All of JaredWigmore's Comments + Replies

As in "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence".

A summary of the evidence can be found on Ben's blog

Adding some more info... Basically the evidence can be divided into two parts. 1) Evidence that the OpenCog design (or something reasonably similar) would be a successful AGI system when fully implemented and tested. 2) Evidence that the OpenCog design can be implemented and tested within a decade.

1) The OpenCog design has been described in considerable detail in various publications (formal or otherwise); see http://opencog.org/research... (read more)

I'm one of the leaders of OpenCog, and I can tell you that these accusations are spurious and bizzare. Regarding installing dependencies and compiling the code, detailed instructions are provided on our wiki. All the major features have been released (as they were ported/cleaned up during 2008 and 2009).

Some interesting features were previously implemented in Novamente but during rushed commercial contracts, in a hacky way that means it's easier to re-implement them now. Sometimes people have difficulties compiling the code, but we help them if they show up on IRC (I don't remember Louie though).

5Louie
My comment relates to the state of OpenCog when I downloaded it in November 2009. It's entirely possible that things are much improved since then. I think it was reasonable to assume that things hadn't changed much though since the code looked mostly empty at that time and I didn't sense that there was any active development by anyone who wasn't on the Novamente/OpenCog team an an employee or close team member. There were comments in the code at the time stating that pieces were missing because they hadn't yet been released from Novamente. Hopefully those are gone now. Sorry I didn't join you on IRC. I never noticed you had a channel. I could have sent an email to the list. But again, it looked like I couldn't contribute to OpenCog unless I somehow got hired by OpenCog/Novamente or ingratiated myself to the current team and found a way to become part of the inner circle. I was considering if that would be a good idea at the time but figured that emailing the list with "Duuuhhhh... I can't compile it. WTF?" would only frustrate internal developers, get condescending replies from people who had unreleased code that made their versions work, or get requests for funding to help open source the unreleased code. Hopefully things have improved in the last 1.5 years. I would love to support OpenCog. The vision you guys have looks great.

I'm in Hong Kong for the OpenCog-related project here (http://opencog.org/2010/10/opencog-based-game-characters-at-hong-kong-poly-u/). I'm a "transplanted Westerner", originally from New Zealand (moved here about 2 months ago). Available basically any evening.

0ferrouswheel
I'm also interested and part of the same project. Jared and I work in Kowloon Tong and I live in Mong Kok. Have messaged my cell number...