Common Sense on a Chip?

[niks]

David G. Stork, chief scientist of Ricoh Silicon Valley in California is launching the Open Mind Initiative to inspire computer addicts to contribute in developing a computer that can reason.

Computers are not very good when it comes to understanding the real world. "For example, you know most animals move faster when they go forward than when they go backward. We would never even think to say it, but no computer knows it," says Stork's collaborator, Push Singh of MIT's Media Lab. A smart computer would need to incorporate key details people understand in their daily lives. To ease the task of collecting so much information, Singh has created a Web site called Open Mind Commonsense and turned to the community of Internet users. He invites visitors to participate in sentence-completion puzzles or describing a simple pictures. Each response gets logged into a growing pool of knowledge. Singh's goal is to create a system that can reason as well as a 7-year-old. He expects to use Commonsense to make a smarter Web search engine.

Stork plans other sites that encourage visitors to teach a computer to recognize speech or handwriting, and not just for fun. "It's fascinating to watch children figure things out," he says. "People will watch Open Mind get smart and want to contribute to see it become the best in the world."

[Thesa]

You have started a very interesting thread.

We all play games with the computer, and these games are done via “Artificial Intelligence”. Now, people are desirous to expand the same to larger areas of interest and make the computer more human.

Its main goals are:

a) To develop an ‘intelligent software’ via collection of large data sets (handwritten characters and spoken words, objects’ names in photographs, common sense about the world, etc.) which can be provided by the common person and not computer experts.

b) To educate the public in cognitive science, computer science, pattern recognition etc.

[David Tan]

It's gotta be constantly learning by recording the information it's capturing through it's 'senses'. Also it has to quickly identify and acquire which stored info is relevant and to process it to come-up with a human like response. Plus it must constantly interact with the world and human beings.

Sounds more like it'll cost billions of dollars to built the facility, buy the hardware, hire the people, programmers, security, etc. Although I hope it happens... tiny hope.