Re: >H CYC

Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Mon, 2 Sep 1996 15:38:57 +0200 (MET DST)


On Fri, 30 Aug 1996, Mitchell Porter wrote:

> Transhuman Mailing List
> [ Doug Lenat's baby -- Cyc ]
> Cycorp is apparently planning to keep most of its accumulated knowledge
> base proprietary; it will be interesting to see how quickly a free
> public-domain one develops on the web.

The source of Cyc's power is shallow reasoning on a huge database. The
engine is not especially interesting, the database is. Many man-decades of
top-notch knowledge engineers were necessary to encode daily trivialities.
This is unlikely to be reverse engineered soon, imo. Afaik, a crippled PD
Cyc release is intended. As an intelligent filter, Cyc is priceless.
Hardware demand is relatively low, purportedly it runs on a 16 MByte Mac
laptop.

'gene