meson guns. He then | instructed the program to develop heuristics for making winning | war-fleet designs. The now familiar routine of nightly computer | runs turned into a merciless Darwinian contest: Lenat and EURISKO | together designed fleets that battled each other. Designs were | evaluated by how well they won battles, and heuristics by how | well they designed fleets. This rating method required several | battles per design, and several designs per heuristic, which | amounted to a lot of battles: ten thousand in all, fought over | two thousand hours of computer time. | | To participants in the national championship of San | Mateo,California, the resulting fleet of ninety-six small, | heavily armored ships looked ludicrous. Accepted wisdom dictated | fleets of about twenty behemoth ships, and many couldn't help | laughing. When engagements started, they found out that the weird | armada held more than met the eye. One interesting ace up Lenat's | sleeve was a small ship so fast as to be almost unstoppable, | which guaranteed at least a draw. EURISKO had conceived of it | through the "look for extreme cases" heuristic (which had | mutated, incidentally, into mutated, incidentally, into "look for | almost extreme cases")." p. 182 | | If you're a young person working in AI, by which I mean you're | less than 30, and if you have not already done so, you should | read about AI history in three decade 60s - 90s. | brundolf wrote: | I may be getting this wrong, but I think I remember hearing | that his auto-generated fleets won Traveller so entirely, | several years in a row, that they had to shut down the entire | competition because it had been broken | | Edit: Fixed wrong name for the competition | mindcrime wrote: | I think you mean "EURISKO won the Traveller championship so | entirely..." | | In which case, yes, something like that did happen. Per the | Wikipedia page: | | _Lenat and Eurisko gained notoriety by submitting the | winning fleet (a large number of stationary, lightly-armored | ships with many small weapons)[3] to the United States | Traveller TCS national championship in 1981, forcing | extensive changes to the game 's rules. However, Eurisko won | again in 1982 when the program discovered that the rules | permitted the program to destroy its own ships, permitting it | to continue to use much the same strategy.[3] Tournament | officials announced that if Eurisko won another championship | the competition would be abolished; Lenat retired Eurisko | from the game.[4] The Traveller TCS wins brought Lenat to the | attention of DARPA,[5] which has funded much of his | subsequent work._ | brundolf wrote: | Whoops yes :) | bpiche wrote: | Worked with their ontologists for a couple of years. Someone once | told me that they employed more philosophers per capita than any | other software company. A dubious distinction, maybe. But it | describes the culture of inquisitiveness there pretty well too | nyx_land wrote: | Weird, I interviewed with him summer 2021 hoping to be able to | land an ontologist job at Cycorp. It went spectacularly badly | because it turned out I really needed to brush up more on my | formal logic skills, but I was surprised to even get an | interview, let alone with the man himself. He still encouraged me | to work on reviewing logic and to apply again in the future but I | stopped seeing listings at Cycorp for ontologists and started | putting off returning to that aspiration thinking Cycorp has been | around long enough that there was no rush. Memento mori | snowmaker wrote: | I interviewed with Doug Lenat was I was a 17 year old high school | student, and he hired me as a summer intern for Cycorp - my first | actual programming job. | | That internship was life-changing for me, and I'll always be | grateful to him for taking a wild bet on a literally a kid. | | Doug was a brilliant computer scientist, and a pioneer of | artificial intelligence. Though I was very junior at Cycorp, it | was a small company so I sat in many meetings with him. It was | obvious that he understood every detail of how technology worked, | and was extremely smart. | | Cycorp was 30 years ahead of its time and never actually worked. | For those who don't know, it was essentially the first OpenAI - | the first large-scale commercial effort to create general | artificial intelligence. | | I learned a lot from Doug about how to be incredibly ambitious, | and how to not give up. Doug worked on Cycorp for multiple | decades. It never really took off, but he managed to keep funding | it and keep hiring great people so he could keep plugging away at | the problem. I know very few people who have stuck with an idea | for so long. | xNeil wrote: | That sounds awesome! Was coming back to Cycorp to permanently | work ever in the works for you? Or did you think the intern was | nice but you didn't want a career in the field? | | Also - what exactly did you do in the internship as a 17 