Somewhat interesting if you haven’t seen it before. The FACTory is a trivia game, and also an apparently trivial implementation of a fact-checker for Cyc.

As the How to Play page explains, Cyc will draw random facts from its knowledgebase and pose it as a True/False question to you, for a total of ten questions. You are scored based on how well your answer correlates with others’ answers; if your answer is in the majority, you get more points. Each answer will also correspondingly increase or decrease Cyc’s confidence in the truth of that particular fact or inference. Once it obtains some threshold of answers for a particular question, Cyc considers the fact either confirmed or rejected, and a new question is placed into the pool. If your answer happens to push it across the threshold and convince Cyc of a fact, then you get an extra bonus to your score.

At the end of each round, the global high scores list is displayed, much like in arcades of yore. And as in the aforementioned arcades…some people have absurdly high scores.

Took me a while to realize what relationship a cuboid can have to a foot (“…a 3d geometric figure and a 1d unit of measure, hm…”). Talk about a vocabulary problem…

If you haven’t come cross Cyc before, it is a rather large knowledgebase with the goal of representing human common sense knowledge in machine-usable form, with rigorous ontologies and its own encoding language, so that one day AI programs may draw upon it for semantic processing and understanding of common sense things that we as sentient humans take for granted. This usually consisted of trained personnel, versed in CycL, but now there are just about enough facts that automated programs can contribute facts by extracting from web sources. Sort of. As their paper on web-based extraction (note: PDF at end of link) notes, fact-checking is hard to do, even with the facts and inferences already stored in Cyc.

Using humans to do fact-checking seems an interesting way to train digital sentience, especially when building a knowledgebase that purports to be a repository of common sense. It seems a fairly intuitive way to harness the intelligence of the bored masses out there to do some good. There’s always trust issues involved thogh – how do we know if someone is just throwing guesses at, or worse, intentionally misleading the system (I wonder if Cyc actually hooks the feedback of this game to its actual knowledgebase)? You might say that in a large community, this is self-correcting, e.g. Wikipedia, and similarly, the FACTory punishes you for having unpopular opinions. Is the opinion of some self-selected majority always right?