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Mindpixel was a web-based collaborative artificial intelligence project which aimed to create a knowledgebase of millions of human validated true/false statements, or probabilistic propositions. It ran from 2000 to 2005.
Participants in the project created one-line statements which aimed to be objectively true or false to 20 other anonymous participants. In order to submit their statement they had first to check the true/false validity of 20 such statements submitted by others. Participants whose replies were consistently out of step with the majority had their status downgraded and were eventually excluded. Likewise, participants who made contributions which others could not agree were objectively true or false had their status downgraded. A validated true/false statement is called a mindpixel.
The project enlisted the efforts of thousands of participants and claimed to be "the planet's largest artificial intelligence effort".
The project was conceived by Chris McKinstry, a computer scientist and former Very Large Telescope operator for the European Southern Observatory in Chile, as MISTIC (Minimum Intelligent Signal Test Item Corpus) in 1996. Mindpixel was developed out of this program, and started in 2000 and had 1.4 million mindpixels in January 2004. The database and its software is known as GAC, which stands for "Generic Artificial Consciousness" and is pronounced Jak. [1]
McKinstry believed that the Mindpixel database could be used in conjunction with a neural net to produce a body of human "common sense" knowledge which would have market value. Participants in the project were promised shares in any future value according to the number of mindpixels they had successfully created.
On 20 September 2005 Mindpixel lost its free server and is no longer operational. It was being rewritten by Chris McKinstry as Mindpixel 2 and was intended to appear on a new server in France.
Chris McKinstry died of suicide on 23 January 2006 and the future of the project and the integrity of the data is uncertain. The mindpixel.com domain currently points to an IQ test web site.
Some Mindpixel data have been utilized by Michael Spivey of Cornell University and Rick Dale of The University of Memphis to study theories of high-level reasoning and continuous temporal dynamics of thought. McKinstry, along with Dale and Spivey, designed an experiment that has now been published in Psychological Science in its January, 2008 issue. [2] In this paper, McKinstry (as posthumous first author), Dale, and Spivey use a very small and carefully selected set of Mindpixel statements to show that even high-level thought processes like decision making can be revealed in the nonlinear dynamics of bodily action.
Other similar AI-driven knowledge acquisition projects are Never-Ending Language Learning and Open Mind Common Sense (run by MIT), the latter being also hampered when its director died of suicide. [3]
Cyc is a long-term artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc focuses on implicit knowledge that other AI platforms may take for granted. This is contrasted with facts one might find somewhere on the internet or retrieve via a search engine or Wikipedia. Cyc enables semantic reasoners to perform human-like reasoning and be less "brittle" when confronted with novel situations.
Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally refers to specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and related activities. Psychometrics is concerned with the objective measurement of latent constructs that cannot be directly observed. Examples of latent constructs include intelligence, introversion, mental disorders, and educational achievement. The levels of individuals on nonobservable latent variables are inferred through mathematical modeling based on what is observed from individuals' responses to items on tests and scales.
Validity is the main extent to which a concept, conclusion or measurement is well-founded and likely corresponds accurately to the real world. The word "valid" is derived from the Latin validus, meaning strong. The validity of a measurement tool is the degree to which the tool measures what it claims to measure. Validity is based on the strength of a collection of different types of evidence described in greater detail below.
Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) is an artificial intelligence project based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab whose goal is to build and utilize a large commonsense knowledge base from the contributions of many thousands of people across the Web. It has been active from 1999 to 2016.
Kenneth Christopher McKinstry was a researcher in artificial intelligence. He led the development of the MISTIC project which was launched in May 1996. He founded the Mindpixel project in July 2000, and closed it in December 2005. McKinstry's AI work and similar early death dovetailed with another contemporary AI researcher, Push Singh and his MIT Open Mind Common Sense Project.
In psychology, the false consensus effect, also known as consensus bias, is a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to “see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances”. In other words, they assume that their personal qualities, characteristics, beliefs, and actions are relatively widespread through the general population.
