Method
Cyc
Overview
Cyc (pronounced SYKE) is a long-term artificial intelligence (AI) project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc focuses on implicit knowledge. The project began in July 1984 at MCC and was developed later by the Cycorp company.
The name "Cyc" (from "encyclopedia") is a registered trademark owned by Cycorp. CycL has a publicly released specification, and dozens of HL (Heuristic Level) modules were described in Lenat and Guha's textbook, but the Cyc inference engine code and the full list of HL modules are Cycorp-proprietary.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The progress of intelligence has throughout been dual. Though it has not seemed so to those who made it, every step in advance has been a step towards both the natural and the supernatural.
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
Close in meaning to Cyc; the term itself is not named.
CALALUCA demonstrated a portion of Volume 160, because it had the most anomalies in it. The software was created by Electronic Book Technologies of Providence, RI, and is called Dynatext. The software works only with SGML-coded data. Viewing a table of contents on the screen, the audience saw how Dynatext treats each element as a book and attempts to simplify movement through a volume.
Library of Congress, Workshop on Electronic Texts
States what Cyc is.
And once more, this idea of equality, in the very process of being formed, necessarily gives origin to two series of relations--those of magnitude and those of number: from which arise geometry and the calculus. Thus the process throughout is one of perpetual subdivision and perpetual intercommunication of the divisions. From the very first there has been that _consensus_ of different kinds of knowledge, answering…
Herbert Spencer, Essays on education and kindred subjects
Close in meaning to Cyc; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Artificial intelligence
- Stanford University
- Inductive reasoning
- Wikipedia
- Higher-order logic
- Stuart J. Russell
- Abductive reasoning
- Deductive reasoning
- Heuristic
- English language
- Epistemology
- Equivalence relation
- Expressive power (computer science)
Place in the tradition
Part of Ontology.