Mindpixel was a web-based collaborative artificial intelligence project which aimed to create a knowledgebase of millions of human validated true/false statements, or probabilistic propositions. It ran from 2000 to 2005.

Description

Participants in the project created one-line statements which aimed to be objectively true or false to 20 other anonymous participants. In order to submit their statement they had first to check the true/false validity of 20 such statements submitted by others. Participants whose replies were consistently out of step with the majority had their status downgraded and were eventually excluded. Likewise, participants who made contributions which others could not agree were objectively true or false had their status downgraded. A validated true/false statement is called a mindpixel.

The project enlisted the efforts of thousands of participants and claimed to be "the planet's largest artificial intelligence effort".

The project was conceived by Chris McKinstry

Chris McKinstry

Kenneth Christopher McKinstry was a researcher in artificial intelligence. He led the development of the MISTIC project which was launched in May 1996. He founded the Mindpixel project in July 2000, and closed it in December 2005...

, a computer scientist and former Very Large Telescope

Very Large Telescope

The Very Large Telescope is a telescope operated by the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The VLT consists of four individual telescopes, each with a primary mirror 8.2m across, which are generally used separately but can be used together to...

 operator for the European Southern Observatory

European Southern Observatory

The European Southern Observatory is an intergovernmental research organisation for astronomy, supported by fifteen countries...

 in Chile

Chile

Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...

, as MISTIC (Minimum Intelligent Signal Test

Minimum Intelligent Signal Test

The Minimum Intelligent Signal Test, or MIST, is a variation of the Turing test proposed by Chris McKinstry in which only boolean answers may be given to questions...

 Item Corpus) in 1996. Mindpixel was developed out of this program, and started in 2000 and had 1.4 million mindpixels in January 2004. The database and its software is known as GAC, which stands for "Generic Artificial Consciousness" and is pronounced Jak.

McKinstry believed that the Mindpixel database could be used in conjunction with a neural net to produce a body of human "common sense

Common sense

Common sense is defined by Merriam-Webster as, "sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts." Thus, "common sense" equates to the knowledge and experience which most people already have, or which the person using the term believes that they do or should have...

" knowledge which would have market value

Market value

Market value is the price at which an asset would trade in a competitive auction setting. Market value is often used interchangeably with open market value, fair value or fair market value, although these terms have distinct definitions in different standards, and may differ in some...

. Participants in the project were promised shares in any future value according to the number of mindpixels they had successfully created.

On 20 September 2005 Mindpixel lost its free server and is no longer operational. It was being rewritten by Chris McKinstry

Chris McKinstry

Kenneth Christopher McKinstry was a researcher in artificial intelligence. He led the development of the MISTIC project which was launched in May 1996. He founded the Mindpixel project in July 2000, and closed it in December 2005...

 as Mindpixel 2 and was intended to appear on a new server in France.

Chris McKinstry committed suicide on 23 January 2006 and the future of the project and the integrity of the data is uncertain. The mindpixel.com domain currently points to an IQ test web site.

Some Mindpixel data have been utilized by Michael Spivey of Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 and Rick Dale of The University of Memphis to study theories of high-level reasoning and continuous temporal dynamics of thought. McKinstry, along with Dale and Spivey, designed an experiment that has now been published in Psychological Science in its January, 2008 issue. In this paper, McKinstry (as posthumous first author), Dale, and Spivey use a very small and carefully selected set of Mindpixel statements to show that even high-level thought processes like decision making

Decision making

Decision making can be regarded as the mental processes resulting in the selection of a course of action among several alternative scenarios. Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion of choice.- Overview :Human performance in decision terms...

 can be revealed in the nonlinear dynamics of bodily action.

Other similar AI-driven knowledge acquisition projects are Never-Ending Language Learning

Never-Ending Language Learning

Never-Ending Language Learning system is a semantic machine learning system developed by a research team at Carnegie Mellon University, and supported by grants from DARPA, Google, and the NSF, with portions of the system running on a supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo!.-Process and...

 and Open Mind Common Sense

Open Mind Common Sense

Open Mind Common Sense is an artificial intelligence project based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab whose goal is to build and utilize a large commonsense knowledge base from the contributions of many thousands of people across the Web.Since its founding in 1999, it has...

 (run by MIT), the latter being also hampered when its director committed suicide.

External links

• Mindpixel Home page (Currently points to a "Mindpixel IQ test" using the Mindpixel Db of validated statements)
• Mindpixel (at the internet archive)
• Interview with Chris McKinstry about the Mindpixel project on Slashdot, July 2000
• Alternative IQ Test modelled loosely after the mindpixel project (February 2006).
• Blog post about Mindpixel and Chris McKinstry's suicide Contains much background and insider information on the project. Posted Saturday, May 6, 2006
• Weegy (Another new variant of the mindpixel project).
• Open source software utilities for manipulating the Mindpixel data set