
Alchemy – Open Source AI - chewxy
http://alchemy.cs.washington.edu/
======
svalorzen
Shameless self-promotion post: if you're interested in AI based on Markov, I
maintain an open-source library here [https://github.com/Svalorzen/AI-
Toolbox](https://github.com/Svalorzen/AI-Toolbox). It can be used for general
autonomous agents which need to act in response to environmental stimuli. I've
used it to learn to play StarCraft and to control cameras to predict people's
movements around buildings. Any comments and suggestions are welcome =)

~~~
detaro
> _I 've used it to learn to play StarCraft and to control cameras to predict
> people's movements around buildings._

If you've described / published either of these examples somewhere, you should
submit them to HN!

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svalorzen
I actually have a video [0] and code [1] of the first (which was a one-month
project), while the second is my thesis which is going to be finished soon.
Maybe I'll post them as a separate entry one day, but I always think these
things are too simple and trivial to be interesting..

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrKMBIR82Qw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrKMBIR82Qw)

[1]:
[https://github.com/Svalorzen/DESOLATOR](https://github.com/Svalorzen/DESOLATOR)

~~~
nickpsecurity
Loved watching the Dragoons dance around their opponents while taking almost
no damage. They seemed to have slipped a few times where they could've doubled
up on fire but just one was firing instead. I might have looked at it wrong
though.

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syllogism
The NLP group at Washington is one of the best in the world (imo likely top
5), and did most of the seminal work on open information extraction, the
technologies backing this service.

I'm surprised they chose this name. The commercial service, AlchemyAPI, that
was bought by IBM is likely to be much less accurate. I can't say for sure,
though --- their terms of service prohibit evaluation. All I know is, that's
not a good sign...

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t45
Alchemy was launched much ealier than AlchemyAPI.

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syllogism
Very interesting!! I had no idea.

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nl
Related:
[http://i.stanford.edu/hazy/tuffy/](http://i.stanford.edu/hazy/tuffy/)

Tuffy is used in DeepDive[1], which is a very interesting project.

[1]
[http://deepdive.stanford.edu/doc/advanced/markov_logic_netwo...](http://deepdive.stanford.edu/doc/advanced/markov_logic_network.html)

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mooreds
Weird. I submitted this yesterday. Must have been the capitalization that got
me:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630551](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630551)

Anyway, just read "The Master Algorithm" by Pedro Domingoes. Fantastic read.
The most interesting part to me was his survey of the five tribes of machine
learning: symbolists, connectionists, geneticists, Bayesians and analogists.

After the survey he goes on to talk about some other aspects. And then
discusses Alchemy and the possibility of uniting the techniques of all five
tribes into one algorithm (hence the title).

I found his writing on a dense subject easy to read and great at conveying the
concepts. Well worth checking out.

Edited for typos

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placeybordeaux
I couldn't get past the introduction of "The Master Algorithm", is the rest of
the book a bit more grounded?

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mooreds
The introduction is a bit breathless, but most of the rest of the book is more
down to earth.

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stephenhess
Related? [http://www.alchemyapi.com/](http://www.alchemyapi.com/)

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sbarre
Yeah slightly confusing naming because Alchemy APIs (owned by IBM now) is
promoted alongside the Watson APIs which are in the same general space as this
project..

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kimi
The project looks dead. Last updates in 2013?

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r0muald
This doesn't seem so uncommon for big projects at that department. I'm
thinking for example about all the various tools developed by Noah Snavely and
colleagues for the Photo Tourism project
[http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/](http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/) ,
that were later acquired by Microsoft for their Photosynth branded tools.

~~~
kimi
Beautiful plumage, sir.

