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1. vannev+14[view] [source] 2025-04-08 19:44:13
>>todsac+(OP)
I would argue that Lenat was at least directionally correct in understanding that sheer volume of data (in Cyc's case, rules and facts) was the key in eventually achieving useful intelligence. I have to confess that I once criticized the Cyc project for creating an ever-larger pile of sh*t and expecting a pony to emerge, but that's sort of what has happened with LLMs.
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2. baq+3j[view] [source] 2025-04-08 21:29:24
>>vannev+14
https://ai-2027.com/ postulates that a good enough LLM will rewrite itself using rules and facts... sci-fi, but so is chatting with a matrix multiplication.
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3. joseph+cm[view] [source] 2025-04-08 21:53:49
>>baq+3j
I doubt it. The human mind is a probabilistic computer, at every level. There’s no set definition for what a chair is. It’s fuzzy. Some things are obviously in the category, and some are at the periphery of it. (Eg is a stool a chair? Is a log next to a campfire a chair? How about a tree stump in the woods? Etc). This kind of fuzzy reasoning is the rule, not the exception when it comes to human intuition.

There’s no way to use “rules and facts” to express concepts like “chair” or “grass”, or “face” or “justice” or really anything. Any project trying to use deterministic symbolic logic to represent the world fundamentally misunderstands cognition.

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4. yellow+Ev[view] [source] 2025-04-08 23:20:57
>>joseph+cm
> There’s no set definition for what a chair is.

Sure there is: a chair is anything upon which I can comfortably sit without breaking it.

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5. lprove+Je1[view] [source] 2025-04-09 09:03:35
>>yellow+Ev
> Sure there is: a chair is anything upon which I can comfortably sit without breaking it.

« It is often said that a disproportionate obsession with purely academic or abstract matters indicates a retreat from the problems of real life. However, most of the people engaged in such matters say that this attitude is based on three things: ignorance, stupidity, and nothing else.

Philosophers, for example, argue that they are very much concerned with the problems posed by real life.

Like, for instance, “what do we mean by real?”, and “how can we reach an empirical definition of life?”, and so on.

One definition of life, albeit not a particularly useful one, might run something like this: “Life is that property which a being will lose as a result of falling out of a cold and mysterious cave thirteen miles above ground level.”

This is not a useful definition, (A) because it could equally well refer to the subject’s glasses if he happens to be wearing them, and (B) because it fails to take into account the possibility that the subject might happen to fall onto, say, the back of an extremely large passing bird.

The first of these flaws is due to sloppy thinking, but the second is understandable, because the mere idea is quite clearly, utterly ludicrous. »

— Douglas Adams

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