Is love forever? Can you be in love with more than one person at the same time?
Is love always mutual? Is it possible to be in love with oneself?
The meaning and essence of romantic love is a question that has preoccupied philosophers and poets since time immemorial.
Here at True Knowledge, we're able to break many of these concepts down into factual code, so that our answer engine can understand and answer questions about love. We've got a total of around 700 facts about romantic love, which represented all together makes a complex diagram (click for a full size image):
Love facts
Unlike search engine software, True Knowledge's revolutionary technology directly recognises the questions being posed, and to explain the meaning of love to our answer engine computer, our knowledge engineers have coded a series of logical ‘love facts’ such as:
- [fact: ["123894513@trueknowledge.com"]]: [is in love with] [uniquely translates as] ["is in love with (has very deep romantic feelings for)"] This is an example of how we need to uniquely describe every relation with a clear definition - stored as a specific fact in our knowledge base.
- [fact: ["123894535@trueknowledge.com"]]: [is in love with] [is an instance of] [relation] This looks obvious, but it is necessary to spell out even the blindingly obvious to the computer. Otherwise it wouldn't be sure that the phrase [is in love with] isn't, say, a person, a colour, or a type of wine.
- [fact: ["123894518@trueknowledge.com"]]: [human being] [is the left class of] [is in love with] This means that only humans can fall in love
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- [fact: ["123894519@trueknowledge.com"]]: [human being] [is the right class of] [is in love with] This means they can only fall in love with other people
- A [is in love with] B represents deep romantic feelings in person A towards person B. This relationship is for person-to-person romantic feelings only: to represent being in love with your house or dog, TrueKnowledge.com uses another relation. Therefore if A [is in love with] B, then A is a person and B is a person.
- We also have facts which explain how languages work. [fact: ["123894515@trueknowledge.com"]]: ["loves"] [is a present central form of] [is in love with] is a lexical fact meaning that to say "X loves Y" is written in the knowledge base as 'X [is in love with] Y'
- If person A [is in love with] person B then person B is not necessarily in love with person A at the same time. This is described technically by [is in love with] not being a symmetrical relation, and as such we are able to describe unrequited love.
- [fact: ["123894525@trueknowledge.com"]]: [transitive] ~[applies to] [is in love with] If A is in love with B and at the same time B is in love with C, is it also true at the same time that A is in love with C? We know that in real human relationships the answer is no, and TrueKnowledge.com has this built into our concept of [is in love with]; we describe [is in love with] as not being transitive, so that if A [is in love with] B, and B [is in love with] C, does not mean that A [is in love with] C. (Note that Negative facts are represented by a tilde ('~') in front of the relation) So we can describe real romantic concepts in our technology.
- [fact: ["123894520@trueknowledge.com"]]: [relation is permanent] ~[applies to] [is in love with] This means that it is possible to fall in, or out of, love - you don't necessarily love the same people forever. Negative facts are represented by a tilde ('~') in front of the relation. - so [is in love with] isn’t permanent, in our terminology.
Love and relationships
By cutting out a lot of the information in the above diagram, we can highlight how True Knowledge represents certain romantic concepts diagramatically. For example, here is a tiny sample of facts describing the similarities and differences between [is in a relationship with] and [is in love with]:
(Again, you can click to get the full size diagram)
Teaching TrueKnowledge about love
Coded computer facts such as those above give our answer engine a fine grounding in the sort of questions members of the public ask about love. However, getting a computer to fully understand such a complex and complicated human emotion as love is something of a Holy Grail for artificial intelligence developers.
Whilst we program the system with facts like those above, the artificial intelligence systems respond to the knowledge engineers’s initial work by asking questions to establish all the detail needed about each piece of information. Such dialogues include a number of machine generated questions and logical queries from the computer that give new meaning to the Facebook relationship status ‘It’s complicated’ - questions such as:
From these series of exchanges, the concept of love was reduced to around 700 core machine-understandable facts, and the result is a first for answer engine technology as True Knowledge’s electronic ‘mind’ is able to attempt to answer questions about love.
(You'll see that True Knowledge now knows the answer to all these questions! Just click a question to go through to our answer.)
Tell me the truth about love
With all these facts in place, True Knowledge is able to understand many romantic concepts and to answer questions about love. Nonetheless, this is a real challenge, as many elements of romance are highly subjective, and our answer engine is best at objective facts which everyone can agree on.
The language of poets about love is rhapsodic, allusive and metaphorical; in contrast True Knowledge is happier with simple, atomic, literal, factual statements. We can ask for quotes by poets about love and True Knowledge can easily find them, but it's not so easy to understand quite what it is they're saying about love.
Here are some examples of challenges we've thought about:
What is love?
Throughout the process of breaking the concept of love down into facts that the True Knowledge answer engine would understand, it was necessary to understand that the word ‘love’ can be used in so many different ways. For example it clearly it means very different things to say: "I love my wife," "I love jelly", "I love my Ferrari" "I love it when a plan comes together" and "love is all around." TrueKnowledge.com’s systems needed to understand how to interpret 'love' when it's used in all these different ways, so we can best interpret people's questions.
Unrequited love and narcissism
The way in which technical properties of abstract relations match up to everyday concepts like love can be surprisingly interesting. For example, True Knowledge knows that [is in love with] is not a symmetric relation as some love can be unrequited. It's also the case that [is in love with] is not anti-reflexive meaning to be narcissistically ‘in love with oneself’ is also possible.
The perfect Valentine’s Day gifts are roses and chocolates, not ‘waste bins and life insurance’
The trappings of love and the concept of Valentine's Day are examples of where humans have many preconceptions which help us instantly understand what someone else means, when they mention Valentine's Day. In contrast, these ideas have to be taught to True Knowledge step by step; there’s a lot of complexity in these concepts which cannot be assumed or inferred by a computer but have to be detailed clearly from first principles. Simply teaching True Knowledge that buying gifts is a conventional thing to do for a loved one on Valentine's Day isn’t enough; it would also be necessary to teach it that items such garlic, waste bins and life insurance are not suitable gifts, while chocolates and flowers make good gifts.
Love defies logic
On a more profound philosophical level, the biggest problem True Knowledge knowledge engineers faced was that as many people can testify, love often appears to defy rationality and logic and we had to have internal discussions about whether love was fundamentally logical or illogical. “In teaching a computer the meaning of love, True Knowledge’s knowledge engineers had to discuss whether being in love means being susceptible to bad logic and if that's the case, is the opposite also true: that being purely logical (like True Knowledge’s A.I system) means that logical computers cannot truly love,” says TrueKnowledge.com founder William Tunstall-Pedoe.
“Certainly one thing we all agreed upon is that it would be a lot easier for a computer to understand love if people talked about it logically, rather than using fluffy, emotional words, and the TrueKnowledge.com computer certainly isn't self-deluding about love - it sees everything purely and clearly logically, unlike us poor emotional humans.”
Our knowledge engineers briefly entertained the idea that teaching the True Knowledge artificial intelligence system about love might be easier if it had an “emotion chip”, similar to that given to Commander Data in Star Trek. Overall though the knowledge engineering team felt that an excess of emotion could make True Knowledge behave erratically, which would almost certainly hinder their work. Also, no one has yet invented an emotion chip!
We also wondered whether True Knowledge might be in love with William Tunstall-Pedoe, the system’s original creator, but it is not; True Knowledge knows that [is in love with] is a relation between two human beings only, and it is not a human, so cannot love its creator. http://www.trueknowledge.com/q/what_type_of_thing_can_be_in_love_with_a_business_man
