Cyc

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 06 Sep 2023 06:42
Open in Logseq
    • A grand project to build a formal representation of all human knowledge! Not wikipedia, but knowledge in a formalized frame system, including everything from common sense facts about objects, money, botany, human relationships, and the economic activity of Indonesia. This was sort of the moonshot project of GOFAI, led by Douglas Lenat first at MCC (a big semi-governmental research lab in Austin) and later as its own company Cycorp which is still going.
    • I worked with the Cyc team for a couple of summers as a graduate student, but it was at a time when I was absorbing a lot of the situated action critique of AI, and the approach of Cyc was quite antithetical. But it was still a neat project! I got past my intellectual qualms by focusing on the user interface, a oft-used strategy of mine, and got a paper out of it A Visual Representation for Knowledge Structures (See MUE)