Robert Bolesław Zajonc was a Polish-born American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. One of his most important contributions to social psychology is the mere-exposure effect. Zajonc also conducted research in the areas of social facilitation, and theories of emotion, such as the affective neuroscience hypothesis. He also made contributions to comparative psychology. He argued that studying the social behavior of humans alongside the behavior of other species, is essential to our understanding of the general laws of social behavior. An example of his viewpoint is his work with cockroaches that demonstrated social facilitation, evidence that this phenomenon is displayed regardless of species. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Zajonc as the 35th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He died of pancreatic cancer on December 3, 2008 in Palo Alto, California.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. Some researchers also include the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence instead of specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task.
Language, Truth and Logic is a 1936 book about meaning by the philosopher Alfred Jules Ayer, in which the author defines, explains, and argues for the verification principle of logical positivism, sometimes referred to as the criterion of significance or criterion of meaning. Ayer explains how the principle of verifiability may be applied to the problems of philosophy. Language, Truth and Logic brought some of the ideas of the Vienna Circle and the logical empiricists to the attention of the English-speaking world.
The minimum intelligent signal test, or MIST, is a variation of the Turing test proposed by Chris McKinstry in which only boolean answers may be given to questions. The purpose of such a test is to provide a quantitative statistical measure of humanness, which may subsequently be used to optimize the performance of artificial intelligence systems intended to imitate human responses.
Verbal reasoning is understanding and reasoning using concepts framed in words. It aims at evaluating ability to think constructively, rather than at simple fluency or vocabulary recognition.
David Francis Marks is a psychologist, author and editor of numerous articles and books largely concerned with five areas of psychological research – judgement, health psychology, consciousness, parapsychology and intelligence. Marks is also the originator of the General Theory of Behaviour, and has curated exhibitions and books about artists and their works.
Lie detection is an assessment of a verbal statement with the goal to reveal a possible intentional deceit. Lie detection may refer to a cognitive process of detecting deception by evaluating message content as well as non-verbal cues. It also may refer to questioning techniques used along with technology that record physiological functions to ascertain truth and falsehood in response. The latter is commonly used by law enforcement in the United States, but rarely in other countries because it is based on pseudoscience.
"Mainstream Science on Intelligence" was a public statement issued by a group of researchers of topics associated with intelligence testing. It was published originally in The Wall Street Journal on December 13, 1994, as a response to criticism of the book The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which appeared earlier the same year. The statement defended Herrnstein and Murray's controversial claims about race and intelligence.
A self-report inventory is a type of psychological test in which a person fills out a survey or questionnaire with or without the help of an investigator. Self-report inventories often ask direct questions about personal interests, values, symptoms, behaviors, and traits or personality types. Inventories are different from tests in that there is no objectively correct answer; responses are based on opinions and subjective perceptions. Most self-report inventories are brief and can be taken or administered within five to 15 minutes, although some, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), can take several hours to fully complete. They are popular because they can be inexpensive to give and to score, and their scores can often show good reliability.
A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment, is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and is expressed in its functioning. Systems are the subjects of study of systems theory and other systems sciences.
Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiology, political science and in context of mass peer review and crowdsourcing applications. It may involve consensus, social capital and formalisms such as voting systems, social media and other means of quantifying mass activity. Collective IQ is a measure of collective intelligence, although it is often used interchangeably with the term collective intelligence. Collective intelligence has also been attributed to bacteria and animals.
Carl Eddie Hewitt was an American computer scientist who designed the Planner programming language for automated planning and the actor model of concurrent computation, which have been influential in the development of logic, functional and object-oriented programming. Planner was the first programming language based on procedural plans invoked using pattern-directed invocation from assertions and goals. The actor model influenced the development of the Scheme programming language, the π-calculus, and served as an inspiration for several other programming languages.
The Wave Federation Protocol is an open protocol, extension of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) that is used in Apache Wave. It is designed for near real-time communication between the computer supported cooperative work wave servers.
Implicit learning is the learning of complex information in an unintentional manner, without awareness of what has been learned. According to Frensch and Rünger (2003) the general definition of implicit learning is still subject to some controversy, although the topic has had some significant developments since the 1960s. Implicit learning may require a certain minimal amount of attention and may depend on attentional and working memory mechanisms. The result of implicit learning is implicit knowledge in the form of abstract representations rather than verbatim or aggregate representations, and scholars have drawn similarities between implicit learning and implicit memory.