zlacker

What a fantastic article. One of the best on HN this year.

I first heard about Cyc as a child in a TV documentary about AI. The example involved a man shaving with an electric razor. Cyc concluded that while shaving the man was not human since the razor was an electrical device and electrical devices were not human. It really caught my imagination as a child and made me want to study AI. The magic diminished a bit once I learned more about how Cyc worked using prolog style relations and I ended up studying CS instead of AI but I still credit Cyc with sparking that initial interest in me.

Lenart seems like a strange man but we need obsessives and true believers like him to push through the various "winters". Who knows if knowledge graphs like Cyc will become relevant again in future as we seek to eliminate hallucinations from statistical learning.

>>fancyf+(OP)
> Cyc concluded that while shaving the man was not human since the razor was an electrical device and electrical devices were not human.

I can't parse this sentence? Is there supposed to be a comma before and after "while shaving"?

>>cubefo+Ta
Yes. Sorry. I was actually just googling this and realised this same anecdote is in cited the intro to the Deep Learning book by Goodfellow et al. Their write-up is hopefully clearer:

"For example, Cyc failed to understand a story about a person named Fred shaving in the morning (Linde, 1992). Its inference engine detected an inconsistency in the story: it knew that people do not have electrical parts, but because Fred was holding an electric razor, it believed the entity “FredWhileShaving” contained electrical parts. It therefore asked whether Fred was still a person while he was shaving"

https://www.deeplearningbook.org/contents/intro.html

The (Linde, 1992) citation is they give is the 4th episode of a TV series - presumably the one I saw as a kid!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_That_Changed_the...

And of course it's on YouTube:

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxRcsHT-s1iZ-VRWFRXA-qg4kjTYe-a6j...

>>fancyf+Ac
Deleuze would argue something similar

>>cubefo+Ta
along this line, “Gravity has no friends.”

http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=2068

>>fancyf+Ac
To be fair, the object "FredWhileShaving" is a state (of Fred), or simply an event, and as such it arguably is not a person in the first place. As persons are presumably neither states nor events.

>>fancyf+(OP)
I remember the very same example (re)-sparking my interest in AI back in the days.

My gut feeling says there is something in this approach that's needed to make GenAI work reliably. The brain has an associative feature, sure; but it's not very useful without filters sorting signal from nonsense, making sense of the content.

Have they been able to get Cyc to generate its own content in meaningful ways? I would expect such a system to eventually be able to derive a lot of details by itself, needing less and less spoon feeding.

>>fancyf+(OP)
> seems like a strange man

seemed.

Unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years ago (which I wish I had known before now!)

>>pmarre+iT
You can still read his papers and textbooks. I thought he was an engaging speaker as well, and several of his lectures and interviews are available on youtube, as well as tributes and retrospectives.