malkiri: It could be a sentence like: [95% of] [people] [in Czech Republic] [Do Not] [Believe] [God] [Does] [Exist]. It's usually one or very few words per textbox. In order to understand the meaning of a sentence, the system needs to figure out the part of speech (noun, verb,..) for each word. That's a problem in English. I saw same examples where the same word was used (in a few sentences) as 5(!) different parts of speech. But it's pretty clear when using the mentioned "chat elements" (each textbox is used just for a single predefined part of speech).
Puppeteer: First, I need to make sure the system has good algorithms for it's thinking. I do not think I need lots of data in this stage. I have a 2 years old daughter. Her view of the world is of course very limited comparing to our view, but her brain always finds some kind of "solutions". We played Tomb Raider 3 today and there is a guy in that game who lost one leg (in jungle). I challenged my daughter saying something like: "He lost one leg, what is he going to do now". She immediately suggested he needs to go to SafeWay to buy a new leg. When her brain generates these "solutions", I can almost see lines of a code which could have been used to find such answer using her limited knowledge base. The solution is incorrect but the algorithm is IMHO valid. And that's what I want to focus in the near future - valid algorithms. When I'm happy with algorithms, I'll try to get lots of data. Yes, Cyc is using meta-language. The communication with the AI system I'm going to develop needs to be close to the regular English. It should be something easy to use for average American. I may need to spend more time studying English grammar and grammar generally. English is far from my native language and I never had time to really study English. Thanks for the links. I'll probably not use Prolog. I'm currently considering VB.NET and MS SQL Server 2000 as main dev tool because it's very convenient and very productive. I still work on a bunch of other interesting projects (one includes a code which will generate new, hopefully nice, MIDI songs using inspiration from existing MIDI files), so I'm just slowly preparing for the AI development now. I have many AI thoughts I'm planning to explore in details. Like algorithms for getting experience and new definitions from fairy-tale-like stories (written in a format the system can understand).. Thinking about Joke generators and players of any game after explanation of rules etc.. But the problem solving is one of my top priorities for my AI systems. BTW there are so many things to study.. If I'm gonna study all the related details then I'll probably never find time to actually develop something.