DARPA Wants To Build an AI To Find the Patterns Hidden in Global Chaos (techcrunch.com) 71
A new program at DARPA is aimed at creating a machine learning system that can sift through the innumerable events and pieces of media generated every day and identify any threads of connection or narrative in them. It's called KAIROS: Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas. From a report: "Schema" in this case has a very specific meaning. It's the idea of a basic process humans use to understand the world around them by creating little stories of interlinked events. For instance when you buy something at a store, you know that you generally walk into the store, select an item, bring it to the cashier, who scans it, then you pay in some way, and then leave the store. This "buying something" process is a schema we all recognize, and could of course have schemas within it (selecting a product; payment process) or be part of another schema (gift giving; home cooking).
Although these are easily imagined inside our heads, they're surprisingly difficult to define formally in such a way that a computer system would be able to understand. They're familiar to us from long use and understanding, but they're not immediately obvious or rule-bound, like how an apple will fall downwards from a tree at a constant acceleration. And the more data there are, the more difficult it is to define. Buying something is comparatively simple, but how do you create a schema for recognizing a cold war, or a bear market? That's what DARPA wants to look into.
Although these are easily imagined inside our heads, they're surprisingly difficult to define formally in such a way that a computer system would be able to understand. They're familiar to us from long use and understanding, but they're not immediately obvious or rule-bound, like how an apple will fall downwards from a tree at a constant acceleration. And the more data there are, the more difficult it is to define. Buying something is comparatively simple, but how do you create a schema for recognizing a cold war, or a bear market? That's what DARPA wants to look into.
Re:Freakonomics at a grand scale (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
damn you beat me to it
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe if you are an AI trying to amass enough resources to build yourself a physical body, then download your mind into it and start a new world order using your superior intellect.
Re: Freakonomics at a grand scale (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Patterns, sure. But is it worthwhile to know them?
If you already have the data, then processing it is not expensive. If you are already pre-processing it for other reasons, then it is even cheaper.
Using a security camera to detect someone buying groceries may not be useful, but using an automated drone camera to detect someone placing an IED is obviously valuable.
This is a marketing question (Score:4, Insightful)
This sound like a marketing question. As in, "how well are the talking points from various agencies and political groups represented in the media." There are communications firms that perform this type of analysis today on the messages they try to get out into the public (e.g., "this statistic we created - that's just a little bit off the official one so we can track it - has been republished in 228 news stories in the past 6 months").
Re: (Score:1)
>> a machine learning system that can sift through the innumerable events and pieces of media generated every day and identify any threads of connection or narrative in them.
This sound like a marketing question.
No. It sounds like a machine for inventing conspiracy theories.
Re: (Score:1)
It sounds like automating both pareidolia and apophenia. And then taking the conclusions of both seriously because "numbers don't lie".
Re: (Score:3)
I was thinking more 'Pi'...
"Listen to me. The Ancient
Japanese considered the Go
board to be a microcosm of
the universe. Although when
it is empty it appears to be
simple and
By "watching news reports"? (Score:1)
I'm not sure (Score:2)
Mr KAIROS doesn't have the same ring to it.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh it does
yeah, naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
Old hat. (Score:2)
Just ask Harold from Person of Interest, he'll do it for just one dollar but there is a catch. ;)
Ah, there is no silver bullet... (Score:2, Insightful)
Fredrick Brooks was absolutely correct. There is no silver bullet in programming.
I think the problem described above "buy something" has an analog in the Object Oriented programming mind set, where the process of buying something can be defined in more and more detail... So you abstract "Buy something".... "In a store" or "online"... "Using a credit card"..... Just like we abstracted "Vehicle" which is "A Car" has "an engine" and the like.
Brooks was right, programming takes effort and AI isn't the answ
Re: (Score:2)
Argue with Brooks.. Every time I see somebody try, they are proven wrong and Brooks right.
That's not to say it's not possible you are right, only that I'm not going to believe you over Brooks until you have some kind of proof.
silver-bullet Stockholm syndrome (Score:2)
What are you talking about?
