I once read a short story about the creation of the world’s most powerful computer. In essence, each time they tried to turn it on, they had some minor misfortune, a power outage, the maid accidentaly tripped on, and unplugged, the power cord, etc. The highly technical twist in the end was that since we live in a Multiverse, all things that can happen happens in a separate universe. It turns out that the computer was so advanced (or something) that it turned in to a black hole when switched on, destroying all life. Since the observers could only exist in the universes where the computer remained switched off, they experienced these “coincidences”, that protected them.

A database of all human knowledge

When I read up a bit on Cyc, the other day, I came upon a competing project that I, myself, once added some mindpixels to.

Mindpixel was a web-based collaborative artificial intelligence project which aimed to create a database of millions of human validated true/false statements, or probabilistic propositions.

Unfortunately the project is now defunct, since the founder Chris McKinstry committed suicide on 23rd January, 2006.

Well, never fear, because from the Mindpixel page on Wikipedia, we learn that Open Mind Common Sense is a similar project, run by MIT, whose goal is to build a large common sense knowledge base from the contributions of many thousands of people across the Web.

Unfortunately that project is also stalling, since Push Singh who was slated to become a professor at the MIT Media Lab to lead the Commonsense Computing group in 2007, commited suicide on Tuesday, February 28, 2006. Just a month after the other visionary of web knowledge, Chris McKinstry.

Let the unreasonable conspiracy theories commence.