The Deep-HiddenUtumnoFrom the Quenya for “the Deep-Hidden”: in J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythology, Utumno was the first great fortress of Middle-earth, delved exceedingly deep beneath the mountains of the far north, at the beginning of days.An older version of the name, Utumna, is said to derive from Tumna(Quenya, “low-lying, low, profound, deep”).
Toward machine reasoning in defeasible domains.
Utumno is a research institute working on imbuing machines with the ability of defeasible reasoningDefeasible reasoningReasoning that is “defeasible, in the sense that the premises taken by themselves may justify us in accepting the conclusion, but when additional information is added, that conclusion may no longer be justified.”John L. Pollock, “Defeasible Reasoning,” Cognitive Science 11 (1987): a problem at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cognition, and philosophy, centered around how to reason in the absence of an objective answer.
CHAL
Council of Hierarchical Agentic Language: a multi-agent dialectic framework that treats defeasible argumentation as an engine for structured belief optimization.
Agents maintain graph-structured belief representations that update through gradient-informed dynamics, with configurable value systems governing reasoning and adjudication.
Primarily, machine reasoning has been developed and evaluated against questions with existing verifiable answers. The reasoning processes required for the questions that matter the most to humanity’s knowledge have no such answers.
Six Research Programs
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