year | old - what skills did you have? | varjag wrote: | Never met the guy but his work was one of my biggest inspirations | in computing. | | I feel it's appropriate to link a blog post of mine from 2018. | It's a quick recap of Lenat works on the trajectory that brought | him towards Cyc, with links to the papers. | | http://blog.funcall.org//lisp/2018/11/03/am-eurisko-lenat-do... | hu3 wrote: | The end of the article [1] reminds me to publish more of what I | make and think. I'm no Doug Lenat and my content would probably | just add noise to the internet but still, don't let your ideas | die with you or become controlled by some board of stakeholders. | I'm also no open-source zealot but open-source is a nice way to | let others continue what you started. | | [1] | | "Over the last year, Doug and I tried to write a long, complex | paper that we never got to finish. Cyc was both awesome in its | scope, and unwieldy in its implementation. The biggest problem | with Cyc from an academic perspective is that it's proprietary. | | To help more people understand it, I tried to bring out of him | what lessons he learned from Cyc, for a future generation of | researchers to use. Why did it work as well as it did when it | did, why did fail when it did, what was hard to implement, and | what did he wish that he had done differently? ... | | ...One of his last emails to me, about six weeks ago, was an | entreaty to get the paper out ASAP; on July 31, after a nerve- | wracking false-start, it came out, on arXiv, Getting from | Generative AI to Trustworthy AI: What LLMs might learn from Cyc | (https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2308/2308.04445.pdf). | | The brief article is simultaneously a review of what Cyc tried to | do, an encapsulation of what we should expect from genuine | artificial intelligence, and a call for reconciliation between | the deep symbolic tradition that he worked in with modern Large | Language Models." | mrcwinn wrote: | Here's one for you, Doug. My condolences. | | https://chat.openai.com/share/dbd59c92-696b-45d3-8097-c09a23... | toomuchtodo wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Lenat | | https://web.archive.org/web/20230901183515/https://garymarcu... | | https://archive.ph/icb92 | eigenvalue wrote: | I have always thought of Cyc as being the AI equivalent of | Russell and Whitehead's Principia--something that is technically | ambitious and interesting in its own right, but ultimately just | the wrong approach that will never really work well on a | standalone basis, no matter how long you work on it or keep | adding more and more rules. That being said, I do think it could | prove to be useful for testing and teaching neural net models. | | In any case, at the time Lenat starting working on Cyc, we didn't | really have the compute required to do NN models at the level | where they start exhibiting what most would call "common sense | reasoning," so it makes total sense why he started out on that | path. RIP. | tunesmith wrote: | It's fun reading through the paper he links just because I've | always been enamored by taking a lot of those principles that | they believe should be internal to a computer, and instead making | them external to a community. | | In other words, I think it would be so highly useful to have a | browseable corpus of arguments and conclusions, where people | could collaborate on them and perhaps disagree with portions of | the argument graph, adding to it and enriching it over time, so | other people could read and perhaps adopt the same reasoning. | | I play around with ideas with this site I occasionally work on, | http://concludia.org/ - really more an excuse at this point to | mess around with the concept and also get better at Akka (Pekko) | programming. At some point I'll add user accounts and editable | arguments and make it a real website. | frenchwhisker wrote: | I've had the same idea (er, came to the same conclusion) but | never acted on it. Awesome to see that someone has! Great name | too. | | I thought of it while daydreaming about how to converge public | opinion in a nation with major political polarization. It'd be | a sort of structured public debate forum and people could | better see exactly where in the hierarchy they disagreed and, | perhaps more importantly, how much they in fact agreed upon. | high_priest wrote: | I don't think this is the goal of your project, so let me ask | this way. Is there any similiar project, where we provide | truths and fallacies, combine them with logical arguments and | have a language model generate sets of probable conclusions? | | Would be great for brainstorming. | tomodachi94 wrote: | So basically a multi-person Zettelkasten? The idea with a | Zettelkasten (zk for short) is that each note is a singular | idea, concept, or argument that is all linked together. | Arguments can link to their evidence, concepts can link to | other related concepts, and so on. