Paul Allen Wants to Teach Machines Common Sense<br />SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen said Wednesday<br />that he was pumping an additional $125 million into his nonprofit computer research lab for an ambitious new effort to teach machines “common sense.”<br />The money for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence will about double the lab’s budget over the<br />next three years, helping to fund existing research as well as the new effort, called Project Alexandria.<br />It can’t read a textbook and understand the questions in the back of the book,” said Oren Etzioni, a former<br />University of Washington professor who oversees the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.<br />“To make real progress in A. I., we have to overcome the big challenges in the area of common sense,”<br />said Mr. Allen, who founded the software giant Microsoft in the 1970s with Bill Gates.<br />In the mid-1980s, Doug Lenat, a former Stanford University professor, with backing from the government<br />and several of the country’s largest tech companies, started a project called Cyc.<br />He and his team of researchers worked to codify all the simple truths<br />that we learn as children, from “you can’t be in two places at the same time” to “when drinking from a cup, hold the open end up
