True Knowledge - Blog

True love at True Knowledge

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
.
• [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:

• Is love forever?
• Can you be in love with more than one person at the same time?
• Is love always mutual?
• Can more than one person be in love with the same person?
• Is ‘married to’ the same as ‘in love with’?
• Is it possible to be in love with oneself?

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

 

 

 

 

Quotations and the meaning of names

If you've ever had to choose a baby's name, you'll know there are a load of names out there. Now you can use True Knowledge to find out what all these names mean. We have the meaning of names from Aaron to Zebedee... 

What does the name Laura mean? What does Ella mean? What about Keegan? Noah? Tyler?

Wait a moment, how about Leah? Is Leah a boy's name? No? A girl's name? OK. But some names are unisex, right? Is Tyler a unisex name?
If Lucy means something to do with light, are there any other names meaning light? Wow, that's too many... how about English names meaning light? Or African names meaning light?
As well as first names, we've also brought a bunch of quotations into True Knowledge. 

 
 So now you can ask for quotations about babies. (Or about mothers, of course, or fathers...)    

You can also dig out quotes by mathematicians or quotes by actresses. And, of course, combine your searches in all sorts of ways: quotes about peace by poets? Quotations by people who live in California? By members of the Beatles?
We've always known Adam Smith's last words. Now we know a whole load more stuff that he said! 
I hope people enjoy playing with these sorts of questions as much as we have here over the last couple of days. Do let us know what you think. We have a bunch of ideas to extend our semantic understanding of this sort of material, and we'd love to hear what sorts of things you'd like to see. You can quote me on that.

Welcome to two new team members

We're delighted to announce two new additions to True Knowledge's management team:

 
Dr James Pycock has recently joined us as VP of Product. He has taken on the challenge of transforming the company's product capabilities and using our technology to create amazing products that engage and delight our users.

James has been at the leading edge of internet and mobile technologies for twenty years. He spent six years at Xerox Research with responsibility for user driven design and applications. He managed programs across US (Xerox PARC) and European Research Centres and drove the commercialization of fundamental technologies within the Corporation and through spin-outs. He went on to found his own company which delivered mobile platforms to Operators and mobile applications to handset manufacturers. Its technology was used by all 5 Mobile Operators in the UK and many more in Europe and the US. In 2009 he sold that company to Mobispine, a publicly listed mobile platform company based in Scandinavia.

He has a First class degree in Psychology, an MSc in Cognitive Science and a PhD in Social Computing from the University of Manchester. He has four granted patents and has published over 30 papers and book chapters in the area of User Interface Design.

 

Dr Laura James has joined the business as Head of Knowledge - the team responsible for teaching our platform everything it knows. She is tasked with scaling knowledge acquisition and enabling our system to answer ever greater numbers of questions.

Laura has a strong background in high tech research, development and productisation, with a focus on delivering new technologies to people in the most useful and usable forms. She first worked on industrial control systems, before moving onto a broad range of projects around embedded and wireless systems, at AT&T Labs in both Cambridge and Silicon Valley.

As Vice President of Engineering at AlertMe.com, Laura took a three word back of the envelope idea (“broadband home security”) through to a complex consumer electronics product and service shipping in volume in just two years. Prior to this, she completed a PhD in high speed optical networking at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, in collaboration with Intel Research. Most recently Laura worked on innovative software for higher education, as Chief Operating Officer for the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies at the University of Cambridge.

Laura holds MEng and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge. She is a Chartered Engineer, received the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Leadership Award, and was a NESTA Crucible Fellow in 2007.

Welcome to both.

 

 

We'd love to meet you!

True Knowledge is having a party on 12 February in Cambridge UK, and we want you to be there!

Come and meet us. If you're interested, it would be helpful if you could let us know by emailing meetup@trueknowledge.com.

Edit: 6 till 8 at the Salisbury Arms (near Cambridge rail station).

Are there more catastrophes at Christmas?

It is widely believed that a disproportionate number of disasters take place during the festive season.  We used our data on major historical events to put that theory to the test.

More frequent: Train and plane crashes, sieges and earthquakes.

Less frequent: Stock market and banking crises, riots, fires and terrorist incidents.

The train and air crashes are unsurprising due to staff shortages and poor weather conditions, at least in the northern hemisphere, where the majority take place.  An increase in sieges make sense too - if your aim is to starve out the enemy, then picking a time of low food availability is obviously sensible.

Westerners might also expect terrorist incidents to increase at Christmas for maximum impact.  But the figures cover incidents from all over the world, including many countries where Christmas isn't widely celebrated.  In fact, February appears to be the most popular month for them.

More surprising is the apparent increase in earthquakes.  Tor Nørretranders, author of Danish popular science books, gives a plausible explanation.  "The increased number of earthquakes may be explained by the fact that any incident of the kind is more likely to get into the media when society goes on vacation", he said.