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten | tunesmith wrote: | Sort of except that it also tracks truth propagation - one | person disagreeing would inform others that portion of the | graph is contested. So the graph has behavior. And, the links | have logical meaning, beyond just "is related to" - it | respects boolean logic. | | You can see some of the explanation at | http://concludia.org/instructions . | quickthrower2 wrote: | You would need a highly disciplined and motivated set of | people in the team. I have been on courses where teams do | this on pen/paper and it is a real skill and it is _all_ | you do for days. Forget anything else like programming, | finishing work, etc. | couchand wrote: | > it respects boolean logic. | | Intuitionist or classical? | tunesmith wrote: | Intuitionist. Truth is provability; the propagation model | is basically digital logic. If you mark a premise to a | conclusion false, the conclusion is then marked "false" | but it really just means "it is false that it is proven"; | vitiated. Might still be true, just needs further work. | dredmorbius wrote: | Cyc ("Syke") is one of those projects I've long found vaguely | fascinating though I've never had the time / spoons to look into | it significantly. It's an AI project based on a comprehensive | ontology and knowledgebase. | | Wikipedia's overview: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc> | | Project / company homepage: <https://cyc.com/> | jfengel wrote: | I worked with Cyc. It was an impressive attempt to do the thing | that it does, but it didn't work out. It was the last great | attempt to do AI in the "neat" fashion, and its failure helped | bring about the current, wildly successful "scruffy" approaches | to AI. | | It's failure is no shade against Doug. Somebody had to try it, | and I'm glad it was one of the brightest guys around. I think | he clung on to it long after it was clear that it wasn't going | to work out, but breakthroughs do happen. (The current round of | machine learning itself is a revival of a technique that had | been abandoned, but people who stuck with it anyway discovered | the tricks that made it go.) | Kuinox wrote: | Why did it didn't work out ? | jfengel wrote: | I don't know if there's really an answer to that, beyond | noting that it never turned out to be more than the sum of | its parts. It was a large ontology and a hefty logic | engine. You put in queries and you got back answers. | | The goal was that in a decade it would become self- | sustaining. It would have enough knowledge that it could | start reading natural language. And it just... didn't. | | Contrast it with LLMs and diffusion and such. They make | stupid, asinine mistakes -- real howlers, because they | don't understand anything at all about the world. If it | could draw, Cyc would never draw a human with 7 fingers on | each hand, because it knows that most humans have 5. (It | had a decent-ish ontology of human anatomy which could | handle injuries and birth defects, but would default reason | over the normal case.) I often see ChatGPT stumped by | simple variations of brain teasers, and Cyc wouldn't make | those mistakes -- once you'd translated them into CycL (its | language, because it couldn't read natural language in any | meaningful way). | | But those same models do a scary job of passing the Turing | Test. Nobody would ever have thought to try it on Cyc. It | was never anywhere close. | | Philosophically I can't say why Cyc never developed "magic" | and LLMs (seemingly) do. And I'm still not convinced that | they're on the right path, though they actually have some | legitimate usages right now. I tried to find uses for Cyc | in exactly the opposite direction, guaranteeing data | quality, but it turned out nobody really wanted that. | dredmorbius wrote: | One sense that I've had of LLM / generative AIs is that | they lack "bones", in the sense that there's no | underlying structure to which they adhere, only outward | appearances which are statistically correlated (using | fantastically complex statistical correlation maps). | | Cyc, on the other hand, lacks flesh and skin. It's _all_ | skeleton and can generate facts but not embellish them | into narratives. | | The best human writing has _both_ , much as artists | (traditional painters, sculptors, and more recently | computer animators) has a _skeleton_ (outline, index | cards, Zettlekasten, wireframe) to which flesh, skin, and | fur are attached. LLM generative AIs are _too_ plastic, | Cyc is _insufficiently_ plastic. | | I suspect there's some sort of a middle path between the | two. Though that path and its destination also | increasingly terrify me. | ushakov wrote: | Sounds similar to WolframAlpha? | bpiche wrote: | Had? Cycorp is still around and deploying their software. | jfoutz wrote: | Take a look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU | | Cyc is sort of like that, but for