AI Magazine, 6(4):65-85

Why People Think Computers Can't MOST PEOPLE ARE CONVINCED computers cannot think. I think those specialists are too used t,o That is, really think. This leads them to believe that there can't "thinking." This essay explains why they are wrong . Can Computers Do Only What They're Told? concerned with huge numerical computations: that's why the things were called computers. Most people think that "creativity" Yet even then a fringe of people envisioned what's now If so, then no computer can create-since, clearly, they realized that computers could manipulate not only numbers anything machines can do can be explained. To see what's wrong with that, we'd better turn aside able to go beyond arithmetic, perhaps to imitate the informa-from those outstanding works our cuhure views as very best Con processes that happen inside minds.

The Open Mind Common Sense project is an attempt to construct a database of commonsense knowledge through the collaboration of a distributed community of thousands of non-expert netizens. We give an overview of the project, describe our knowledge acquisition and representation strategy of using natural language rather than formal logic, and demonstrate this strategy with a search engine application that employs simple commonsense reasoning to reformulate problem queries into more effective solution queries.