Obituary for Cyc
Yuxi Liu (via Hacker News):
The legendary Cyc project, Douglas Lenat’s 40-year quest to build artificial general intelligence by scaling symbolic logic, has failed. Based on extensive archival research, this essay brings to light its secret history so that it may be widely known.
[…]
In 1984, he launched Cyc to manually encode millions of facts and rules about common sense, predicting that once this “knowledge pump” was primed, the system would begin true machine learning by reading natural language texts and conducting autonomous scientific experiments. Cyc grew to contain approximately 30 million assertions at a cost of $200 million and 2,000 person-years. Yet despite Lenat’s repeated predictions of imminent breakthrough, it never came.
[…]
Cycorp achieved long-term financial stability that is uncommon for a small technology company, but all known commercial uses of its system involve standard methods in expert systems, data integration, and information retrieval, functionally the same as similar services offered by established corporations like Oracle and IBM. No evidence suggests that Cyc’s purported higher intelligence provided any competitive advantage.
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I first heard about Cyc from the 1993 documentary "The Machine That Changed The World".
Here's Doug talking about "the brittleness problem":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enWWlx7-t0k&list=PL3GEqwP6dqmjVeHZTmymATHwu3s_YWLQC
Cyc knows people shave and Cyc "thinks" an electric shaver held in the hand is, in some sense, part of a person. But it also knows people don't have electrical parts. "So in a sense, [Cyc] is asking,'Is Fred still a person while he's shaving?'"
Unfortunately Doug passed away in 2023 (says Wikipedia).
Yes, I remembered that strange conclusion from the same documentary, many years after watching, it thanks to Andy Baio.
When I saw this here, what did I do to confirm it is the glimmering phantom that I thought it was? Asked an AI, of course.
