vacation

Well, my short 4 week summer break is in full swing. All except the summer. I went to UW Madison last weekend to attend my brother-in-law's graduation (PhD). We had a barbecue at a state park. It was cold, windy, and wet most of the time. I have the unfortunate habit of dressing for whatever weather there was yesterday, and this is a terrible idea when packing for a few day outing.

I finished up finals the first week in May. I will be starting two classes in June/July to get some nuisances out of the way.

I am continuing to work on Knowledge Representation, investigating Cyc. It's a bear of a system, gobbles up RAM like there's a bonbon at the bottom of the heap, and tends to be a little persnickity. Anyone recall 3rd grade computer lessons where before letting you get your hands on a Logo system, they told stories about the stupidity of robots... something along the lines of:
"If you have a bucket on the table, and want it filled with water, you can tell a man to take the bucket to the well and fill it. If you want a machine to do this, you have to tell it to move forward 10 feet (to the table), reach for the item at 3-1/2 feet, grasp, lift, turn (whatever direction the well is) advance so many feet, stop, lower bucket into well (at this point the robot has probably fallen in with the bucket since we left off telling it about the rope and crank)..."

I am struggling to get this enormous warehouse of mundane facts to produce sensible answers. What's a thing like both a knife and a spoon? Of course a snowmobile also has a handle and is a man-made tool, that's just the right answer. This was a productive answer... Every time I try to whittle it down closer, I reach less and less satisfactory answers. Did you know that the greatest common denominator of dashboard and spoon is 1, and that they are thus relatively prime numbers? I didn't, and I sometimes worry about the leaps of ingenuity that allow this program to steam-roll through common sense.

I think Cyc is a great way to represent knowledge, and for some simple questions it is fitting, but for many of the things an eight year old would think you were stupid to have asked it flounders. It is, of course, just as likely that I don't have the nuanced feel for the thousands of available predicates to ask just the right question to lead it to the best answer (Fork would win a gold medal).