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Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

Since 1984 a secretive AI project has been building a massive knowledge base to enable human-like reasoning. Will it work?

Six miles north of downtown Austin, Texas, in an unassuming office park just off the Mopac Expressway, stands the headquarters of Cyc, one of the most ambitious artificial intelligence projects in history – a four decade-long effort to codify the common-sense knowledge that is the foundation of human reasoning. Lenat wagered that a machine that could draw on a large body of general knowledge – what humans call 'common sense' – when it got stuck would have a better chance of achieving genuine intelligence than clever but simple-minded programs like AM and EURISKO. Despite its name, Cyc was not meant to be encyclopedic per se; it would cover an even more basic level of knowledge – propositions like 'A person is born only once' and 'Animals can't talk except in fairy tales' that are so obvious that no one bothers to write them down.

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