True Knowledge - Blog

Some more extreme questions

Image via Wikipedia

A while back we posted here about how we deal with "superlative" questions about objects with extremely high or low values of some property, like "What is the tallest mountain?".  That was nice but it couldn't cope with questions with extra conditions in them, like "What is the longest river in Africa?"  We've started building on this now.  We've also added a few more orderings, giving us questions like "Who was the first woman to climb Everest?"

The most useful new concept seems to be the missing object class (MOC).  This is a class of everything that has a particular relation to something else, for example everyone who's been president of the US, or everything that is located in France.  We can improve these to get extended missing object classes, which are MOC's with an extra condition on the variables.  These give us the classes like "all cities in France" and even "all cities of all republics".

An extended MOC turns the river question into "Which is the longest member of the class (river located in Africa)?" so we can answer it with all the existing machinery. 

We've moved!

True Knowledge has moved to a shiny new office on Hills Road right in the heart of Cambridge.

We had outgrown our space in the Innovation Centre and have been looking for an office of our own for some time. Our new HQ is just around the corner from Cambridge Train station (which is a huge blessing for those who commute in by train) and just a few minutes walk from the City Centre.

The new space will allow us to continue expanding while giving everyone who works here a great working environment.

We could probably do with putting some pictures up :)

We still have quite a bit of work to do to make it a really nice office.

To see more photos visit our Facebook Page.

Office Warming Party

We are planning to have an office warming party sometime in the near future (once we've got properly settled). If you want to get an invite as soon as it's announced just become a fan of True Knowledge on Facebook.

Happy New Year

Hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year.  We've had a few lists going into the data here.  Here's a few examples of the new types of questions that we can answer:

• How much is it to mail a letter from Minneapolis to Melbourne?
• Who won the Masters in 1950?
• What's the emergency number for police in Kigali City?
• Who was the Chancellor of Germany in 1965?
• Is the founder of Dell richer than Bill Gates?

And my personal favourite of the questions that now work

• Who got hit by a shoe in Iraq?

Enjoy the rest of 2009!