UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with Common Sense Mingzhe Du and Hongying Du April, 2011 This paper “Programs With Common Sense” was written by John McCarthy in 1959, Stanford University

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Outline Programs with common sense Introduction Basic Concept The Construction of Advice Taker: an example Common sense database Common sense problem

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Why common sense: Software Is BRITTLE Example Google: “Is the Eiffel tower taller than the Dubai Burj Al Arab?” VS Eliza: a computer therapist in 1965, MIT a.php3

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Eliza: a computer therapist in 1965, MIT

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Eliza: a computer therapist in 1965, MIT

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering John McCarthy born in Boston in 1927 Invention of Lisp one of the founders of artificial intelligence and knowledge representation. Programs with Common Sense – the birth of knowledge representation

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense Introduction and Concept The Construction of Advice Taker: an example

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense Advice Taker: is a proposed program for solving problems by manipulating sentences in formal languages. The basic program will draw immediate conclusions from a list of premises. These conclusions will be either Declarative or Imperative sentences.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense Imperative Sentence When an imperative sentence is deduced the program takes a corresponding action. These actions may include printing sentences, moving sentences on lists, and reinitiating the basic deduction process on these lists. Declarative Sentence Describing the situation in which action is required together with a few imperatives that say what is wanted.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense Main Advantages: we expect the advice taker’s behavior will be improvable merely by making statements to it, telling it about its symbolic environment and what is wanted from it.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense A program has common sense if it automatically deduces for itself a sufficiently wide class of immediate consequences of anything it is told and what it already knows.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense “We base ourselves on the idea that: In order for a program to be capable of learning something it must first be capable of being told it.” -- John McCarthy

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense Features an intelligent system should have: All behaviors must be representable in the system. Interesting changes in behavior must be expressible in a simple way. All aspects of behavior except the most routine must be improvable. The machine must have or evolve concepts of partial success. The system must be able to create subroutines which can be included in procedures as units.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense Our Ultimate Objective Make programs that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense Introduction The Construction of Advice Taker: an example

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense An example: Assume that I am seated at my desk at home and I wish to go to the airport. My car is at my home also. The solution of the problem is to walk to the car and drive the car to the airport.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense 17 Premises a predicate ``at''. ``at(x,y)'' is a formalization of ``x is at y''.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense Here prog(y,u) is the program of first carrying out y and then u.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense Deduction Process According to x: home, y: desk, z: car We can deduce

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense Similarly, we can get Then According to We can deduce

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense According to We can deduce

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Programs with common sense According to We can deduce

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering The need for a computer to be able to perform commonsense reasoning The need for a computer to have a formal representation of the commonsense The representation of such knowledge, along with an inference method to reason with this knowledge, was an essential part of any artificial intelligence Programs with common sense

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Controversy Philosopher and linguist Yehoshua Bar-Hillel: The example of formal commonsense reasoning given in the paper was oversimplified and that any proper formalization of an example would necessarily be much longer and more complex.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Common sense database: open mind common sense In 1999, Common Sense Computing Initiative began at the MIT Media Lab to collect common sense from volunteers on the internet. Now, the English site has over a million sentences from over 15,000 contributors.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering A planning problem: The Wolf and the Bush A small girl is walking through a forest to visit her grandmother, and she passes a bush behind which a Wolf is hiding, planning to pounce out and eat her. Just as she gets close, however, the Wolf hears the singing of the woodcutters as they start work nearby. The Wolf therefore decides to stay hidden and not pounce on the little girl after all. The problem is to explain why the Wolf decides to stay behind the bush. Contributed by Pat Hayes and Lokendra Shastri (9th July, 1997)Pat HayesLokendra Shastri More examples at

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering Common sense problem If one encounters no difficulty along the way, one should be suspicious of the adequacy of the solution. It’s more difficult than they appear at first glance. Few of the problems listed in that website are currently solvable without considerable simplification.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Department of Computer Science and Engineering References John McCarthy, Programs With Common Sense, 1959, Mechanisation of Thought Processes, Proceedings of the Teddington Conference on the Mechanization of Thought Processes, 77–84 Patrick Hayes and Leora Morgenstern, On John McCarthy’s 80th Birthday, in Honor of His Contributions, 2007, AI Magazine 28(4): cs/CommonSensehttp:// cs/CommonSense