Category Archives: Commerce
07 Jun Finding a Tree in the Forest
Complex Search Finding the information you need can be a problem, particularly when you have to look through tons (or terabytes) of data. I recall when geocaching first became popular. The idea that a technology could create a model for an entertaining activity that connects people in unusual ways is quite diverting. Will it still be popular […]
05 Jun Intelligent Traveling Salesmen
Another Sample Problem Several specific reasoning or inference problems have provided fodder for AI textbooks and experiments. One of these is the traveling salesman problem (Get an explanation and an example applet here): Given a traveling salesman who must get to x number of cities, find the shortest route the salesman can travel to reach […]
30 May State of the Art in Knowledge Representation
KR Evolves Slowly The state of the art in computer programming has evolved toward data-driven techniques. In early programs, the data was “hard-coded” into the program with specific functions operating differently on each data item and type. Gradually, programmers began storing data and templates in different files, attempting to write orthogonal procedures to introduce a modularity […]
27 May Machine Components for Intelligence
If an abacus or a log and rope can be considered intelligent machines, then we can decompose their parts, possibly rearrange them, and get different kinds of intelligent machines. I know this is an extreme example of absurd reasoning. Let’s go from the opposite direction in the complexity spectrum. Can we use the human brain and its parts as […]
15 May Analyzing Semantics
Semantics The stratum of semantics is usually associated with meaning. Throughout the 1980s, when I was in college, semantics was viewed as more and more important in text-understanding systems. One aspect of semantics that has received a great deal of attention is thematic or case roles, which can be very useful in defining the roles of words or […]
10 May Word Structure Analysis
Analyzing Morphology In many natural languages, gender or case has a profound affect on morphology – so much so that students have to memorize conjugation tables. It’s really easy to teach computers about conjugation tables and they remember very well. If it were not so, it may be difficult to keep their attention long enough […]
08 May Three-Dimensional Model of Language
Topographical maps of concepts in a text provide useful views of language. Fortuna et al in Semantic Knowledge Management (pp. 155-169) describe how three-dimensional topic maps can both give meaningful insights into clusters of related content, such as news stories or published papers. I have frequently stressed the importance of concept associations in the brain, in cognitive […]
14 Apr Translation: Inverted Communication
Lately I’ve been concentrating on modeling communicative skills. Whether speaking, signing, gesturing or writing, we begin with intent and wrap symbols around the intent or message to encode it. Translating and encrypting start with a fully encoded message, and unwrap it, before rewrapping it in a different form that is intended to preserve the original intent. Translation is an application […]
07 Apr A Good Excuse for Heuristic Logic
Dichotomous logic is useful for reasoning about form or the way things are. Function, or cause and effect, however, is fuzzier because observation may not be enough to exclude other processes that lead to the same result. Heuristic logic applies to function instead of form, prescribing actions based facts. Heuristics often operate at a relatively […]
07 Mar Your Personal Bubble
There is time-space context within which we constantly move and place ourselves in the universe. Our constantly moving and evolving personal bubble is the starting point of understanding. Where are you at this very moment? Are you where you want to be? Where am I? Why am I here? Why isn’t the tide washing the […]