INTERNET users are being asked to share their common sense with a computer
program. Canadian computer scientist Chris McKinstry hopes that building a huge
body of facts into the program will help it understand how people think. 鈥淭o
digitise the parts of the human experience that don鈥檛 currently exist,鈥� he
says.
Called the Generic Artificial Consciousness, it has at its heart a huge
database of statements about the world that can be either true or false.
Realising what a superhuman task it would be to complete this database by
himself, McKinstry has turned to the Web to ask the rest of us
(www.mindpixel.com).
McKinstry believes it may be 10 years before the GAC has collected the
billion facts鈥攈e calls them mindpixels鈥攈e鈥檚 aiming for. Because
people will disagree on some statements, he expects that four times that many
will have to be collected to reach a consensus. Once the GAC is complete it will
be used to train an artificial neural network that should help reveal patterns
and irregularities in human thought.
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