December 23, 1994--Birth of Scientific AI
Christopher McKinstry
I just wanted to thank you for all the work you did in building my
timeline (http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/mckinstry.html). You made me
aware of some mistakes I've have made in my own internal
chronology--which I have now corrected. Your work stands as an
important resourse for future Chris McKinstry scholars independent of
its obvious bias.
Some of the information you dug up is quite interesting, some is very
funny, some is embarrassing, some just crazy. But, tempted as I might
be to delete my unflattering postings from the google index (as is my
right), I will not. I was who I was. And more important, my work and
by proxy, my history is actually important--if for no other reason
that I built the best possible--and only scientific test--of any
future claim of AI.
The Mindpixel Corpus is pushing a million items now (748,416). This
data is better than the MIT collection and CYC because of the
community validation it subject it to--the validation makes it a
scientific measurement, not just engineering. No credible person
disputes that the corpus is the highest quality collection of
commonsense fact on the planet, though many take issue with what I
think can be done with the corpus.
Can I use the data to train a neural net? Maybe or maybe not. Can I
use it as a fitness test in artificial evolution? Maybe or maybe not.
Can it be understood symbolically ala MIT? Maybe or maybe not.
These practical questions notwithstanding, what history will remember
is that the human race collectively started moving itself bit by
literal bit into computers on December 23, 1994. On that day, AI moved
into the public and began a very fast road to becoming a falsifiable
science for the first time--grounded in measurement and not hype. By
the year 2000, tens of thousands of people from all the regions of the
planet were helping to build up a high resolution map of the human
mind and the best and most credible scientists of the time recognized
the value and courage of the effort.
Chris.
http://www.mindpixel.com