MLP: Open mind

[liv]

No, I'm not dead, just completely snowed under right now. I'm submitting this week, which means the end is in sight, but it also means I absolutely have to finish a lot of work in a short time.

Anyway, I saw a link in a comment on another LJ discussion to the Open mind AI project. I really badly do not need another source of displacement this week, but it's kind of an interesting concept so I thought I'd pass it on.

Much as I like this kind of distributed information building (I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia and I used to do a lot of volunteering for various open directory projects in the days before there was Google), this particular effort does seem a bit implausible to me. But it's interesting, both in outline and in detail. It's surprising how hard some of the questions are, actually; I was really stumped by exercises such as 'Describe in not more than five sentences what you need to know to understand the statement: The dog was straining at its leash'.

Comments

[darcydodo]

What do you mean, "in the days before there was Google"? Google's been around about as long as you've been at university.

[liv]

Are you sure? I remember in my first and second years Altavista was about the best search engine available. Maybe I was just really stupid and didn't know about Google, but it seems to me that it's more recent than that.

[darcydodo]

Google was established in September 1998, so that's the beginning of your second year, my first year. I remember it growing pretty quickly.

[liv]

K, that makes sense; it wasn't around at all in my first year, and in my second year I wasn't really online very much, since I didn't have access in my room, so I could quite easily have missed Google for most of that year. So I was probably a bit slow to catch on, but not entirely dimwitted.

[darcydodo]

Not entirely, no. ;)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

When I were a lad, there were no search engines. You young whippersnappers don't know how lucky you are. <hobbles away on zimmerframe>