Seeking Artificial Common Sense

Although artificial intelligence (AI) has made great strides in recent years, it still struggles to provide useful guidance about unstructured events in the physical or social world. In short, computer programs lack common sense.

"Think of it as the tens of millions of rules of thumb about how the world works that are almost never explicitly communicated," said Doug Lenat of Cycorp, in Austin, TX. Beyond these implicit rules, though, commonsense systems need to make proper deductions from them and from other, explicit statements, he said. "If you are unable to do logical reasoning, then you don't have common sense."