Can you guess the source.

Posted by Phil Henshaw-2 on Apr 20, 2007; 4:15am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Can-you-guess-the-source-tp523696p523755.html

Marcus,
What I noticed in your replies to Frank was that you kept coming back
with the additional levels of distinctions that a careful application of
categories to physical things must encounter.  Do you have a method of
doing that, or is that part of the method of the Cyc data format
somehow?  

My method of identifying emerging complex systems is really the rock bed
I always return to, observing when and where the continuity of change
(flow) in time series data begins and ends.  Do you have a series of
questions you ask to dig up the structural variety in a physical
situation?


Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: friam-bounces at redfish.com
> [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels
> Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 9:33 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Can you guess the source.
>
>
> Phil Henshaw wrote:
> > I'll have to try OpenCyc to have any clear idea what it's
> for.   What's
> > the productive question it asks?
> >  
> >From  http://www.cyc.com/cyc/technology/whatiscyc_dir/whatsincyc
>
>  The Cyc knowledge base (KB) is a formalized representation of a vast
> quantity of fundamental human knowledge: facts, rules of thumb, and
> heuristics for reasoning about the objects and events of
> everyday life.
> The medium of representation is the formal language CycL, described
> below. The KB consists of terms--which constitute the vocabulary of
> CycL--and assertions which relate those terms. These
> assertions include
> both simple ground assertions and rules.
>
> ..
>
> The Cyc KB is divided into many (currently thousands of)
> "microtheories", each of which is essentially a bundle of assertions
> that share a common set of assumptions; some microtheories
> are focused
> on a particular domain of knowledge, a particular level of detail, a
> particular interval in time, etc. The microtheory mechanism
> allows Cyc
> to independently maintain assertions which are prima facie
> contradictory, and enhances the performance of the Cyc system by
> focusing the inferencing process.
>
> ..
>
> Natural-language (NL) processing is among the most studied --
> and most
> intractable -- outstanding challenges of software engineering. Many
> teams have attempted to produce NL systems capable of reading
> and making
> sense of plain english text, but none have succeeded to any
> significant
> degree outside of narrow, pre-conceived domains. As shown in the
> examples below, Cyc-like common sense is a prerequisite for
> human-level
> competence at this task.
>
> Consider the following pair of sentences:
>
>     * Fred saw the plane flying over Zurich.
>     * Fred saw the mountains flying over Zurich.
>
> Although the sentences are very similar, humans have little
> difficulty
> in recognizing that in the first sentence, "flying" probably
> refers to
> the plane, while in the second sentence, "flying" almost certainly
> refers to Fred.
>
>
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