|
 (Posted
03/1/10
www.RemnantNewspaper.com)
CYC is a computer "knowledge base" in an artificial
"knowledge-representation language" called CYCL. CYC comes from the
word "enCYClopedia". The original idea of CYC was to encode a
single-volume English desk encyclopedia into a language of symbolic
logic so that the semantic content or meaning could be more easily
manipulated by computers. By "manipulated" I mean to include things
like making logical deductions from premises in a manner analogous
to the third operation of the intellect studied at least up until
the 1960s by every Catholic seminarian in his foundation in
scholastic/Thomistic/Aristotelian logic.
On
the order of 1,000 man-years
(i.e., the unit measuring the work of one person in a year,
based on a standard number of man-days)
has been invested in the development of the CYC knowledge base. The
original estimate in 1986 by Mr. Douglas Lenat, was that 350
man-years would be required. A consortium of corporations
contributed financially. And now, 24 years later, researchers are
still working on adding knowledge to the CYC knowledge base. A
more-recent account of the effort already expended is 700 man-years.
CYC
has been linked to Wikipedia in a project called "DB-pedia".
Moreover, the elements of the CYC knowledge base have been
connected or integrated with the development of the so-called
"Semantic Web".
So
what does this have to do with us, God and His Church?
As with any one-volume desk encyclopedia, a portion of the CYC
knowledge base concerns Roman Catholicism, and aspects of other
religions. Such knowledge bases may contain errors. So there is
potential for error in the CYC knowledge base, in DB-pedia, and in
other such knowledge bases. For example, if you look-up "Jesus of
Nazareth" in the CYC knowledge base, you will find good information,
inaccuracies and even blasphemies concerning Our Lord (for example,
Our Lord, described as and a "clairvoyant") all mixed together—but
no mention of the fact of His divinity. Not surprising since the
entries in the knowledge-base may not have been made by a Catholic
let along a competent Catholic theologian. Nevertheless, there is
now a very real potential for the propagation of global error and
blasphemy against Our Lord or Our Lady through artificial logical
knowledge-representation (artificial-intelligence) language.
For
example take a look at the DB-pedia web page here about the Mother
of God:
http://dbpedia.org/page/Mary_%28mother_of_Jesus%29
The web page at the link just above contains quite a lot of claims
about Our Lady in human-readable form not necessarily from a
Catholic perspective, but rather from a religiously indifferentist
perspective.
Stepping aside from the Catholic-bashing and/or erroneous
information issue, the CYC knowledge-base also contains a Terrorism
Knowledge Base under development, as the Wikipedia article on CYC
states:
"The
comprehensive Terrorism Knowledge Base is an application of cyc in
development that will try to ultimately contain all relevant
knowledge about terrorist groups, their members, leaders, ideology,
founders, sponsors, affiliations, facilities, locations, finances,
capabilities, intentions, behaviors, tactics, and full descriptions
of specific terrorist events. The knowledge is stored as statements
in mathematical logic, suitable for computer understanding and
reasoning.[8]"
I
found two references to Catholicism as a terrorist organization at a
CYC-related web page:
http://sw.opencyc.org/#
("OpenCYC"
is the title for the freely-downloadable, open-software version of
CYC.)
If you go to this web page, and type in the word "Catholic" in the
text box under the phrase, "Searching for OpenCyc Content", a list
of nine concepts stored in the OpenCyc knowledge base is then
displayed and the seventh and eighth concepts displayed on the list
have these titles:
"Catholicism terrorist organization [Catholicism group]"
"Catholicism terrorist"
There are four associated URL links from these two highly offensive
and anti-Catholic knowledge-base entries. All four are disconnected
links, so we cannot see what else the man or men who first typed in
these offensive characterizations of Catholicism as "terrorist" may
have claimed.
So
perhaps this suggests that whoever is developing the comprehensive
terrorism knowledge base (some agency or agencies of the U.S.
government?) has been putting data into that knowledge base claiming
that Catholics of one sort or another are terrorists.
Of
course this would be the ultimate hate crime against a segment of
society, based on religion—the Catholic religion.
The
facts are these: Catholic Church teaches that we, as Catholics, are
not even to become involved in sedition; that one sufficient
condition for a war to be unjust is that there is no hope of
victory; and that in ancient times, Christians would cooperate with
the government peacefully and obediently, but would refuse to
cooperate in sin if commanded by the government to sin, even going
off joyfully to their executions as a result. Hardly the basis for
terrorism!
In
the Ukraine, even Mr. Josep Tyrelia did not do any violence, but
would do things like kneel down and pray out loud in front of his
Communist interrogators. He let the Blessed Virgin defend him, not
unlike St. Maximilian Kolbe, Cardinal Mindszenty, Cardinal Kung,
etc.
