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Obituary for Cyc
Obituary for the greatest monument to logical AGI. After 40 years, 30 million rules, 200 million dollars, 2000 person-years, and many promises, Cyc has failed to reach intellectual maturity, and may never will. Exacerbated by the secrecy and insularity of Cycorp, there remains no evidence of its general intelligence.
In 1985, 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. He concluded that humans don’t run out of steam because they have a vast store of common sense knowledge about the world, from which they can draw upon for analogies, those far-flung flights of fancies that, in sufficient quantities, allows us to generate genuinely new ideas forever. Though deprived of its purported backbone, from our vantage point, the Semantic Web has arrive as promised, but instead of the dream of Cyc-like thinkers performing long queries over databases, we have forgetful agent swarms talking with each other with API calls, dying, REST ing, and reincarnating, a game of Memento on the global scale.
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