everything. Not just a | small limited world. I believe it didn't work out because | it's really hard. | ansible wrote: | If we are to develop understandable AGI, I think that | some kind of (mathematically correct) probabilistic | reasoning based on a symbolic knowledge base is the way | to go. You would probably need to have some version of a | Neural Net on the front end to make it useful though. | | So you'd use the NN to recognize that the thing in front | of the camera is a cat, and that would be fed into the | symbolic knowledge base for further reasoning. | | The knowledge base will contain facts like the cat is | likely to "meow" at some point, especially if it wants | attention. Based on the relevant context, the knowledge | base would also know that the cat is unlikely to be able | to talk, unless it is a cat in a work of fiction, for | example. | DonHopkins wrote: | [delayed] | DonHopkins wrote: | As Roger Schank defined the terms in the 70's, "Neat" refers | to using a single formal paradigm, logic, math, neural | networks, and LLMs, like physics. "Scruffy" refers to | combining many different algorithms and approaches, symbolic | manipulation, hand coded logic, knowledge engineering, and | CYC, like biology. | | I believe both approaches are useful and can be combined and | layered and fed back into each other, to reinforce and | transcend complement each others advantages and limitations. | | Kind of like how Hailey and Justin Bieber make the perfect | couple: ;) | | https://edition.cnn.com/style/hailey-justin-bieber- | couples-f... | | Marvin L Minsky: Logical Versus Analogical or Symbolic Versus | Connectionist or Neat Versus Scruffy | | https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article. | .. | | https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article. | .. | | "We should take our cue from biology rather than physics..." | -Marvin Minsky | | >To get around these limitations, we must develop systems | that combine the expressiveness and procedural versatility of | symbolic systems with the fuzziness and adaptiveness of | connectionist representations. Why has there been so little | work on synthesizing these techniques? I suspect that it is | because both of these AI communities suffer from a common | cultural-philosophical disposition: They would like to | explain intelligence in the image of what was successful in | physics--by minimizing the amount and variety of its | assumptions. But this seems to be a wrong ideal. We should | take our cue from biology rather than physics because what we | call thinking does not directly emerge from a few fundamental | principles of wave-function symmetry and exclusion rules. | Mental activities are not the sort of unitary or elementary | phenomenon that can be described by a few mathematical | operations on logical axioms. Instead, the functions | performed by the brain are the products of the work of | thousands of different, specialized subsystems, the intricate | product of hundreds of millions of years of biological | evolution. We cannot hope to understand such an organization | by emulating the techniques of those particle physicists who | search for the simplest possible unifying conceptions. | Constructing a mind is simply a different kind of problem-- | how to synthesize organizational systems that can support a | large enough diversity of different schemes yet enable them | to work together to exploit one another's abilities. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neats_and_scruffies | | >In the history of artificial intelligence, neat and scruffy | are two contrasting approaches to artificial intelligence | (AI) research. The distinction was made in the 70s and was a | subject of discussion until the middle 80s.[1][2][3] | | >"Neats" use algorithms based on a single formal paradigms, | such as logic, mathematical optimization or neural networks. | Neats verify their programs are correct with theorems and | mathematical rigor. Neat researchers and analysts tend to | express the hope that this single formal paradigm can be | extended and improved to achieve general intelligence and | superintelligence. | | >"Scruffies" use any number of different algorithms and | methods to achieve intelligent behavior. Scruffies rely on | incremental testing to verify their programs and scruffy | programming requires large amounts of hand coding or | knowledge engineering. Scruffies have argued that general | intelligence can only be implemented by solving a large | number of essentially unrelated problems, and that there is | no magic bullet that will allow programs to develop general | intelligence autonomously. | | >John Brockman compares the neat approach to physics, in that | it uses simple mathematical models as its foundation. The | scruffy approach is more like biology, where much of the work | involves studying and categorizing diverse phenomena.