Still, such Catholic bashing is not a simple thing to undo. Perhaps,
if we do what we can to expose the fact that reference is made to
Catholic "terrorism" in OPENCYC (the free version of CYC), all such
references will quickly be withdrawn from public view on all CYC-related
websites, but then the data on Catholic "terrorists" will be
carefully hidden after that. So if someone wishes to make a case
against those who contributed these errors and blasphemies to the
CYC knowledge base, and wanted the evidence to remain in place until
the right moment, we may want to wait.
Global Ramifications
One
might say that blasphemies against Our Lord and Our Lady, and other
anti-Catholic errors abound in all manner of anti-Catholic
publications in a wide variety of natural languages such as English,
French, German, etc. So why is there special reason for alarm when
some computer scientists who want to create an "artificial
intelligence" (a man-made "mind") may write anti-Catholic
blasphemies and errors into an artificial knowledge-representation
language such as a language of symbolic logic?
Perhaps the most important reason to pay attention is the very low
cost with which a knowledge-base containing such anti-Catholic
errors can be duplicated and distributed in large numbers. Consider
how many copies of Microsoft Windows exist in the world. Because of
the potential utility of the true knowledge inside of the CYC
knowledge base to the common man, the CYC knowledge base could end
up inside of almost every cell phone, PC and video-game device five
or ten years from now. We cannot let blasphemies and anti-Catholic
errors be copied into a large proportion of the electronic devices
in the world.
A
few days ago, I finished downloading a copy of OPENCYC onto my
laptop computer. The compressed file that I downloaded was about 220
megabytes, which is to say about 220 million characters, about the
equivalent of the number of letters in 500 books. OPENCYC took about
90 minutes to download. After decompressing this file, it occupies
775 megabytes of space, about the equivalent of the number of
letters in 1,500 books. I believe this is on the order of what a
single audio CD will store. OPENCYC, then, will fit easily on a cell
phone possessing 1GB (1 gigabyte) of memory, since 1 gigabyte is
1,000 megabytes, as compared to the 775 megabyte CYC knowledge base,
that is, 77.5% of the storage space on a 1GB storage device. I have
next to me a small 4GB USB storage device for which I paid a mere
$13. Here is what the Wikipedia article on CYC claims is contained
within these 775 megabytes:
The
latest version of OpenCyc, 2.0, was released in July 2009. OpenCyc
1.0 includes the entire Cyc ontology containing hundreds of
thousands of terms, along with millions of assertions relating the
terms to each other, however these are mainly taxonomic assertions,
not the complex rules available in Cyc. The knowledge base contains
47,000 concepts and 306,000 facts and can be browsed on the OpenCyc
website.
CYC contains millions of assertions in a language of symbolic logic,
each assertion being the equivalent of some corresponding
declarative sentence that could be written in English. These
assertions, expressed in the artificial language "CYCL" rather than
English, can be true or false. Ideally, all of the assertions would
be true. But human error causes some of them to be false. And
anti-Catholicism and/or ignorance of Roman Catholicism, harbored in
the hearts and minds of those manually composing these assertions
may lead to anti-Catholic errors spreading, again, in a large
percentage of the electronic devices throughout the world, including
web servers. We can expect websites of all different kinds,
including non-Catholic/anti-Catholic religious websites, to employ
the CYC knowledge base towards evil ends such as support for
anti-Catholic apologetics software.
On
the other hand, the knowledge base could be used in defense of Roman
Catholicism, insofar as it contains true assertions on the relevant
subjects (theology, philosophy, history, the Church hierarchy,
Latin, the Bible, Patristics, Doctors, saints, etc.). For good or
evil, such knowledge bases are different from static books and
documents because computer programs can simulate the third
operation of the intellect, drawing conclusions from premises (two
or more of the millions of assertions which make up the CYC
knowledge base).
For
example, general inference rules embodying syllogistic reasoning
could be applied to (1) CYC assertions representing general
principles of ISLAM and (2) specific data collected from an
8-year-old Muslim boy's interaction with tutorial software that is
designed to interactively brainwash the child. Or the same kind of
thing could be done to teach truth to an 8-year-old Catholic boy.
It
becomes easy to see why someone should oppose existing errors in
these knowledge bases and why someone should oppose the introduction
of additional errors as these knowledge bases grow.
Catholics, especially orthodox Catholic theologians, historians,
philosophers, etc., should be encouraged to become the people
composing and adding the assertions pertaining to Roman Catholicism
to these knowledge bases. Atheistic scientists, or adherents of the
30,000+ false religions plaguing the world, who will skew and
distort the truth, should be prevented from adding anything
pertaining to theology, philosophy, history, etc.
Please pray. |
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