"People do not walk on their heads." The assertion comes about 900 statements deep into the 527,308 items that comprise the Open Mind common sense database. It's after "Laws are the rules of society" and before "The sky is blue during the day." This collection of mundane facts, which would take more than 20,000 pages to print out, consists entirely of statements so unremarkable they are barely worth stating. Most of us would correctly dismiss them as common sense. - from the article, Guess who's smarter

Good Places to Start

Newcomer's Guide to Commonsense Computing. From Commonsense Computing @ Media [the MIT Media Lab]. "Why give computers common sense? What does it even mean to give computers common sense? Here are several articles explaining why this problem is both challenging and important to solve if we want to take our computing technology to the next level."

• Projects at Commonsense Computing @ Media include:
  • Applications with Common Sense: "Commonsense-based technologies enable an entirely new breed of applications, ones that are actually "smart" in the sense of understanding the user's situation and goals somewhat like a real person would.
  • Learning Common Sense
  • X-Net Knowledge Bases: "What are good ways to represent and organize commonsense knowledge?"

Whatever happened to machines that think? By Justin Mullins. New Scientist (April 23, 2005; Issue 2496: pages 32 - 37). "The problem with chatbots is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). For years researchers have been promising to deliver technology that will make computers we can chat to like friends, robots that function as autonomous servants, and one day, for better or worse, even produce conscious machines. Yet we appear to be as far away as ever from any of these goals. But that could soon change. In the next few months, after being patiently nurtured for 22 years, an artificial brain called Cyc (pronounced 'psych') will be put online for the world to interact with. And it's only going to get cleverer. Opening Cyc up to the masses is expected to accelerate the rate at which it learns, giving it access to the combined knowledge of millions of people around the globe as it hoovers up new facts from web pages, webcams and data entered manually by anyone who wants to contribute. ... [Doug] Lenat's optimism about Cyc is mirrored by a reawakening of interest in AI the world over."

Guess who's smarter. As sophisticated as computing has become, machines still lack the common sense of a 3-year-old. But MIT artificial intelligence researchers are tackling ways to start building that basic breadth of knowledge into programs and applications. By D.C. Denison. The Boston Globe (May 26, 2003; page D1). "But now there are signs that 'common sense' artificial intelligence research may be making a comeback, sparked by projects like [Push] Singh's Open Mind database. For the first time, after decades of theoretical research, researchers and programmers have begun using a freely distributed, natural language common sense database to start the process of building common sense into products, programs, and applications. In fact, as Singh sits in his cramped office in the Media Lab, he's able to point in the direction of a number of MIT researchers using his database for applications that may soon bring common sense AI to consumers. A few doors down to the right, Barbara Barry, a graduate student in the Media Lab's Interactive Cinema group, is working with Singh to build common sense into video cameras. On the other side of the Media Lab, Henry Lieberman, a research scientist who works with the Software Agents Group, is using common sense to enhance e-mail programs, language translation software, even a search engine. And just outside Singh's office, the Media Lab's 'wearable computing' group is building common sense into the devices and sensors they believe many of us will be wearing in the future."

From 2001 to 2001: Common Sense and the Mind of HAL. By Douglas B. Lenat. [From HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality edited by: David G. Stork. MIT Press. The MIT Press provides an abstract online, and the author has the full-text of the article available on the Cycorp web site.]

• read an interview with Doug Lenat

Stanford Formal Reasoning Group. "The Stanford Formal Reasoning Group concentrates on Logical AI. This is an approach to the development of symbolic AI. It was first proposed by McCarthy in his 1959 paper, Programs with Common sense. It uses logic to describe the manner in which intelligent machines or people behave."

The logic of common sense. By Vladimir Lifschitz (1995). ACM Computing Surveys, 27 (3): 343 - 345. "Is the theory of commonsense reasoning a branch of logic or does it belong to artificial intelligence?"

Readings Online

Artificial Intelligence - Help Wanted - AI Pioneer Minsky. By Kevin Featherly. Newsbytes (August 31, 2001). "It is hard to find people who want to tackle common-sense reasoning, [Minsky] said, mainly because creating common-sense responses is an enormous programming challenge."

January 29, 2005: Google's search for meaning. By Duncan Graham-Rowe. New Scientist Magazine (Issue 2484; page 21). "Computers can learn the meaning of words simply by plugging into Google. The finding could bring forward the day that true artificial intelligence is developed. ... Paul Vitanyi and Rudi Cilibrasi of the National Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, realised that a Google search can be used to measure how closely two words relate to each other. ... From this a computer can infer meaning, says Vitanyi. 'This is automatic meaning extraction. It could well be the way to make a computer understand things and act semi-intelligently,' he says. ... The pair's results do not surprise Michael Witbrock of the Cyc project in Austin, Texas, a 20-year effort to create an encyclopaedic knowledge base for use by a future artificial intelligence. ... 'The web might make all the difference in whether we make an artificial intelligence or not,' says Witbrock."

