Prof George F. R. Ellis is a South African Physicist. He has written the most straightforward explanations about complexity and emergence. I have used his explanations to build, test, understand, and enable Pipi's self-documentation.
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17/05/2025
George Ellis and Emergence
By: Mike Peters
On a Sandy Beach: 17/12/2023
Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.
"George Francis Rayner Ellis, FRS, Hon.
FRSSAf
(born 11 August 1939), is the emeritus distinguished professor of complex
systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the
University of Cape Town in South Africa. He co-authored The Large Scale
Structure of Space-Time with University of Cambridge physicist Stephen
Hawking, published in 1973, and is considered one of the world's leading
theorists in cosmology. From 1989 to 1992, he served as president of the
International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. He is a past
president of the International Society for Science and Religion. He is an
A-rated researcher with the NRF.
Ellis, an active Quaker, was a vocal opponent of apartheid during the
National Party reign in the 1970s and 1980s, and it was during this period
that Ellis's research focused on the more philosophical aspects of
cosmology, for which he won the Templeton Prize in 2004. He was also awarded
the Order of the Star of South Africa by Nelson Mandela in 1999. On 18 May
2007, he was elected a fellow of the British Royal Society." - Wikipedia
Bruni, Marco; Dunsby, Peter K. S. (1992). "Cosmological perturbations
and the physical meaning of gauge-invariant variables". The Astrophysical Journal. 395: 34. Bibcode:1992ApJ...395...34B. doi:10.1086/171629. ISSN0004-637X.
John H. Holland's books and recorded seminars have significantly influenced PIPI's internal architecture, especially the incorporation of genetic algorithms.
I also learned 2 key clues that I implemented. Noise injection should be around 0.5%, and 2,000 - 3,000 cycle iterations are necessary before an adaptive response to the environment emerges.
John Henry Holland (February 2, 1929 – August 9, 2015) was an
American scientist and professor of psychology, electrical
engineering, and
computer science
at the
University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor. He was a pioneer in what became known as
genetic algorithms. ...
"Holland is best known for his role as a founding father of the complex
systems approach. In particular, he developed genetic algorithms and
learning classifier systems. These foundational building blocks of an
evolutionary optimisation approach are now included in all texts on
optimisation and programming."[6]
–
Carl Simon, professor of mathematics, economics, complex systems and public policy
Holland was a member of the Board of Trustees and Science Board of the
Santa Fe Institute ...
His books include
Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (1975, MIT
Press)
TDAN has published an excellent series of articles on data and architecture in large systems written by Dave McComb.
Resources
Resource
References
Reference
Repository
Home > Ajabbi Research > Library > Authors > Dave McComb
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Last Updated
17/05/2025
Dave McComb on the Data-Centric Revolution
By: Dave McComb
TDAN: 10/12/2023
Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.
Dave McComb is President and co-founder of Semantic Arts, Inc., a Fort Collins, Colorado-based consulting firm. Since its founding in 2000, Semantic Arts has remained 100% focused on helping clients adopt Data-Centric principles and implement Enterprise Knowledge Graphs. Semantic Arts has 30 employees in three countries and is currently helping ten highly visible Fortune 500 companies adopt Data-Centricity. In 2022, Semantic Arts was named a Colorado Company to Watch.
WholeCellViz is a web-based software program for visually analysing whole-cell simulations. Pipi's internal architecture uses many of the same techniques.
" Doug Lenat
was one of the most brilliant, acerbically funny people I have ever met.
If people like Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, and Alan Newell were among
the first to think deeply about how symbolic AI, in which machines
manipulate explicit verbal-like representations, might work, Doug was the
first to try really hard to make it actually work. I have spent my whole
career arguing for consilience between neural networks and symbolic AI,
and on the strictly symbolic side of that equation, Lenat was light-years
ahead of me, not just more deeply embedded in those trenches than I, but
the architect of many of those trenches.
Lenat spent the last 40 years of his life launching and directing a
project called Cyc, an intense effort to codify all of common sense in
machine-interpretable form. Too few people thinking about AI today even
know what that project is. Many who do, write it off as a failure. Cyc
(and the parent company, Cycorp, that Lenat formed to incubate it) never
exploded commercially – but hardly anybody ever gives it credit for the
fact that it is still in business 40 years later; very very few AI
companies have survived that long.
My own view is that Cyc has been neither a success nor a failure, but
somewhere in between: I see it as a ground-breaking, clarion experiment
that never fully gelled. No, Cyc didn’t set the world on fire, but yes, it will
seem more and more important in hindsight, as we eventually make real
progress towards artificial general intelligence.
