Welcome to Representing Knowledge with Primitives

Computers should help people deal with everyday problems from making decisions to playing games. To offer more help, computers need more complete representations of knowledge, i.e. useful incorporated information. This web site provides tools to collaborate on creating more complete representations, starting with textual natural language.

Hypothesis

This research web site explores a hypothesis about representing knowledge:

Conditional probabilities

Conditional probabilities deal with uncertainty in information, ambiguity, and approximation, which complete representations must embrace.

with logical expressions

To get an expressive and fine-grained enough representation, conditional probabilities, which are statements about events, could use complex logical expressions, including high-order logic.

with predicates from a limited set of primitives

If predicates in logical expressions can come from a limited set, called primitives, then expressions may be compared and manipulated more readily.

can tractably represent common sense knowledge.

This combination may lead to wonderful new capabilities, despite the unbounded nature of ideas, the complexity of ideas, and the uncertainty of the ideas communicated with natural language.

Getting started

Collaborators are welcome to add their thoughts about how anything may be described. Such philosophical insights may be given without specific consideration of the logic, probability, or algorithms that handle them.

Register to read more. Make an edition to collaborate. As desired, add primitives or condition groups with outcomes.

This introduction, comparison of methods, glossary, references, and site implementation pages are openly available. However, most pages are securely transferred using a self-signed certificate, which will need to be at least temporarily accepted along with some rather ominous browser warning dialogs. The warnings discourage viewers from entering confidential information, which this site does not request, or running untrusted applications. This site provides no applications yet. Certificates, whether self-signed or from recognized certificate authorities, are not designed to counteract other internet dangers.

Collaborators must register with the site providing at least postal codes, such as a U.S. ZIP code, which provides a locality, and e-mail addresses so that a site administrator may authenticate them. Since authentication is manual, new potential collaborators may gain full access slowly, particularly if the information provided is minimal.

Except for a self-assigned identifier string, all collaborator information is only available to administrators, unless collaborators choose to share their information with other authenticated collaborators.

Agreements

Site owners or their designees shall have unrestricted rights to anything created with the site. Please do not provide information with restrictions, other than requiring acknowledgments. For instance, information that most Free Software Foundation licenses cover, which restrict proprietary use, should not be submitted. Collaborators retain non-exclusive rights to what they provide.

Information on this site that is not already publicly available may not be publicized or used in a product without the explicit permission of site owners or their designees. Collaborators retain their rights to publicize or otherwise use anything that they provide.

Security of collaborator registration information will be attempted but is not guaranteed.  Collaborators and other viewers assume risks from using this site.

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Copyright © 2013 Robert L. Kirby.  All rights reserved.