Mostly holes - part 1 : Having the guts for big tasks

This might become an episodic post, ending with

• episode 17 (rough guess)
• me - having the feeling to have told everything at least twice and
• you - waiting for the connections between all the funny bits and loose ends
• some big embarassment since it doesn't work out at all - not even in my dreams

Gut feelings

Being an engineer for several years, you learn some old and valuable truths - the normal way - the hard way.

• There is always some detail, you have missed
• It's never that easy
• When it goes bad, you surely had a bad feeling about it in the first place

The last point is quite critical, since the mind tends to play tricks on us most of the time.
But if you are really questioning about your "gut feeling" or you have even made some notes, you might discover one of the most precious tools, mother nature has given us - a "brain" between the place where sience and women would locate it.

Normally guts tend to be quite monosyllabic, with something like "Oh, oh", "6 months at the very least" or "Not again ....". But sometimes it goes off on its own and babbles on and on and on...

Hey brain, 
Hey you - are you listening?
I've got this thingy about language and such - you know?
It's really important, so listen closely:
There are computers you know - and hey - wow - they do all crazy sorts of things.
And there are babys and they spend most of their time eating and crying.
And after two or three years they just talk - so how hard can it be?
Maybe these computational linguists just make too much fuss about it ...
It surely is just a bit of database filling and once the words are in place the talking comes on its own.
Ooooh - let's just start the coding, and you will see, the rest falls into place.

I hope, you have spared yourself the last lines since they don't really make much sense.
That's the problem with gut feelings:
There aren't really any good points and arguments present but you somehow feel, there is something to it and you shouldn't ignore the message.

The message

• It's a shame that "AI development" and "teaching computers our language" isn't one of the main tasks for "us" (software engineers and alike) anymore
• Since so many people have already thought about these topics since the 80th, you cannot run along the same trodden paths when you want to get other results
• You must try to keep the amount of necessary work for yourself to a minimum or you will never finish 
• The advantage you have - when you start out now - is that the freaks of the 80th had LISP and we have the internet - millions of people doing Farmville.
• When you have a running system and you can make it more exciting to help teach the net some language than to water virtual cabbage, you should have won!

Flicks of details without much connection

• Traditional knowledge bases were quite statical, hierarchical systems that had to get everything right from the start - just like a house of cards
• There are always many ways to explain something - a tree is "many leafes in the sky with a trunk going down to the roots" or "a giant root system that's powered by some leafes up above"
• It shouldn't make a mess to have concurrent statements, meaning the same and it shouldn't make things much slower
• The database should be easy to administer, to extend and should scale up nicely.
• You might even use something strange as the DNS system to store the data since it covers some of the requirements above quite well (CNames, Subdomains, Caching) - and isn't that hostile to funny new applications
• It's might not be necessary to make the teaching of sentences that formal - it should start of like baby talk
• You shouldn't expect too much from the system in the first time
• The Thing (whatever it might turn into) should therefore be at least "cuddly" from the start - otherwise the people will continue to tend to their cabbage... No kidding