The emotional machine. An Interview by Suzy Hansen. Salon.com (January 2, 2002). "Steve Grand, designer of the artificial life program Creatures, talks about the stupidity of computers, the role of desire in intelligence and the coming revolution in what it means to be 'alive.' ... 'But 'Star Trek' has more or less demonstrated that Mr. Spock isn't always as bright as he looks. It's Captain Kirk who always comes out on top because he's got emotions and common sense and all these other things that Spock doesn't have.'"

"Birth of a Thinking Machine. For 17 years, a team has been trying to develop the most sophisticated artificial intelligence system ever. This summer, the public will be able to see its work." By Michael A. Hiltzik. The Los Angeles Times (June 21, 2001) / made available by Cycorp. "Cyc already has displayed the ability to identify common-sense absurdities. 'Cyc already knows that people have to be a certain age before they're hired for a job,' Lenat says, meaning that it could clear such inaccurate entries as mistaken birth dates from corporate payroll records."

Cyc-ed Up for Open Source. IT-Director.com (December 4, 2001). "Cyc is about as close to true artificial Intelligence that you can get and has, typically, been living off Defence Department contracts for several years. Both the Feds and the company are mute on the nature of the research but have admitted to its being in the area of anti-terrorism. ... Lenat's vision hinges on this statement: 'If we can write down knowledge and wisdom and rules of thumb for the computer to follow and use, it can apply rules of reasoning to the knowledge that we give it and produce the same kinds of conclusions.'"

Making Sense of Common Sense Knowledge - Benjamin Kuipers on using commonsense reasoning to make useful conclusions, or, finding gold nuggets in a pan of sand. Ubiquity; Volume 4, Number 45 (January 13 - 19, 2004). "A long time ago, I wrote the following definition: 'Commonsense knowledge is knowledge about the structure of the external world that is acquired and applied without concentrated effort by any normal human that allows him or her to meet the everyday demands of the physical, spatial, temporal and social environment with a reasonable degree of success.' I still think this is a pretty good definition (though I might remove the restriction to the "external" world)."

Beating Common Sense into Interactive Applications. By Henry Lieberman, Hugo Liu, Push Singh, and Barbara Barry. AI Magazine 25(4): Winter 2004, 63-76. Abstract: "A long-standing dream of artificial intelligence has been to put commonsense knowledge into computers — enabling machines to reason about everyday life. Some projects, such as Cyc, have begun to amass large collections of such knowledge. However, it is widely assumed that the use of common sense in interactive applications will remain impractical for years, until these collections can be considered sufficiently complete and commonsense reasoning sufficiently robust. Recently, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory, we have had some success in applying commonsense knowledge in a number of intelligent interface agents, despite the admittedly spotty coverage and unreliable inference of today’s commonsense knowledge systems. This article surveys several of these applications and reflects on interface design principles that enable successful use of commonsense knowledge."

The St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium: Designing Architectures for Human-Level Intelligence. By Marvin Minsky, Push Singh, and Aaron Sloman. AI Magazine 25(2): Summer 2004, 113-124. Abstract: "To build a machine that has "'common sense' was once a principal goal in the field of artificial intelligence. But most researchers in recent years have retreated from that ambitious aim. Instead, each developed some special technique that could deal with some class of problem well, but does poorly at almost everything else. We are convinced, however, that no one such method will ever turn out to be 'best,' and that instead, the powerful AI systems of the future will use a diverse array of resources that, together, will deal with a great range of problems. To build a machine that's resourceful enough to have humanlike common sense, we must develop ways to combine the advantages of multiple methods to represent knowledge, multiple ways to make inferences, and multiple ways to learn. We held a two-day symposium in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, to discuss such a project --- to develop new architectural schemes that can bridge between different strategies and representations. This article reports on the events and ideas developed at this meeting and subsequent thoughts by the authors on how to make progress."

The Open Mind Common Sense Project. By Push Singh. "Push Singh of the MIT MediaLab describes a novel approach to achieving machine intelligence by teaching machines how to reason heuristically." Available from KurzweilAI.

• Find out more about the Open Mind Commonsense web site.

