This was an interesting article, thanks for sharing. My general impression is that there is a lot being said between the lines here, and despite the author's general repetition of his respect for...
This was an interesting article, thanks for sharing. My general impression is that there is a lot being said between the lines here, and despite the author's general repetition of his respect for Lenat, the content of what he's saying about him doesn't seem to be very positive at all, and the implications are worse.
I'm also interested that he said he could never get his hands on Cyc, given that its Wikipedia page says it had several public releases under open source licenses (for at least portions of it). I was also not convinced by the explanation that the paradigmatic shift Wolfram Alpha presented was one of 'computation.' I think he may be trying to say that it turned out to be more useful to spend time building direct knowledge bases about useful things in the world, that you can compute with, than it was to try to lead with the capacity for advanced reasoning that you could later apply to a knowledgebase or infer a knowledgebase from. I think this notion holds true in general, where the successful successors of expert systems are most often knowledge bases for areas of science that encode and link findings, and where some level of semantic reasoning is present, but is most often largely ignored, or considered a kind of auxiliary feature of their use in serving as priors for statistical analysis etc.
Nevertheless, as someone who works in the area of those successors, I enjoyed reading some of the social history. There is a particular mixture of that curious semi nostalgia for something you are very familiar with but never directly experienced, paired with the visionary idealism and ultimate tragedy of so many instances of this kind of logicist approach to AI.
That sounds consistent with everything I've ever heard about Stephen Wolfram--that the dude thinks he's the smartest person in the history of the world and that he can do no wrong. He's certainly...
despite the author's general repetition of his respect for Lenat, the content of what he's saying about him doesn't seem to be very positive at all
That sounds consistent with everything I've ever heard about Stephen Wolfram--that the dude thinks he's the smartest person in the history of the world and that he can do no wrong. He's certainly brilliant, but it seems to have gone to his head.
I haven't had much exposure to him previously, but I certainly got that vibe from this article, between its whole premise as what can be viewed uncharitably as a kind of humblebrag triumphalism...
I haven't had much exposure to him previously, but I certainly got that vibe from this article, between its whole premise as what can be viewed uncharitably as a kind of humblebrag triumphalism over someone who just died, and talking like he's the first person to think of "computation."
Just to be clear, when he refers to computation, he's not talking about what you or I think of when we hear the word. He's referring to things like cellular automata. He thinks it's such a big...
Just to be clear, when he refers to computation, he's not talking about what you or I think of when we hear the word. He's referring to things like cellular automata. He thinks it's such a big deal that he called his book A New Kind of Science. He's at least a little pompous, to say the least.
That's some much needed context, thank you. I can see the connection with theorem provers and all that more clearly now, I suppose it is an abstraction that can be used for rule-based systems that...
That's some much needed context, thank you. I can see the connection with theorem provers and all that more clearly now, I suppose it is an abstraction that can be used for rule-based systems that isn't limited to traditional formal logic (or at least a way of thinking about those systems in a different way). I'm looking forward into reading more into it.
This was an interesting article, thanks for sharing. My general impression is that there is a lot being said between the lines here, and despite the author's general repetition of his respect for Lenat, the content of what he's saying about him doesn't seem to be very positive at all, and the implications are worse.
I'm also interested that he said he could never get his hands on Cyc, given that its Wikipedia page says it had several public releases under open source licenses (for at least portions of it). I was also not convinced by the explanation that the paradigmatic shift Wolfram Alpha presented was one of 'computation.' I think he may be trying to say that it turned out to be more useful to spend time building direct knowledge bases about useful things in the world, that you can compute with, than it was to try to lead with the capacity for advanced reasoning that you could later apply to a knowledgebase or infer a knowledgebase from. I think this notion holds true in general, where the successful successors of expert systems are most often knowledge bases for areas of science that encode and link findings, and where some level of semantic reasoning is present, but is most often largely ignored, or considered a kind of auxiliary feature of their use in serving as priors for statistical analysis etc.
Nevertheless, as someone who works in the area of those successors, I enjoyed reading some of the social history. There is a particular mixture of that curious semi nostalgia for something you are very familiar with but never directly experienced, paired with the visionary idealism and ultimate tragedy of so many instances of this kind of logicist approach to AI.
That sounds consistent with everything I've ever heard about Stephen Wolfram--that the dude thinks he's the smartest person in the history of the world and that he can do no wrong. He's certainly brilliant, but it seems to have gone to his head.
I haven't had much exposure to him previously, but I certainly got that vibe from this article, between its whole premise as what can be viewed uncharitably as a kind of humblebrag triumphalism over someone who just died, and talking like he's the first person to think of "computation."
Just to be clear, when he refers to computation, he's not talking about what you or I think of when we hear the word. He's referring to things like cellular automata. He thinks it's such a big deal that he called his book A New Kind of Science. He's at least a little pompous, to say the least.
That's some much needed context, thank you. I can see the connection with theorem provers and all that more clearly now, I suppose it is an abstraction that can be used for rule-based systems that isn't limited to traditional formal logic (or at least a way of thinking about those systems in a different way). I'm looking forward into reading more into it.