About Forum X Prime:

This Web page is a front end to a sophisticated expert system incorporating the latest breakthroughs in natural language and neural network research. It is the successor project to the original Forum 2000, originally conceived and implemented by Darrell Kindred and Corey Kosak of Carnegie Mellon University, with funding for the project provided by Intelleq, an industrial consortium consisting of IntraLink Solutions, Linguistic Technologies, and Quantor UK, Ltd. Unfortunately, Intelleq was liquidated in early 2001 due to lack of funding, and the project languished, until it was revived in late 2002 by a group of ex-employees and Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Most of the archived neural matrices were recovered, though some of the SOMADs were found to be incomplete or highly damaged.

The system is composed of about 16 million lines of C++ code, running on a "farm" of 256 2.8GHz Pentium 4 machines interconnected via a prototype 700F Megabit ATM network developed by IntraLink Solutions. The underlying quadratic neural network has been training on Usenet, Web, LiveJournal, blogger.com and literature sources for slightly over four years; on September 17, 2003, the neural matrix surpassed 10 Terabytes in size!

Although previous versions of the system showed promising results, they required excessive computational effort and produced poor solutions for many common cases. However, in 1994 Andrej Bauer made several theoretical breakthroughs in the synthesis of Lambek calculi and connectionist search algorithms. Implementing his ideas increased the performance of the system and the quality of the solutions by many orders of magnitude. He has written a brief treatment of the work, originally published for Forum 2000, suitable for the lay person.

Update 01/02/2004: Additional history on Forum 2000 and recent developments



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