Dylan Hunter

Now this looks like some fun, (and a _whole_ lot o’ work! :-0 ). Just joined today, and would encourage others to do the same, though one does have to wonder a good bit why they’re effectively starting from scratch in trying to determine the web of human knowledge when a whole ton of these kind of assertions / relationships could be preliminarily posited by crawling extant SE’s, Wikipedia, blogs & the whole host of Web 2.0 tagging-type apps, leaving users the far simpler option of just editing the relationships they’ve posited from analysis of these sources - ah well, s’pose that’s the difference between having all the cash and time in the world, and knowing that you’ve got 6 mths to pull something off, or you won’t be making the mortgage payment!

In any case, the concept’s certainly intriguing, at least, and if the method undertaken turns out to be too unwieldy, certainly a good chance that a startup could do as suggested above - anyone got a $1M burning a whole in their pocket?

Cambridge, Mass. — Japanese Computer manufacturer Toshiba and the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Monday announced a new collaboration, called the “GlobalMind Project,” a program intended “to bring cross-cultural common sense to computer systems.” Toshiba said that it hopes to explore new ways to give computers “human-like” understanding for applications such as Japanese text recognition and processing, car navigation, and robots. On MIT’s end, the program is being led by Professor Emeritus Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), and will include other Media Lab researchers.