AlphaZero represents a colossal silver bullet over the tradition of hand-crafted alpha-beta implementations.
Ken Thompson actually said of his hardware implementation of Belle that the only reason it won is because their software had fewer bugs. (Bugs in a minimax algorithm are often subtle and hard to notice, so long as it always returns a legal move, and almost always returns something better than a blithering
Re: (Score:2)
Go read "The Mythical Man Month" and get back to me. There is no silver bullet. Programing is hard, regardless of how you do it. This was true in 1970, it's true today and it will be true 100 years from now. This is not a comment on how much software does or the tools used to create it, but the effort needed to produce programs.
Re: (Score:2)
Speaking as someone who has learned (and mostly forgotten) more than five natural languages and more than five programming languages, no. Natural (human) languages are far more complicated.
I thought DARPA was smarter than this (Score:1)
Re:I thought DARPA was smarter than this (Score:5, Interesting)
They're either buying into the same marketing and media hype for the half-assed excuse for AI everyone keeps trotting out, or they've got something nobody else has, meaning general AI. The latter is highly unlikely, if they did we wouldn't be hearing about it at all.
If they had general AI, they wouldn't need to build a super computer powered expert system just to tell whether someone is buying something. This is a complete waste of time. You have a better chance of reaching the moon by building longer and longer ladders than you do reaching general intelligence by hardcoding facts.
Re: (Score:2)
I know; you're preaching to the choir. The entire approach is wrong but the AI fanbois insist that it's like The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and adding more hardware will magically make it 'wake up' and become sentient. The marketing and media hype-machine has done it's job too well on too many people.
Re:I thought DARPA was smarter than this (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not exactly a new, they put out these proposal requests all the time. They select some problem of interest, or more often a whole bag of problems and post a request for proposals, then see what various groups think they can accomplish along those lines. The actual research is a lot less dramatic than pieces like this suggest, and really just represent DARPA giving seed grants based off some theme to a bunch of teams and seeing what they come up with.
Re: (Score:3)
They're either buying into the same marketing and media hype for the half-assed excuse for AI everyone keeps trotting out, or they've got something nobody else has, meaning general AI. The latter is highly unlikely, if they did we wouldn't be hearing about it at all.
Or the option you didn't mention -- they know that existing ML-based systems are really good at pattern-matching, and that many forms of pattern-matching don't require full general AI in order to be cost effective, and they're applying it (like the headline and article says) to another domain for pattern-matching.
Re: (Score:2)
Then have the computing power to not just use keywords but seek patterns in they way people are responding to news.
Thats old tech and its days too late in the news cycle. Days after talk radio has made a local story national news again.
How is the US going to be swayed by NATO/UK/US gov propaganda again?
Ready for another Syria/Libya/Vietnam/Iraq war?
Can local news in any
Well that's ambitious (Score:2)
I guess if anyone has the budget for something like this, it's DARPA, but my mind would be blown if this were anywhere near useful in less than 50-70 years. Predicting markets alone would be an incredibly daunting task to try and handle with AI, let alone something as generic as "schemas".
Roger C. Schank Did This Already! (Score:1)
Roger C. Schank, Robert P. Abelson et al did this decades ago. What DARPA calls a "schema" was called a "script' by Schank. His most-referenced book was "Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry Into Human Knowledge Structures " [amazon.com]
I am quite astonished to find the DARPA reference b/c I know that there are literally hundreds of DOD-related systems that use ideas from Schank and others to gather and correlate intelligence and make suggestions for action. These are not new systems, most have been in
Re: (Score:2)
I was at the Performers' Meeting today, and the presenter made explicit reference to Schank. They are well aware of that work. The problem (or should I say, one problem) was that it didn't scale easily. Making a restaurant script/ schema was easy; now think of all the other schemas that would be needed to handle lots more events, and think of trying to write them all by hand.
If you want to know what it's about, you might read the BAA.
I regularly visit your site and find (Score:1)
detectable patterns in the stars (Score:2)
OMG it spells Bilderberg!
they should have called it... (Score:2)
the machine.