CYC

CYC, a project begun in 1984 under the auspices of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, a consortium of American computer, semiconductor, and electronics manufacturers, to advance work on artificial intelligence (AI). In 1995 Douglas Lenat, the CYC project director, spun off the project as Cycorp, Inc., based in Austin, Texas. The most ambitious goal of Cycorp was to build a knowledge base (KB) containing a significant percentage of the commonsense knowledge of a human being. A projected 100 million commonsense assertions, or rules, were to be coded into CYC, in an approach known as symbolic AI. The expectation was that this “critical mass” would allow the system itself to extract further rules directly from ordinary prose and eventually serve as the foundation for future generations of expert systems.

With only a fraction of its commonsense KB compiled, CYC could draw inferences that would defeat simpler systems. For example, CYC could infer “Garcia is wet” from the statement “Garcia is finishing a marathon run,” by employing its rules that running a marathon entails high exertion, that people sweat at high levels of exertion, and that when something sweats it is wet. Among the outstanding remaining problems are issues in searching and problem solving—for example, how to search the KB automatically for information that is relevant to a given problem. AI researchers call the problem of updating, searching, and otherwise manipulating a large structure of symbols in realistic amounts of time the frame problem. Some critics of symbolic AI believe that the frame problem is largely unsolvable and so maintain that the symbolic approach will never yield genuinely intelligent systems. It is possible that CYC, for example, will succumb to the frame problem long before the system achieves human levels of knowledge.