[a] | | [...] | | >Modern AI as both neat and scruffy | | >New statistical and mathematical approaches to AI were | developed in the 1990s, using highly developed formalisms | such as mathematical optimization and neural networks. Pamela | McCorduck wrote that "As I write, AI enjoys a Neat hegemony, | people who believe that machine intelligence, at least, is | best expressed in logical, even mathematical terms."[6] This | general trend towards more formal methods in AI was described | as "the victory of the neats" by Peter Norvig and Stuart | Russell in 2003.[18] | | >However, by 2021, Russell and Norvig had changed their | minds.[19] Deep learning networks and machine learning in | general require extensive fine tuning -- they must be | iteratively tested until they begin to show the desired | behavior. This is a scruffy methodology. | at_a_remove wrote: | Neats and scruffies also showed up in The X-Files in their | first AI episode. | dredmorbius wrote: | "Neat" vs. "scruffy" syncs well with my general take on Cyc. | Thanks for that. | | I _do_ suspect that well-curated and hand-tuned corpora, | including possibly Cyc 's, _are_ of significant use to LLM | AI. And will likely be more so as the feedback / autophagy | problem exacerbates. | pwillia7 wrote: | Wow -- I hadn't thought of this but makes total sense. | We'll need giant definitely-human-curated databases of | information for AIs to consume as more information becomes | generated by the AIs. | dredmorbius wrote: | There's a long history of informational classification, | going back to Aristotle and earlier ("Categories"). See | especially Melville Dewey, the US Library of Congress | Classification, and the work of Paul Otlet. All are based | on _exogenous classification_ , that is, subjects and/or | works classification catalogues which are _independent_ | of the works classified. | | Natural-language content-based classification as by | Google and Web text-based search relies effectively on | documents self-descriptions (that is, their content | itself) to classify and search works, though a ranking | scheme (e.g., PageRank) is typically layered on top of | that. What distinguished early Google from prior full- | text search was that the latter had _no_ ranking | criteria, leading to keyword stuffing. An alternative | approach was Yahoo, originally Yet Another Hierarchical | Officious Oracle, which was a _curated and ontological_ | classification of websites. This was already proving | infeasible by 1997 /98 _as a whole_ , though as training | data for machine classification might prove useful. | rvbissell wrote: | Why not combine the two approaches? A bicameral mind, of | sorts? | jfengel wrote: | I'm sure somebody somewhere is working on it. I've already | seen articles teaching LLMs offload math problems onto a | separate module, rather than trying to solve them via the | murk of neural network. | | I suppose you'd architect it as a layer. It wants to say | something, and the ontology layer says, "No, that's stupid, | say something else". The ontology layer can recognize | ontology-like statements and use them to build and evolve | the ontology. | | It would be even more interesting built into the | visual/image models. | | I have no idea if that's any kind of real progress, or if | it's merely filtering out the dumb stuff. A good service, | to be sure, but still not "AGI", whatever the hell that | turns out to be. | | Unless it turns out to be the missing element that puts it | over the top. If I had any idea I wouldn't have been | working with Cyc in the first place. | mindcrime wrote: | There are absolutely people working on this concept. In | fact, the two day long "Neuro-Symbolic AI Summer School | 2023"[1] just concluded earlier this week. It was two days | of hearing about cutting edge research at the intersection | of "neural" approaches (taking a big-tent view where that | included most probabilistic approaches) and "symbolic" (eg, | "logic based") approaches. And while this approach might | not be _the_ contemporary mainstream approach, there were | some heavy hitters presenting, including the likes of | Leslie Valiant and Yoshua Bengio. | | [1]: https://neurosymbolic.github.io/nsss2023/ | sanderjd wrote: | I'm so looking forward to the next swing of the pendulum back | to "neat", incorporating all the progress that has been made | on "scruffy" during this current turn of the wheel. | DonHopkins wrote: | The GP had the terms "neat" and "scruffy" reversed. CYC is | scruffy, and neural nets are neat. See my sibling post | citing Roger Schank who coined the terms, and quoting | Minsky's paper, "Logical Versus Analogical or Symbolic | Versus Connectionist or Neat Versus Scruffy" and the "Neats | and Scruffies" wikipedia page. | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37354564 | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | Definitely would be nice to have a ChatGPT that could | reference an ontology to fact check itself. | at_a_remove