The Speculist

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.

-Albert Einstein

Cycorp, Inc. is looking for help with their Cyc Knowledge Base project. Cyc is already the world's largest database of common sense information. Cycorp is hopeful that by interacting with larger groups of people Cyc's knowledge will quickly grow.

They've developed a game called FACTory where Cyc asks players questions. They can be multiple choice or true/false questions. Unike the typical true/false questions we all had back in school, a player has the option of answering, without penalty, "I don't know." This allows Cyc to move on without altering it's confidence on that question.

Players also have the option of stating that a question "doesn't make sense." This, presumably, would make Cyc question its grammar.

Cyc informs the players whether they've answered with the majority or not, whether they are the first to answer a question, and how the answer affects Cyc's confidence in certain facts. For example, I was asked:

"Does the act of Middle Eastern dances expresses freedom?"

Obviously Cyc needs work on its grammar, but I thought, "Yeah, if I was to break out my righteous chicken dance in downtown Riyadh I'd certainly be expressing something... er, let's go with freedom."

When I answered "True" Cyc informed me that it has received 16 answers to this question and that my answer agreed with 60%. It's now more confident that that "The act of Middle Easter dances expresses freedom."

Players have to login with a user name and a password. This makes me think that Cyc is not only evaluating facts, but also participants. I suppose that if a player were to constantly give Cyc bad info, it would eventually get wise to it, thereafter discounting what that player said. And, the opposite could be true. It could develop trust in certain people.

This is not unlike the suggestion I made to improve Ray Kurzweil's chatbot Ramona. Instead of a game that players log into I suggested that Ramona be distributed as a piece of networked software that could serve as an intelligent agent for its users while being trained and getting smarter.

[E]ach user could be a trainer. As she chats with her users about different subjects, different memes will develop and will compete within Ramona's distributed neural net according to evolutionary algorithms.

For example, one user could remark to Ramona that it was a pretty day outside and that the sky is blue. She would no doubt hear from other users that the sky is blue. She might also hear that the sky is grey or black or even red. Ramona would assign a level of confidence to both the information and the trainer as she is trained. As Ramona grows in sophistication she could learn that the sky is indeed blue, grey, black, and even sometimes red according to certain conditions - night or day, cloudy or clear.

Whenever she is in the process of learning a particular thing she will want to ask her users about it. When her confidence about a certain subject reaches a sufficiently high percentage she will consider that knowledge confirmed (more or less) and will seek to talk about other things that she is learning.

By assigning a level of confidence for each of her users Ramona will come to value the opinions of some trainers more than others.

Perhaps FACTory is the first step toward the intelligent web assistant I was contemplating. If you'd like to be a part of the formative years of what could be the world's first strong AI, play the game.

UPDATE: Apparently FACTory is just the latest effort by Cycorp to get the public interacting with Cyc. Doug Lenat of Cycorp said last year that opening Cyc up to the masses could lead to the Singularity in ten years.