Most young AI researchers have never even heard about it. But every
single one of them should know something about Cyc. They don’t need to
like it, but they should understand what it was, and what it tried to do,
and what they might do instead to accomplish the same goals ..."
From Wikipedia
Douglas Bruce Lenat (September 13, 1950 – August 31, 2023) was an
American computer scientist and researcher in artificial intelligence who
was the founder and CEO of
Cycorp, Inc. in Austin, Texas.
Lenat was awarded the biannual IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1976
for creating the machine-learning program AM. He has worked on (symbolic,
not statistical) machine learning (with his AM and Eurisko programs),
knowledge representation, "cognitive economy", blackboard systems, and
what he dubbed in 1984 "ontological engineering" (with his Cyc program at
MCC and, since 1994, at Cycorp). He has also worked in military
simulations, and numerous projects for the US government, military,
intelligence, and scientific organizations. In 1980, he published a
critique of conventional random-mutation Darwinism. He authored a series
of articles in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence exploring the nature
of heuristic rules.
Lenat was one of the original Fellows of the AAAI, and is the only
individual to have served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of both
Microsoft and Apple. He was a Fellow of the AAAS, AAAI, and Cognitive
Science Society, and an editor of the J. Automated Reasoning, J. Learning
Sciences, and J. Applied Ontology. He was one of the founders of
TTI/Vanguard in 1991 and member of its advisory board. He was named one of
the Wired 25.
Background and education
Lenat was born in Philadelphia, United States, on September 13, 1950. When
he was 5, the family moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where his father, Nathan
Lenat, owned a bottling plant. His father died when he was 13 and the family
then returned to Pennsylvania, where he attended Cheltenham High School. His
after-school job was cleaning rat cages and goose pens at Beaver College
which motivated him to learn programming as a better occupation.
He attended the University of Pennsylvania, supporting himself by
programming, including the design and development of a natural language
interface for a United States Navy online operations manual. He graduated
with bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and Physics, and a master's degree
in Applied Mathematics, all in 1972.
For his senior thesis, advised in part by Dennis Gabor, was to bounce
acoustic waves in the 40 mHz range off real-world objects, record their
interference patterns on a 2-meter square plot, photo-reduce those to a
10-mm square film image, shine a laser through the film, and thus project
the three-dimensional imaged object—i.e., the first known acoustic
hologram.[citation needed] To settle an argument with Dr. Gabor, Lenat
computer-generated a five-dimensional hologram, by photo-reducing computer
printout of the interference pattern of a globe rotating and expanding
over time, reducing the large two-dimensional paper printout to a
moderately large 5-cm square film surface through which a conventional
laser beam was then able to project a three-dimensional image, which
changed in two independent ways (rotating and changing in size) as the
film was moved up-down or left-right.[citation needed]
Lenat was a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Stanford University,
where his published research included automatic program synthesis from
input/output pairs and from natural language clarification dialogues.
Research
Lenat received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University
(published as Knowledge-based systems in artificial intelligence, along with
the Ph.D. thesis of Randall Davis, McGraw-Hill, 1982) in 1976. His thesis
advisor was Professor Cordell Green, and his thesis/oral committee included
Professors Edward Feigenbaum, Joshua Lederberg, Paul Cohen, Allen Newell,
Herbert Simon, Bruce Buchanan, John McCarthy, and Donald Knuth.
His thesis, AM (Automated Mathematician) was one of the first computer
programs that attempted to make discoveries, i.e., to be a theorem
proposer rather than a theorem prover. Experimenting with the program
fueled a cycle of criticism and improvement, leading to a slightly deeper
understanding of human creativity. Many issues had to be dealt with in
constructing such a program: how to represent knowledge formally,
expressively, and concretely, how to program hundreds of heuristic
"interestingness" rules to judge the worth of new discoveries, heuristics
for when to reason symbolically and inductively (and slowly) versus when
to reason statistically from frequency data (and hence, quickly), what the
architecture - the design constraints - of such reasoning programs might
be, why heuristics work (in sum, because the future is a continuous
function of the past), and what their "inner structure'' might be. AM was
one of the first halting steps toward a science of learning by discovery,
toward de-mystifying the creative process and demonstrating that computer
programs can make novel and creative discoveries.
In 1976 Lenat started teaching as an assistant professor of Computer
Science at Carnegie Mellon and commenced his work on the AI program
Eurisko. The limitation with AM was that it was locked into following a
fixed set of interestingness heuristics; Eurisko, by contrast, represented
its heuristic rules as first class objects and hence it could explore,
manipulate, and discover new heuristics just as it (and AM) explored,
manipulated, and discovered new domain concepts.
