Cyc
In plain wordsAn AI system built by specialists who spent decades typing in millions of everyday truths, such as 'people cannot be in two places at once', hoping to give computers common sense.
A very large knowledge baseknowledge base, n.: A store of facts and rules that a program can reason with: like a database, but organized so that new conclusions can be worked out from it, not just looked up. and reasoning system that aims to encode the commonsense knowledge underlying ordinary human understanding, written by trained knowledge engineers in CycL, an expressive higher-order logical language. Knowledge is organized as a very large ontologyontology, n.: A carefully defined vocabulary for a subject such as medicine, spelling out each kind of thing, how kinds nest inside one another, and which connections between them are allowed. of concepts with millions of assertions, partitioned into microtheories — contexts such as modern medicine or a particular work of fiction — so that locally consistent but globally conflicting beliefs can coexist. An inference engineinference engine, n.: The part of an AI system that does the working-out: in older AI, the program that applies rules to facts; in today's AI, the software that runs a trained model to produce answers. with many specialized reasoning modules answers queries and can explain its conclusions. Cyc has been applied to intelligence analysis, querying of medical records and enterprise data integration, and has been released in limited forms (OpenCyc, ResearchCyc). Critics point to its cost, closed development and limited demonstrated generality; supporters regard it as the most serious attempt to engineer common sense explicitly, and as a potential complement to language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code..
Origin
Begun by Douglas Lenat in 1984 at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) in Austin, Texas, as a ten-year effort, and spun off as the company Cycorp in 1994. Lenat led the project until his death in 2023. The name comes from 'encyclopedia'.
Usage note
A touchstone in debates about the knowledge acquisition bottleneckknowledge acquisition bottleneck, n.: The problem that getting knowledge out of human experts and into a computer by hand is so slow and costly that it limited how far classic expert systems could go.: Cyc shows both that common sense can be partly codified and how much effort that takes. Published counts of its concepts and assertions vary by source and date.
Related
- commonsense reasoningcommonsense reasoning, n.: The everyday background knowledge and reasoning people take for granted — dropped glasses break, hungry people eat, nobody is in two places at once — which machines long struggled to match.
- knowledge baseknowledge base, n.: A store of facts and rules that a program can reason with: like a database, but organized so that new conclusions can be worked out from it, not just looked up.
- ontologyontology, n.: A carefully defined vocabulary for a subject such as medicine, spelling out each kind of thing, how kinds nest inside one another, and which connections between them are allowed.
- knowledge engineeringknowledge engineering, n.: The craft of collecting what human experts know — through interviews, observation and documents — and turning it into rules or structured data that a computer system can use.
- knowledge acquisition bottleneckknowledge acquisition bottleneck, n.: The problem that getting knowledge out of human experts and into a computer by hand is so slow and costly that it limited how far classic expert systems could go.
- symbolic AIsymbolic AI, n.: An approach to AI that writes knowledge down as human-readable symbols and rules, such as 'every bird has wings', and reasons by manipulating them step by step instead of learning patterns from data.
Sources
- Lenat, D. B. & Guha, R. V. (1990). Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project. Addison-Wesley.
- Lenat, D. B. (1995). CYC: A Large-Scale Investment in Knowledge Infrastructure. Communications of the ACM 38(11), 33–38.
Mentioned in
commonsense reasoningcommonsense reasoning, n.: The everyday background knowledge and reasoning people take for granted — dropped glasses break, hungry people eat, nobody is in two places at once — which machines long struggled to match., knowledge baseknowledge base, n.: A store of facts and rules that a program can reason with: like a database, but organized so that new conclusions can be worked out from it, not just looked up., ontologyontology, n.: A carefully defined vocabulary for a subject such as medicine, spelling out each kind of thing, how kinds nest inside one another, and which connections between them are allowed., ConceptNetConceptNet, prop. n.: A free, crowd-built network of everyday facts — 'a knife is used for cutting', 'rain makes things wet' — in many languages, which AI systems use to make sense of ordinary situations., Douglas LenatDouglas Lenat, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who spent four decades building Cyc, a giant hand-written database of everyday common sense meant to let computers reason like people., knowledge acquisition bottleneckknowledge acquisition bottleneck, n.: The problem that getting knowledge out of human experts and into a computer by hand is so slow and costly that it limited how far classic expert systems could go.