A bit of a tribute to three people who have persisted in the face of scepticism.

How long has Doug Lenat has been working on the CYC project? I described it unkindly as a kind of dinosaur in 2005, when it was already more than twenty years old. What is it about? AI systems often lack the complex background of understanding needed to deal with real life situations. One strategy, back in the day, was to tackle the problem head-on and simply build a gigantic encyclopaedia of background facts. Once you had that, rules of inference would do the rest. That seems an impossibly optimistic and old-fashioned strategy now, but CYC has apparently been working away on its encyclopaedia ever since and – it’s said – is actually beginning to deliver.

Also in 2005 I described the remarkable findings of Maurits Van Den Noort apparently showing a reaction to stimuli before the stimuli actually occurred. (That post is one of the “lost” ones from when I moved over to WordPress. I’ve just brought it back, but alas the lively discussion in comments is gone.) I’ve heard no more about the research since, but Van Den Noort is still urging the case for a new relationship between neurophysics and quantum physics.

That post mentions Huping Hu, who with his long-time colleague (and wife) Maoxin Wu, also announced some remarkable findings relating consciousness and quantum physics. He went on to found his own journal – one way to ensure your papers are properly published – which continues to publish to this day.

We may feel (I do) that these people are in differing ways on the wrong track, but their persistence surely commands respect.