Many years ago (late 80s, early 90s?), I saw a PBS special on Artificial Intelligence. This new (at the time) project had taken a different angle on the traditional approach. They began by entering thousands of words (adjectives, nouns, verbs, etc.) into a database. Then they taught it sentence structure and some basic “truths”. Then they would allow the machine to churn at night and develop its own “ideas”. The next day, they would examine each “idea” and tell the program if it was correct or incorrect. For example, the program came up with this hypothesis: If a man holds an electric razor, his entire arm becomes electric. The technician would then instruct the program that this “idea” was incorrect. However, the program was also able to construct correct “ideas” of its own, such as: If Bob is Harry’s father, and Sam is Bobs father, then Sam must be Harry’s grandfather.
I may have some of the project details incorrect. It was a while ago.
ANYWAY…I was wondering if anyone knew the name of this project or what ever became of it. Any info would be appreciated.
It’s not exactly as you describe, but it sounds similar enough to be what you’re remembering…
I know of a few, similar projects, but in none that I know of can the AI spontaneously derive ‘ideas’. There are some that can read stories and derive a synopsis of the story, test logical conclusions about the content, etc., but in the end, it still merely number crunching…
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