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Thursday, February 12, 2004
Vulcan to help fund next phase of science project
A year-old effort to let computers answer scientific questions they've never seen before, and to state their reasoning, will get additional funding from Vulcan Inc., that company said yesterday.
The investment arm of Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen said the undertaking, dubbed Project Halo, will receive money to enter its 30-month second phase, set to end mid-2006.
Vulcan has contracted with three competing teams to pursue Project Halo, which has as its aim to create a so-called digital Aristotle -- a database of all the world's scientific knowledge, as that ancient Greek teacher was reputed to have had in his head.
The amount of funding received wasn't disclosed.
The project's first phase, which ended in May, established that it's possible to create computer programs to answer novel questions in advanced-placement chemistry. But doing so required the use of highly specialized and knowledgeable personnel, which drove development costs to $10,000 per page of chemistry text. Even then, too much of the intricate information was recorded incorrectly.
The second phase will address those challenges, trying to make it simpler and cheaper for experts to accurately translate their knowledge into forms a computer can use.
This phase will introduce attempts to reduce biology, physics and chemistry into computer-usable data. The project has restricted its scope to scientific knowledge because it's factual and quantifiable.
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