Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 11 and 18 June

QuEST 11 and 18 June

There will not be any QuEST meetings on these two dates – but we will still post relevant links for reading.  The first posting is related to a sequence of emails that have been circulating in the group associated with a recent podcast ‘Machine Learning Street talk Episode #54’. 

The interview is with Gary Marcus / Luis Lamb.  They speak to several issues we’ve discussed – what might the third wave look like – early in the discussion (it is over 2 hours long) – they speak to recent articles by them:

The next decade of AI – Gary Marcus – https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.06177

The Next Decade in AI: Four Steps Towards Robust Artificial Intelligence Gary Marcus Robust AI 17 February 2020

Neurosymbolic ai the 3rd wave – https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.05876.pdf

Neurosymbolic AI: The 3rd Wave Artur d’Avila Garcez1 and Lu´ıs C. Lamb2 1 City, University of London, UK a.garcez@city.ac.uk 2 Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil luislamb@acm.org December, 2020

We suggest both articles are good to read – also about 20 min into the podcast the interviewers provide their definitions for some terms we’ve discussed in detail.  I provide below for your consideration.  I think they missed some of the conclusions we’ve reached but I found the discussion interesting.

6 most important words intension, extension, reasoning, knowledge, semantics and understanding

Intension – internal structure of an object – ‘the tutor of alexander the great was Aristotle, some other statement whose answer is Aristotle (best student of Plato) – intension is about the understanding the deeper reality where extension is extending without real understanding of the reality

Reasoning – is the act of deriving new knowledge from prior knowledge, given new information – using axioms and rules – ‘my trainer has been milking me’ – reasoning you would say they are taking my money

Knowledge – is a justified true belief – true means it is a fact, justified means it has been established and proved – gold standard

Semantics – is about the interpretation of or mapping to an inner structure to assign meaning (even for pictures not just in linguistics)

Meaning of an utterance – constructed from building materials – infinite – Chomsky universal grammar – everything in the structure – syntax – same as the intension

Understanding is successfully ascertaining, meaning by reconstruction the intension – that inner structure from the syntax / structure we had – if we can describe and reapply the knowledge we gleaned –