An Austin man is trying to teach computers how to think on their own by feeding them 15 million toddler-approved rules of logic, such as “You can’t be in two places at the same time,” and “You can’t pick something up unless you’re near it.”
That is the story of Doug Lenat, a former Stanford computer science professor out to remake artificial intelligence. Wired magazine highlighted his story in a piece called “One Genius’ Lonely Crusade to Teach a Computer Common Sense” that was published Thursday.
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The piece contrasts Lenat’s approach with machine learning, one of the principle technologies behind Google Inc.’s Go-playing artificial intelligence, which made headlines earlier this month when it beat an internationally ranked player at the board game. Companies such as Google and Microsoft Corp. are developing artificial intelligence by feeding massive amounts of data into neural networks that can learn patterns.
