About Argcrux

Our Mission

ARGCRUX was born out of CAIS' AISES course as a way to improve public discussion about the risks of developing AI superintelligence.

One of the challenges of this contemporary issue is being able to compare and contrast how different researchers and the public at large understand and address the key arguments for and against the proposition that development of greater-than-human intelligence may lead to significant civilizational risks.

ARGCRUX combines proven methodologies from argument mapping research with modern game mechanics to create an engaging learning experience.

In addition to being a tool for improving public discourse, it can also be used on a variety of private settings as well. From classrooms to boardrooms, ARGCRUX helps people think more clearly, communicate more effectively, and make more informed decisions.

An Argumentation Framework is a formal method for defining arguments and their relationships. It is used as a way for building and determining the validity of claims based on preceding assumptions, axioms or statements.

The classical way of representing arguments is through the use of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Depending on the specific framework rules', different types of statements and relations can be validly established, and then conclusions may be drawn from this graph.

Starting from the basic framework as established by Dung1995, more advanced formal methods can be created to allow for greater semantic representation and automated processing.

Throughout the years several different software packages have been written in an attempt to make concrete the promises of this academic field. Two prominent projects that we can highlight as explicit inspirations for ARGCRUX are DebateGraph and Kialo

While evaluating existing solutions, we made two observations that influenced design decisions of ARGCRUX:

• The depth of the argumentation makes it increasingly hard to follow how a particular statement reflects the overall problem statement (for example, in the above image, an attack-support-attack path makes the selected attack argument a support of the goal proposition).
• While the ability to comment promotes collaboration, different users may have completely different assumptions which invalidate the entire argumentation (for the above example board, there is some discussion about the risk coming from “general” as opposed to “super” intelligence).

Thus ARGCRUX was designed, as a new implementation of the well-known argument framework, while trying to address the observed shortcomings of existing tools and providing it in a gamefied, engaging platform for both public and private use.