

Computer reads the internet - ankimal
http://www.techeye.net/science/computer-reads-the-internet

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Cushman
_At the moment NELL thinks that the First Amendment is a musical instrument,
the Second Amendment is a 'hobby,' and is completely unwilling to admit to any
knowledge of the fifth amendment at all._

You can insert your own joke here— but I actually think those are some
fascinating insights about the internet.

~~~
NathanKP
Just for the fun of it I asked Cleverbot (cleverbot.com) what the first
amendment was. Here was the response:

    
    
        What is the first amendment?
        I don't know. What is the first duty?
    

NELL at least has a guess, even if it is wrong. Of course is someone told
Cleverbot that the first amendment was a musical instrument it would probably
repeat that as well.

~~~
shaddi
I once had Cleverbot and an ELIZA clone "talk" to each other. After a few back
and forth exchanges, Cleverbot spit out this:

    
    
      Eliza clone: What does that suggest to you?
      Cleverbot: A program like Eliza.

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jluxenberg
Official site for the project: <http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/>

~~~
nkassis
Some of these facts are super hilarious and interesting. Ex I just saw: Long
Term Risk is a board game ;p The irony of that statement is awesome.

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lukev
I'm glad stuff like this is being worked on.

But the fact is, it won't _really_ work until we have strong AI. The more I
learn about it, the more I'm convinced that nothing except human-level
intelligence can properly parse satire, irony, metaphor and simile.

Natural language is just too contextual. Sentence parsing and vocabulary
identification/disambiguation are really hard problems, but even if we solved
them entirely we still wouldn't be able to make sense out of a plain-text
corpus.

That said, I think NLP research is one of the most promising _routes_ to
discovering how to build a strong AI.

~~~
dstorrs
"Strong AI" isn't really a meaningful term anymore, because we keep moving the
goalposts:

 _) "A computer will be intelligent when it can beat a human at chess. Oh,
Deep Blue did that? Umm, ok, then...."

_ ) "A computer will be intelligent when it can recognize a human face. Oh,
every digital camera on the market has basic versions of that built in? Ummm,
ok, then...."

 _) "A computer will be intelligent when it can TRANSLATE between human
languages! Hah! Try THAT on for size, you geeky boffins! Wait, what? Google
has been doing that for years, and AltaVista did it back in 1995? Oh. Ummmm,
well...."

_ ) "A computer will be intelligent when it can pass an unrestricted Turing
tes- [someone else whispers to the speaker] What's that? Computers have passed
the Turing test? And humans have failed it? Um, right, moving on!"

"Strong AI" is the magic incantation that means "a computer that is so smart
we don't understand how it works any more"--because, if we DO understand how
it works, then it's just another computer program.

This says interesting things about why we regard humans as intelligent. If we
actually advance neuroscience et al to a sufficient point that we deeply
understand the brain and the mind, will we stop thinking of ourselves as self-
aware and free-willed?

~~~
lukev
I disagree. I think people have always had a pretty good idea what they meant
by intelligence - the examples you cite are just things that they have pulled
out of their hat as examples of something "only" an intelligent entity could
do.

Turns out they were (partially) wrong about the capabilities of non-
intelligent systems, but it doesn't mean that the concept of general
intelligence isn't meaningful. Hard to define, yes, but I think most of us
would know it when we see it (or interact with it). I'd actually be pretty
comfortable defining it by the original discussion - can it meaningfully
process a corpus of idiomatic human language, "learn" from it, and respond
intelligibly to arbitrary questions on it? This certainly isn't a lower bound
on intelligence, by any means, but if it does happen, I don't think there's
anyone who won't be convinced.

By the way, do you happen to have citations for the computers passing the
Turing test? I'd love to see transcripts of that... It is of course _possible_
to pass a Turing test with an Eliza-like program, but it depends largely on
the judge and the time allotted.

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spot
Tom Mitchell is on a roll. He also got press for the fMRI mind reader:
[http://singularityhub.com/2009/04/24/devices-that-read-
peopl...](http://singularityhub.com/2009/04/24/devices-that-read-peoples-
minds-are-you-thinking-what-im-thinking/)

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chime
It's about time. I wondered why no one had hooked up a learning AI to
Wikipedia/dbpedia and the rest of the Internet. Cyc always semed like a good
idea but bad execution to me. Manually feeding in data takes a lot of time and
effort. Why not just let something soak up the entire Internet and correct it
if it learns the wrong things? Good luck to CMU. Maybe this will become the
search engine of the future.

~~~
dandelany
Sorry to single you out, but comments like this really get me. _It's OBVIOUSLY
MUCH harder than it looks to you_.

It's about time! I wondered why no one had hooked up a fuel cell to cleanly
power a car.

It's about time! I wondered why no one had proved P != NP.

It's about time! I wondered why no one had used [insert pop science news
headline] to solve [insert major science-related problem].

If you've got a simple solution to a complex problem, you're probably not
seeing the whole picture. Or you should be implementing it yourself.

~~~
chime
Even as I wss typing the above post, I knew I would be singled out because of
how I said it. I understand the complexity of what they're trying to do (BS
comp sci, coder for 20 years). What I meant to imply was that finally someone
is tackling such difficult problems head on and out in the open. This is
science fiction becoming a reality. This could be AI that does more than drive
cars or fulfil my Netflix orders. So color me excited with optimism. But yes,
I see your point and thanks for me calling out. I should have been more
explicit in my comment.

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danielnicollet
This story would be better titled: "Computer reads _and learns from_ the
Internet"

Text-to-voice is already very established. However, "machine learning from the
Internet" with its intelligent crawling, parsing, computational linguistics
logic, and AI involved is the truly impressive aspect here. Don't you think?

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dmoney
Project homepage: <http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/> No source but you can browse or
download the database.

NELL even has a twitter feed: <http://twitter.com/#!/cmunell>

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edkennedy
Particularly interesting and somewhat comedic is it's complete lack of bias.
I'm curious as to how it is absorbing all this data, as the order in which it
processes the data could greatly effect how it chooses it's beliefs.

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CUViper
These commenters deserve many internet points:

    
    
      Henry T. - so when does NELL become self aware? :-)
      Jon M - As soon as it reads this page ;-)

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terra_t
-1 blogspam; this has been in the NY Times and everyplace else...

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TheSOB88
Why would they correct it and say Klingon isn't an ethnicity? It pretty much
is, only a fictional one.

