Doug Lenat has worked in diverse parts of AI – natural language understanding and generation, automatic program synthesis, expert systems, machine learning, etc. – for going on 40 years now, just long enough to dare to write this article. His 1976 Stanford PhD thesis, AM, demonstrated that creative discoveries in mathematics could be produced by a computer program (a theorem proposer, rather than a theorem prover) guided by a corpus of hundreds of heuristic rules for deciding which experiments to perform and judging "interestingness" of their outcomes. That work earned him the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, and sparked a renaissance in machine learning research. Dr. Lenat was on the CS faculty at CMU and Stanford, was one of the founders of Teknowledge, and was in the first batch of AAAI Fellows. He worked with Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold to launch Microsoft Research Labs, and to this day he remains the only person to have served on the technical advisory boards of both Apple and Microsoft.

Cogitai, a new company aimed at developing and commercializing core artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, today announced a strategic investment from Sony Corporation. Cogitai is focused on addressing one of the biggest problems confronting AI: namely, that no existing AI system has an understanding of the world comparable to a human's. Even small children in the first few years of life develop an understanding of the world far richer and more sophisticated than the most elaborate AI systems on earth. To address this problem, Cogitai is committed to developing systems that learn continually from their experience. "Our continual-learning technology will allow computer systems to build knowledge and skills simply through interacting with the world around them," said Dr. Mark Ring, CEO of Cogitai.

To address this problem, Cogitai is committed to developing systems that learn continually from their experience. "Our continual-learning technology will allow computer systems to build knowledge and skills simply through interacting with the world around them," said Dr. Mark Ring, CEO of Cogitai. "Simple knowledge and skills gained through early experience will allow development of more complex knowledge and skills in a powerful cycle of never-ending self-improvement. Though this ambition has always been one of the major goals of AI, it has never been considered feasible in the near term by those knowledgeable in the field, but our team believes it sees a path toward this dream." "Our company will build upon decades of research in the fields of Reinforcement Learning and Deep Learning, harnessing recent progress, but going well beyond current technology to create systems that learn for themselves how the world works in ways reminiscent of how human children do," said Dr. Satinder Singh, Chief Scientist of Cogitai.

WWTS (What Would Turing Say?) Turing's Imitation Game was a brilliant Turing was heavily influenced by the World War II "game" If Turing were alive today, what sort of test might he propose? If a machine could fool interrogators as often as a typical man, then one would have to conclude that that machine, as programmed, was as intelligent as a person (well, as intelligent as men.) As Judy Genova (1994) puts it, Turing's originally proposed game involves not a question of species, but one of gender. The current version, where the interrogator is told he or she needs to distinguish a person from a machine, is (1) much more difficult to get a program to pass, and (2) almost all the added difficulties are largely irrelevant to intelligence! And it's possible to muddy the waters even more by some programs appearing to do well at it due to various tricks, such as having the interviewee program claim to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian who doesn't speak English well (University of Reading 2014), and hence having all its wrong or bizarre responses excused due to cultural, age, or language issues.