Mindpixel was a web-based collaborative artificial intelligence project which aimed to create a

knowledgebase A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems, which were the first knowledge-based systems. Ori ...

of millions of human validated true/false statements, or probabilistic propositions. It ran from 2000 to 2005.

Description

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 Kenneth Christopher McKinstry (February 12, 1967 – January 23, 2006) 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 cl ...

, a computer scientist and former

Very Large Telescope The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is a telescope facility operated by the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. It consists of four individual telescopes, each with a primary mirror 8.2 m across, ...

operator for the

European Southern Observatory The European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, commonly referred to as the European Southern Observatory (ESO), is an intergovernmental organization, intergovernmental research organisation made up of 16 mem ...

Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east a ...

, 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 Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

is known as GAC, which stands for ''"Generic Artificial Consciousness"'' and is pronounced Jak. McKinstry believed that the Mindpixel database could be used in conjunction with a

neural net Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...

to produce a body of human "

common sense ''Common Sense'' is a 47-page pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–1776 advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies. Writing in clear and persuasive prose, Paine collected various moral and political argu ...

" knowledge which would have

market value Market value or OMV (Open Market Valuation) is the price at which an asset would trade in a competitive auction setting. Market value is often used interchangeably with ''open market value'', ''fair value'' or ''fair market value'', although the ...

. 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

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 Michael Spivey (commonly known as Mike Spivey) is a British computer scientist at the University of Oxford. Spivey was born in 1960 and educated at Archbishop Holgate's Grammar School in York, England. He studied mathematics at Christ's Coll ...

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

and Rick Dale of

The University of Memphis } The University of Memphis (UofM) is a public research university in Memphis, Tennessee. Founded in 1912, the university has an enrollment of more than 22,000 students. The university maintains the Herff College of Engineering, the Center for Ea ...

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. 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 In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rati ...

can be revealed in the nonlinear dynamics of bodily action. Other similar AI-driven knowledge acquisition projects are

Never-Ending Language Learning Never-Ending Language Learning system (NELL) is a semantic machine learning system developed by a research team at Carnegie Mellon University, and supported by grants from DARPA, Google, NSF, and CNPq with portions of the system running on a superc ...

and

Open Mind Common Sense 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 ...

(run by

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

), the latter being also hampered when its director died of suicide.

References

{{reflist

External links

Mindpixel Home page
(Currently points to a "Mindpixel IQ test" using the Mindpixel Db of validated statements) Artificial intelligence Knowledge bases

Description

See also

References

External links