This is the sixth entry in a series of journals I am writing for my AI class this semester. It concerns some thoughts of mine on the Cyc project, and the usefulness of OpenCyc.
As we learned in class, Cyc is an attempt by the company Cycorp to create a knowledge base of basic, common-sense facts about everyday objects and events that could someday be used to create new assertions about these objects and events, based solely on what has already been added to the ontology and some basic logical inference rules.
I'm going make a bit of a blanket disclaimer before I delve into my feelings about Cyc and OpenCyc: I am extremely interested in AI in general, and knowledge representation in particular. Ever since I had heard of Cyc (sometime back in junior high, I think), I have considered it an excellent idea. With the addition of the OpenCyc program (and the ability to allow the great mass of people able to access the internet to augment the knowledge base), I think the idea has only become more useful.
However, is this really artificial intelligence? I was leafing through an old AI book the other day and was reminded of the Chinese Room gedankenexperiment. The Chinese Room (in case someone other than Wheeler happens to read this!) is a thought experiment in which an English-speaking person is placed in a locked room and passed messages under the door which are written in Chinese, which he has no natural knowledge of. However, he is equipped with a series of books written in English which detail precisely how to respond in Chinese to any given set of characters. So as he receives a message under the door, he examines it, looks up the appropriate response in one of his books, copies the squiggles shown onto a new sheet of paper and passes it out underneath the door to the entity waiting for a response.
Now assuming that the man is a flawless follower of directions, the entities on the other side of the door have no idea that he has absolutely no idea how to write in Chinese. To them, he is perfectly fluent. John Searle, creator of this thought experiment, suggests that this is an excellent model for the way computers deal with knowledge input to them by humans. If we consider the knowledge base of Cyc combined with the logical inference rules Cyc could use as equal to the books of rules the man has in the Chinese Room, isn't Cyc just a Chinese Room simulation? In fact, can't we posit that most knowledge representations just lapse into revisions and variants of the Chinese Room? The computer has no underlying knowledge of the Cyc contents just as the man has no intrinsic knowledge of Chinese.
This kind of made me sad for a little while, as I liked Cyc as a project and wanted to see something good come of it. But then I cogitated a little further, and decided maybe it is exactly how our brains work as well, at least in the beginning. When I began thinking as an infant, I had an inbuilt set of rulebooks in my genes. Without devolving too much into a nature vs. nurture discussion, I think I had a very basic set of rules to allow me to interact on a very primitive basis with the objects around me. And really, how is that different from the rulebooks the man in the Chinese Room is given? After a while, wouldn't the man in the room (as an intelligent being) begin to remember shortcuts about which books to look in? After a long enough amount of time, he might indeed emerge from the room as fluent as if he had been born and raised in Beijing!
So since I have decided to think of Cyc as a very early stage of the rules handed down to me by genetics (assuming nature is indeed dominant over nurture, which is what I suspect), I suggest that Cyc is a very important project indeed. Perhaps one day the knowledge base will grow large enough for the rules of inference to begin making those shortcuts. Once that happens, I think we are in for exciting times indeed!
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