Wired News Two Fake Brains Better Than One
"A few weeks ago, computer scientist Chris McKinstry announced a plan to harness the brain power of Internet users to fuel an artificially intelligent thinking machine.

Web surfers flocked to his Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project website, and McKinstry's database of mindpixels -- "one-bit" pieces of knowledge -- swelled so quickly that his system became temporarily overloaded."

"But even though AI laymen took to McKinstry's decentralized, profit-sharing model of artificial intelligence (anyone who enters data gets a share in the company), many in the academic AI community balked at his plans.

Now, it seems that the academy is changing its tune, as no less venerable an institution than MIT's Media Lab has decided to collaborate with McKinstry."

I, Cringely Put On Your Thinking Cap : Chris McKinstry Wants to Build a Brain Accelerator
"Who cares if a computer is capable of thought? It is much more useful to have a computer that APPEARS capable of thought, which is to say a computer that experiences the world as we do. But how do you program a computer with the entire human experience? How do you tell a computer that a little salt is good but too much salt is too much? How do you teach a computer that "Kiss my butt" doesn't literally mean kiss my butt? And how, even if you could teach a computer these ideas, do you teach it all the ideas in between. That's when Chris McKinstry invented the mindpixel, and the Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project.

"All great truths are composed of a multitude of minor truths, and the minor truths are composed of massive numbers of atomic truths," says Chris. The basic facts he hopes to elicit from you and me are the atomic truths, items of binary consensus fact or mindpixels."

The OpenMind Project What is Open Mind Commonsense?
"Computer scientists have been trying to find ways to teach computers all this knowledge for many generations now, but they have not been very successful, mainly because people know so many things of such a diverse variety. No computer knows as much as a five-year old child, because even at that young age the webs of knowledge in our brains are vast and intricate.

We think this problem can be solved -- by harnessing the knowledge of everyone on the internet! We want to make it easy and fun for people to work together to give computers the millions of little pieces of ordinary knowledge that constitute "common sense", all those aspects of the world that we all understand so well we take them for granted. Everyone has common sense, so everyone can participate!

Why do we want to do this? Because teaching computers how to describe and reason about the world, and especially about people and their goals, activities, and interests, will give us exactly the technology we need to take the internet to the next level, beyond its current state as a giant repository of web pages, to a new state where it will be able to think about all the knowledge it contains, in essence, to make it a living entity."

MindPixel The Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project
"GAC (pronounced 'Jack') is a first step toward true artificial consciousness. By talking to GAC in clear and unambigious Mindpixels, you teach it what it is to be human. In doing so, you help create the Mindpixel Corpus, which is the largest database of validated human common sense ever attempted to be collected. When complete in 2010 it will have more than one billion individual facts, entered by over two million individual people. The data entry alone for this project is valued at more than $250 million.

A Mindpixel is a binary statement of consensus fact such as "Water is wet" or "It is difficult to swim with ski pants on". The idea behind this project is to collect as many such statements as possible from the world wide internet community and validate them. The database will then be used to train neural net based systems to mimic a human being when presented with Mindpixels. We hope to have 2 million users registered by the end of 2001 and 1 billion validated Mindpixels by 2010. The means about 30 billion transactions!"