Lenat returned to Stanford as an assistant professor of Computer Science
in 1978 and continued his research building the Eurisko automated
discovery and heuristic-discovery program. Eurisko made many interesting
discoveries and enjoyed significant acclaim, with Lenat's paper
"Heuretics: Theoretical and Experimental Study of Heuristic Rules" winning
the Best Paper award at the 1982 AAAI conference.
A call for "common sense"
Lenat (working with John Seely Brown at Xerox PARC) published in 1984 an
analysis of what were the limitations of his AM and Eurisko lines of
research. It concluded that progress toward real, general, symbolic AI
would require a vast knowledge base of "common sense", suitably formalized
and represented, and an inference engine capable of finding tens- or
hundreds-deep conclusions and arguments that followed from the application
of that knowledge base to specific questions and applications.
The successes, and analysis of the limitations, of this AM and Eurisko
approach to AI, and the concluding plea for the massive
(multi-thousand-person-year, decades-long) R&D effort would be
required to break that bottleneck to AI, led to attention in 1982 from
Admiral Bob Inman and the then-forming MCC research consortium in Austin,
Texas, culminating in Lenat's becoming Principal Scientist of MCC from
1984–1994, though he continued even after this period to return to
Stanford to teach approximately one course per year. At the 400-person
MCC, Lenat was able to have several dozen researchers work on that common
sense knowledge base, rather than just a few graduate students.
Cycorp
The fruits of the first decade of R&D on Cyc were spun out of MCC into
a company, Cycorp, at the end of 1994. In 1986, he estimated the effort to
complete Cyc would be at least 250,000 rules and 1,000 person-years of
effort probably twice that, and by 2017, he and his team had spent about
2,000 person-years of effort building Cyc, creating approximately 24 million
rules and assertions (not counting "facts").
Lenat continued to work on Cyc as CEO of Cycorp until his death. While
the first decade of work on Cyc (1984–1994) was funded by large American
companies pooling long-term research funds to compete with the Japanese
Fifth Generation Computer Project, and the second decade (1995-2006) of
work on Cyc was funded by US government agencies' research contracts, the
third decade up through the present (2007–2023) has been largely supported
through commercial applications of Cyc, including in the financial
services, energy, and healthcare areas. One of these later projects was a
learning by teaching application called Mathcraft.
Personal life and death
Lenat was married to Merle Baruch, with whom he had a daughter; they
divorced and he later married Cycorp business manager Mary Shepherd. He died
of bile duct cancer on August 31, 2023, at the age of 72.
Quotes
"Intelligence is ten million rules." This refers to the prior
and tacit knowledge that authors presume their readers all possess
(such as "if person x knows person y, then x's date of death can't
be earlier than y's date of birth") not counting the vastly larger
number of "facts" such as one might find in Wikipedia or by
Googling.
"The time may come when a greatly expanded Cyc will underlie
countless software applications. But reaching that goal could easily
take another two decades."
"Once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as
knowledge, then the human-software system will be superhuman, in the
same sense that mankind with writing is superhuman compared to
mankind before writing."
"Sometimes the veneer of intelligence is not enough."
“If computers were human, they’d present themselves as autistic,
schizophrenic, or otherwise brittle. It would be unwise or dangerous
for that person to take care of children and cook meals, but it’s on
the horizon for home robots. That’s like saying, ‘We have an
important job to do, but we’re going to hire dogs and cats to do
it.'”
"What we needed, he says, is nothing less than an “AI Manhattan
Project”, a full frontal assault on common sense: the challenge is
to create an Encyclopédia of Common sense", Michio Kaku citing
Lenat.
Writings
"Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work," (Lenat and John Seely Brown),
Proceedings of National Conference on AI (AAAI–83), Washington, DC,
August 1983.
Davis, Randall; Lenat, Douglas B. (1982). Knowledge-Based Systems
in Artificial Intelligence. New York: McGraw-Hill International Book
Co. ISBN 978-0-07-015557-2.
Hayes-Roth, Frederick; Waterman, Donald Arthur; Lenat, Douglas B.,
eds. (1983). Building Expert Systems. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley
Pub. Co. ISBN 978-0-201-10686-2.
Lenat, Douglas B. "Computer Software for Intelligent Systems: An
Underview of AI," in Scientific American, September 1984.
