Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
aging. Those courageous few who have tried, have found that you
need a tremendous amount of knowledge of a very diverse variety
to understand even the simplest children's story. Many researchers
regard the problem of giving computers common sense as simply
too big to think about. There have been several attempts to es-
timate how much commonsense knowledge people have. These
attempts range from experiments that demonstrate that people can
only acquire new long-term memories at the rate of a few bits per
second, to counting the number of words we know and estimat-
ing how much we know about each word, to estimating the brain's
storage capacity by counting neurons and guessing at how many
bits each neuron can store. Several of these estimates produce ap-
proximately the same number, suggesting there are of the order of
hundreds of millions of pieces of commonsense knowledge. This is
a huge number. [2]
From the estimates quoted by Singh it is clear that, admirable though the
efforts of the Cyc project have been, 1.5 million pieces of knowledge is a
mere drop in an ocean of several hundred million. Singh's fundamental
goal, therefore, is to make much more manageable the task of acquiring
all this knowledge in a format that a computer can understand. The
real problem is that computers do not know anything about us, how we
think and behave, or what we can achieve. They know nothing of the
patterns of our lives, the homes, offices, schools and other places where
we spend much of our time, of inter-personal relationships, of our hopes
and fears, our likes and dislikes, our personalities or our emotions. So
Singh concluded that we should teach them. Yes, you and I! His idea is
to tap into the vast volunteer workforce of humankind that has access to
the Internet.
Many of the millions of ordinary pieces of knowledge we acquire are
so obvious that we take them for granted: the sun rises in the morning
and sets in the evening; 12:30 p.m. is later than 12:15 p.m.; a cheetah
runs faster than a man. In order to accelerate the process of teaching
computers all this knowledge Singh decided to make a manual attempt
to build a system with common sense, a problem he described as being
“as large as any other that has been faced in computer science to date”.
Singh's idea of inviting everyone to participate in his project takes its
impetus from the fact that some 100 million of us have access to the
Internet. This makes it possible for millions of people to collaborate
on the project, to help build the mother of all databases. Anyone with
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