wrote: | I've often thought that Cyc had an enormous value as some kind of | component for AI, a "baseline truth" about the universe (to the | degree that we understand it and have "explained" our | understanding to Cyc in terms of its frames). AM (no relation to | any need for screaming) was a taste of the AI dream. | optimalsolver wrote: | >I've often thought that Cyc had an enormous value as some kind | of component for AI | | Same. I wonder if training an LLM on the database would make it | more "grounded"? We'll probably never know as Cycorp will keep | the data locked away in their vaults forever. For what purpose? | Probably even they don't know. | | >AM (no relation to any need for screaming) | | heh. | ftxbro wrote: | Here's a 2016 Wired article about Doug Lenat, he was the guy who | made Eurisko and CYC https://www.wired.com/2016/03/doug-lenat- | artificial-intellig... | pinewurst wrote: | How about a black bar for Doug? | headhasthoughts wrote: | Why? He shared little with the wider community, contributed to | mass surveillance with Cyc's government collaborations, and | hasn't really done anything of note. | | I don't dislike Lenat, but he doesn't fit the commercial value | of people who get black bars, he doesn't fit the ideological | one, and he doesn't fit the community-benefit one. | rvz wrote: | Not even Warnock got a black bar even when asked for one as a | mark of respect: [0] | | I guess the black bar really is an ideological thing. Rather | than being supposedly a 'mark of respect'. | | Regardless, RIP Doug. | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197852 | acqbu wrote: | Wow, that is really mean! | dang wrote: | Wouldn't it also be a mark of respect to check, before | saying something that mean, whether it's true or not? | | https://web.archive.org/web/20230821003655/https://news.yco | m... | [deleted] | pinewurst wrote: | Why do people have to have 'commercial value' to get black | bars? Why do people have to pass the ideological police? Why | isn't serving as a visible advocate of a certain logical | model enough? | | I think my bias comes from having started my career in AI on | the inference side and having (perhaps not so much long term | :) seen Cyc as a shining city on a hill. Lenat certainly | established that logical model even if we've since gone onto | other things. | vkou wrote: | I believe the parent poster claims that a black bar should | meet either a commercial, hacker-cultural, _or_ open-source | contribution one. | junon wrote: | I think you don't understand the meaning of the black bar if | "commercial value" is one of the metrics. | vkou wrote: | [flagged] | mdp2021 wrote: | > _by which criteria_ | | Historic value. | vkou wrote: | And _which_ category of important-enough-to-be-historic | contributions has he made? | skyyler wrote: | Take a moment to reflect on what you're doing right now. | | You're turning a celebration of life for a _very_ | recently departed figure into a _pissing contest_. | | Extremely distasteful. | vkou wrote: | I think you're misunderstanding the direction and intent | of this subthread. | | You're right that talking about Jobs is off-topic, | though. | sgt101 wrote: | Didn't he: | | - invent case based reasoning | | - build Eurisko and AM | | - write a discipline defining paper ("Why AM and Eurisko | appear to work") | | - undertake an ambitious but ultimately futile high risk | research gamble with Cyc? | steve_adams_86 wrote: | While futile from a personal and business aspect, it's | certainly valuable and useful otherwise. Maybe that's | implied here as you're listing contributions, but I wanted | to emphasize that it wasn't a waste outside of that narrow | band of futility. | zozbot234 wrote: | Case-based reasoning is VERY old. It shows up prominently | in the Catholic tradition of practical ethics, drawing on | Aristotelian thought. Of course in a more informal sense, | people have been reasoning on a case-by-case basis since | time immemorial. | EdwardCoffin wrote: | I got a lot of value out of some of the papers he wrote, and | what bits of _Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems_ I | managed to read. | ftxbro wrote: | he is the patron hacker of players who use computers to break | board games or war games | toomuchtodo wrote: | Consider giving more grace. Life is short, and kindness is | free. | jonahbenton wrote: | Oh, so sorry to hear that. Good summary of his work- the Cyc | project- on the twitter thread. Had missed that last paper- with | Gary Marcus- on Cyc and LLM. | mrmincent wrote: | Sad to hear of his passing, I remember building my uni project | around OpenCyc in my one "Intelligent Systems" class many many | years ago. It was a dismal failure as my ambition far exceeded my | skills, but it was so enjoyable reading about Cyc and the | dedicated work Douglas had put in over such a long time. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-09-01 23:00 UTC)