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Artificial Inteligence Common Sense Database

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-could-use-that-in-my-head dept.

warren69 writes "Atari researcher/Stanford Prof. develops AI called Cyc, pronouced psych, based on "1.4 million truths and generalities". Allready this, umm application (linux fyi), has powered lycos search narrowing. There is encouraging results, like Cyc asking if it is human."

6 of 397 comments (clear)

  1. download cyc by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    (anonymous karma whoring -- whoo hoo)

    Cycorp web site

    OpenCyc

    Sourceforge project

  2. Old news by joshv · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yet another webzine discovers Cyc, and yet another crop of slashdotters hasn't heard of it... If you read the article, the damned thing asked if it was human in 1986. This is news?

    I have been following this thing for at least 5 years, and they have continually been just a few years away from real world applications. One of the things they have been talking about for a long while was Cyc approaching the ability to "read" for itself, and gather new information for it's database from the web, newspapers, or any other authoritative source. They've been talking about it for a long time and it hasn't happened yet.

    It is a very interesting application, but will probably never amount to anything near human intelligence - a very versatile expert system at best.

    -josh

  3. OpenCyc project on SourceForge by Cycon · · Score: 5, Informative
    I don't personally have anything to do with the project, but I thought it might be worth mentioning that there's an OpenCyc project being hosted by SourceForge. From their website:

    OpenCyc is the open source version of the Cyc technology, the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine. Cycorp, the builders of Cyc, have set up an independent organization, OpenCyc.org, to disseminate and administer OpenCyc, and have committed to a pipeline through which all current and future Cyc technology will flow into ResearchCyc (available for R&D in academia and industry) and then OpenCyc.

    --Cycon

    --
    Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
  4. Lycos rejected it by Animats · · Score: 3, Informative
    From the article:

    The job ended because of turnover at Lycos after it was bought by Terra Networks. Cyc showed promise and could be brought back, though it can't improve search engines all by itself, said Tom Wilde, Terra Lycos' general manager of search services.

    Lenat has been announcing that Cyc will become "intelligent" Real Soon Now about every two years for the last decade. Nobody believes him any more.

    Someday that database may be useful, but not with a predicate-based world model. I regard Cyc as the ultimate answer to "Will rule-based expert systems ever become intelligent". The answer is "no".

  5. Cyc is not AI by localman · · Score: 4, Informative

    Cyc is a cool project - one that I've been reading about for 10 years now. But I don't think it is AI or ever will be. It basically collects a huge number of rules and has a deductive engine that helps it infer new facts based on what it knows. If you think that's all the human mind does, then you might want to read some books by Douglas Hofstadter. Amazing stuff.

    Intellegence is about finding the differences between things that are the same, sameness between things that are different, and adapting to new situations fluidly. All of these are impossible with large collections of rules.

    I believe that machines may think someday, but it won't come from projects like Cyc - it'll be more from the neural network approach.

  6. Re:Whatever you do.... by Spire · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is shamelessly stolen from Fredric Brown's excellent 1954 short story Answer.

    --
    begin 644 .sig22&%I;"P@9F5L;&]W(&=E96 LA`end