Lenat, Douglas B.; Clarkson, Albert; Kircmidjian, Garo (1983). "An
Expert System for Indications & Warning Analysis". Proceedings
of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial
Intelligence - Volume 1. IJCAI'83. San Francisco, CA, USA: Morgan
Kaufmann Publishers Inc.: 259–262.[34]
Lenat, Douglas B.; Feigenbaum, Edward A. (February 1991). "On the
Thresholds of Knowledge". Artif. Intell. 47 (1-3): 185–250.
doi:10.1016/0004-3702(91)90055-O. ISSN 0004-3702.[35]
Lenat, Douglas B.; Guha, R. V. (1990-01-01). Building Large
Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Inference in the Cyc
Project. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. ISBN
9780201517521.[36]
Lenat, Douglas B. From 2001 to 2001: Common Sense and the Mind of
HAL[37]
Lenat, Douglas B. (2008-07-10). "The Voice of the Turtle: Whatever
Happened to AI?". AI Magazine. 29(2). doi:10.1609/aimag.v29i2.2106.
ISSN 0738-4602[38]
Blackstone E.H., Lenat, D.B. and Ishwaran H. Infrastructure
required to learn which care is best: methods that need to be
developed, in (Olsen L., Grossman, C., and McGinnis, M., eds.)
Learning What Works: Infrastructure Required for Comparative
Effectiveness Research. Institute of Medicine Learning Health System
Series, The National Academies Press, pp. 123–144, 2011.
Lenat DB, Durlach P. “Reinforcing Math Knowledge by Immersing
Students in a Simulated Learning-By-Teaching Experience.” J.
International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education.,
2014
Lenat, Douglas B. (2016-04-13). "WWTS (What Would Turing Say?)". AI
Magazine. 37 (1): 97–101. doi:10.1609/aimag.v37i1.2644. ISSN
0738-4602[39]
I was saddened to read of the recent death of Dr Matthew West in the UK on August 1 2023.
I had hoped to meet him in person one day.
I had some contact with him on the Ontolog Forum. He was a great help when I sorted out critical issues with Pipi regarding using BORO, 4d'ism, schema, data catalogues, and upper-level ontologies.
He pioneered the integration of space-time into data models (4d'ism). He was very experienced and right on many issues.
I first discovered him while searching for information about temporal data models. Then, I came across the UK Digital Twin Project, of which he was the technical lead, to discover a fascinating series of reports on ontologies and frameworks. He then led me onto the Ontolog Forum that I joined. So, thank you, Matthew.
Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.
From the Ontolog Forum Bio
Matthew joined Information Junction, as a director in 2008, where he
delivers consultancy in information management, and is the Technical Lead
for the UK Digital Twin programme. He gained a BSC and PhD in Chemical
Engineering and joined Shell in 1978, initially as a Refinery Technologist,
but from 1987 on the computing/business interface with a particular interest
in Information Management and Data Modelling. He has been a key technical
contributor to ISO 15926 "Lifecycle integration of process plant data
including oil and gas production facilities" and IIDEAS (ISO 18876) -
Integration of Industrial Data for Exchange, Access and Sharing. He also
developed a data model of Shell's Global Downstream business.
Matthew was the Shell Visiting Professor in the Keyworth Institute at the
University of Leeds. He is a Member of the Institution of Chemical
Engineers, the British Computer Society, and he is a Chartered Engineer and
a Chartered IT Professional. He is a member of the Ontolog Board of
Trustees.
He is the author of "Developing High Quality Data Models" and was awarded
an OBE for services to information management in the 2021 New Year's Honours
List (UK).
List of publications from his website
Here you will find selected references to books, papers, articles, and
presentations that I have written that are in the public domain. For
many of them electronic versions of the documents are available here or
elsewhere on the web.
Stell, John G. West, Matthew
A 4-Dimensionalist Mereotopology
pp 261-272 Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Varzi, A.C. Vieu,
L. (eds) IOS Press, 2004
West M.R., The mathematical modelling of anionic polymerisation in a
continuous stirred tank reactor, PhD Thesis, Leeds University
(1981)
Moore J.G., West M.R., Brooks J.R., The Anionic Solution
Polymerization of Butadiene in a Stirred-Tank Reactor, ACS Symposium
Series 104 Washington DC (1979)
Dew P.M., West M.R., Estimating and controlling the global error in
Gear's method, BIT 19, pp135-137, (1979)
Dew P.M., West M.R., A Package for integrating stiff systems of
ordinary differential equations based on Gear's method Report 111,
Dept. Computer Studies Leeds University (1978)
Dew P.M., West M.R., Control of global error in the solution of stiff
systems of Ordinary Differential Equations Report 107, Dept. Computer
Studies Leeds University (1978)
