AI is officially topical — I thought it might be, when I got a call from a reporter who wanted to ask me about AI for a theme ish of a magazine that would come out around the same time as the Spielberg movie. The flood of links to AI science stories in the mainstream press that I'm coming across confirms it. I've got a love-hate relationship with AI: the promise is amazing, and AI makes a great McGuffin for a science-fiction plot, but the results have been pretty unspectacular to date. At the same time, the power of real "I" has been largely overlooked — despite the power of Google and other large-scale collaborative filters (really just programs that aggregrate large numbers of human decisions and draw conclusions from them) people are still dissing collaborative filtering as a trivial app. Anyway, this is a great story on Cyc, a huge AI project that promises to eliminate some of the crappier quotidian human-fired jobs (like sifting a database to spot erroneous entries on the basis of common-sense — an engieneer who's been in your employ for 30 years can't have been born in 1988…).
…The project already has consumed an estimated 500 person-years and $50 million in investments…
…The system today encompasses more than 1.4 million assertions–hundreds of thousands of root words, names, descriptions, abstract concepts, and a method of making inferences that allows the system to understand that, for example, a piece of wood can be smashed into smaller pieces of wood, but a table can't be smashed into a pile of smaller tables….