The World in a Box - Little Fanfare Greets The Coming Out of a Pivotal AI Project. By Lamont Wood. Scientific American News Scan (January 15, 2002). "Cyc's most prominent role thus far is as a software utility that improves the quality of retrievals for the Lycos Web search engine. If you search for 'dime,' it will suggest 'Franklin Roosevelt' as an alternative topic, because Cyc knows that F.D.R.'s picture is on the dime. That is impressive. But [Doug] Lenat had expected a lot more progress toward commonsense software by now. ... The project got bogged down by the growing realization that facts alone are not enough: they require context. For instance, vampires are not real -- but in fictional settings they may be treated as real. This inflated the size of the necessary database by a factor of 10, Lenat explains."

• Don't miss the sidebar: An Entity Named Monica: "The material in Cyc's database is expressed in second-order predicate calculus (a system of formal mathematical logic) using Cycorp's in-house notation, called CycL. A random line from the Cyc database, in CycL, reads..."

Related Web Sites

Active Logic. The Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland at College Park. "Active logics are a family of inference engines that incorporate a history of their reasoning as they run. This characteristic makes Active Logic systems more flexible than traditional AI systems and therefore more suitable for commonsense reasoning." Be sure to check out their links, such as "Primer" and "Applications".

"The Common Sense Problem Page is a resource page for researchers who are interested in logical formalizations of commonsense reasoning. It consists primarily of a list of benchmark problems in commonsense reasoning. ... The page also contains links to other useful resources, such as lists of researchers who are working in similar areas, and papers of interest." Maintained by Leora Morgenstern.

Cycorp. "Cycorp was founded in 1994 to research, develop, and commercialize Artificial Intelligence. Cycorp's vision is to create the world's first true artificial intelligence, having both common sense and the ability to reason with it."

• The Cyc knowledge base. "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 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. Cyc is not a frame-based system: the Cyc team thinks of the KB instead as a sea of assertions, with each assertion being no more 'about' one of the terms involved than another."
• OpenCyc: "The Project OpenCyc is the open source version of the Cyc technology, the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine. Cycorp, the builders of Cyc, have set up an independent organization, OpenCyc.org, to disseminate and administer OpenCyc, and have committed to a pipeline through which all current and future Cyc technology will flow into ResearchCyc (available for R&D; in academia and industry) and then OpenCyc. ... The Platform OpenCyc can be used as the basis of a wide variety of intelligent applications such as: speech understanding database integration rapid development of an ontology in a vertical area email prioritizing, routing, summarization, and annotating to name just a few."
• Also see: Will technology ever be as intelligent as us? By Liz Simpson. Computing / vnunet.com (December 13, 2002). " Ask any stranger, 'Do you have the time?' and they look at their watch. Not many of us would be fazed by that request, or the reply 'Time for what?' Our brains cope with understanding and responding to such ambiguities of communication, while computers, so far, do not. But one day they will, thanks to artificial intelligence pioneer Doug Lenat. At the Austin, Texas offices of Cycorp, Lenat and his team have been working on machines that are smart, in the way that humans using common sense are smart.

"Learner is a system which interactively acquires knowledge about the everyday world over objects. We aim to collect knowledge about everyday world which computers do not have and which is not easily obtainable with current text extraction methods. The collection is carried out both over the web and in a kiosk setting at a science museum exhibit titled 'Robots and Us'. Learner, developed by Dr. Timothy Chklovski, currently at the Interactive Knowledge Capture group at ISI [the Information Sciences Institute at USC], is poised to supercede an earlier version of Learner, the work carried out by Dr. Chklovski as PhD research at MIT." Also see this related USC press release (August 2, 2005).

Open Mind Commonsense from MIT's Commonsense Computing @ Media. "No computer knows as much as a five-year old child, because even at that young age the webs of knowledge in our brains are vast and intricate. We think this problem can be solved -- by harnessing the knowledge of everyone on the internet! We want to make it easy and fun for people to work together to give computers the millions of little pieces of ordinary knowledge that constitute 'common sense', all those aspects of the world that we all understand so well we take them for granted. Everyone has common sense, so everyone can participate!"

• Be sure to see the related article.

Related Pages

• Discourse Analysis
• General Index to Ai in the news: Reasoning
• Reasoning
• Representation

More Readings

JOKES and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious, a draft of Marvin Minsky's "Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious (In Cognitive Constraints on Communication, Vaina and Hintikka (eds.) Reidel, 1981.).

The mind, artificial intelligence and emotions - Interview with Marvin Minsky. Conducted by Renato M.E. Sabbatini, PhD, Associate Editor, Brain & Mind Magazine (Number 7; September - November 1998). "We need common-sense knowledge - and programs that can use it. Common sense computing needs several ways of representing knowledge. It is harder to make a computer housekeeper than a computer chess-player, because the housekeeper must deal with a wider range of situations."