Special Interest - Common Sense

FOLLOW-UP 06/11/07

All work related to this subject is being done in-life now. The group is the Cartesian Theater.

Sincerely,

Yordie Sands

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FOLLOW-UP

It has been over two weeks since I added the original post (below). Since that time I have determined that my goal of creating a "cycle of life" at the core of an SL artificial being is not possible without access to the viewer/client internals. For this reason I an moving my quest in a different direction and will not be checking back into this forum except on an occassional basis.
Sincerely,

Yordie Sands

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ORIGINAL POST 04-28-2007

Hello fellow pilgrims,

I am a semi-retired software developer (c/c++, other) with a lifelong interest in Artificial Intelligence and specificially computerized common sense communications.

I'm currently working on a vision document that describes my approach to the problems associated with computerized common sense reasoning but have also done some experiments in preparation for a follow-on technical specification.

My interest in Second Life is two fold, first as a pilgrim in the magical relm of Second Life, but my other focus is SL as a platform for AI experiments. At this stage I'm still just an explorer and haven't attempted to learn how to use any of the SL development tools.

I am not affiliated with any educational institution or government entity, but I do have one corporate collaborator, a fellow developer whom I've know for many years. Neither of us have any plans for commercializing our work at this stage. I would like to discuss the topic of AI in general and my specific area of interest with kindred developers, scientists and knowledgeable enthusiasts.

RIGHT NOW --> My focus is on a cycle of life built within an artificial universe where every entity and being experiences life instantaneously. I believe the instant is a cycle that passes through every object in the universe, recieving, processing, and sending messages to and from the other objects in that universe. The idea is to break down every action that occurs into its smallest instance, and the action persists until each instance has been completed, suspended or discontinued. In this way _parallelism_ is achieved through the speed of the computers processor, and the information associated with the cycle of life is used to create a "Cartesian Theater" where each computer being forms a context for his or her own being. To make an impossible experiment even more unlikely, knowledge representation must possess properties that enable actions and concepts to be stored, networked and retrieved for each humanlike entity. And just to take one step further into the abyss, I'd like to take advantage of the knowledge base created by the Cyc project. By using a Cyc interface, an entity will have access to vast quantities of knowledge.

If you understand what I've just said then please share your thoughts. I'll try to check in here on a weekly basis and more often if we can generate a useful dialog. Meanwhile, I'm headed back to my fantasy life.

BTW, I already have serious doubts that I will be able to use SL for my experiments. In many ways, SL is an ideal environment but my instinct is that I cannot get close enough to central kernal of SL to implement the "cycle of life". Other problems might have viable workarounds though.

Sincerely,

Yordie Sands

Can you describe your experiments more? Would it be possible to use LSL as thin clients to external programs via such open source environments as PHP? Or would you require using libsl to directly interface with them and CYC?

No, I don't really get it
but then again this also eludes me:
http://www.timecube.com/

Just installed opencyc on my linux server. Seems fine, except my browser can't connect without causing a segmentation fault. Seems as if my server doesn't have enough ram (the docs recommend at least 1G, and my machine only has 512M). Will keep trying tho.

Hello Nynthan, Please keep in mind that I am still very much at a disadvantage in linking my programming knowledge with SL specific tools including LSL and the LIBSL, especially the later.

There are many ways to approach many of the specifications of the "cycle of life" that I am developing. Since you are referring to Cyc, the discussion narrows to inferrence and natural language processing.

Imagine an avitar who simply sits in an environment and responds to questions originating from SL. In this context, an program is needed to receive and interpret questions, then infer what a proper response will be to the question. (BTW, Cyc has been used in Doom3 in a similar context). The interface from SL is basically chat/IM text and the output is chat/IM text, but the big problem is interpretive/inference process, and this will require advanced Cyc expertise.

Cyc development is not the area that I want to work on personally because I believe the foundation of Cyc, its Ontology & Knowledge Base, is not well suited for an artificial being (super avitar) that requires the ability to learn. Cyc is one of the greatest achievments of AI history but it has architectural limitations. I'm hoping to attract a Cyc specialist into my project or inspire anyone who is interested in Cyc to develop those skills. In fact, Cyc is likely to form a foundation technology for artificial language for the foreseeable future.

My goal is to have Chat/IM messages coming in through the SL client, be worked on by a Cyc program that interfaces with the Cyc knowledge base and return Chat/IM messages to the SL client and into Second Life. Having that technology in place would set the stage for higher levels of devleopment, starting with a separate (from Cyc) knowledge representation system that is specific to an an artificial being. In Cyc, knowledge starts with "Thing" but in my artificial being, knowledge starts with "I-Me".

In my artificial being, the "I-Me" will create rich knowledge engrams whose conceptualization will be assisted by the Cyc inferences.

I need to re-emphasize that my knowledge of SL specific architecture, interfaces and tools is still rudimentary.

Hope this helps, Yordie Sands

Yes, Cyc is the pig of all pigs and it can only get larger. 1GB is really a machine minimum but it I am setup with VMware and can run Cyc in a virtual machine using only 512mb of memory... although I haven't downloaded the latest version so the newest version may be a bigger pig. And then there are the more advanced versions that will require GBs.