Overview of CYC Project

Overview of CYC

Abstract

The CYC project is the first serious attempt to build a base of human consensus knowledge -- to encode common sense. The CYC system is intended to provide a "deep" layer of understanding that can eventually be used by other programs to make them more flexible and less "brittle".

This paper discusses of the motivations behind the encoding of common sense, provides an overview of the CYC system and touches on some of its applications.

Introduction

Often it is enough is to solve problems in a very specific domain. Expert systems are often called upon when this type of intelligence is desired. Knowledge based systems have enjoyed commercial success and have shown promise as candidates for practical intelligent systems of the near future [1].

Traditional knowledge based systems -- and programs in general -- have an undesirable performance characteristic that can be described as brittleness. The term -- coined by Doug Lenat -- refers to software, which when given well conditioned data, will produce acceptable results, but when confronted by some unanticipated situation, is likely to reach the wrong conclusion. This brittleness arises because knowledge based systems lack the common sense that all humans possess. Lenat laments that

"It is all too easy to find examples of such brittle behavior: a skin disease diagnosis system being told about a rusty old car, and concluding it has measles; a car loan authorization system approving a loan from someone whose ``years at the same job'' exceeded their age; a digitalis dosage system that doesn't complain when someone accidentally types a patient's age and weight in reverse order (even though this 49 pound, 102 year old patient was admitted to the h...

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...ady self-aware. If you ask it what it is, it knows that it is a computer. If you ask who we are, it knows that we are users. It knows that it is running on a certain machine at a certain place in a certain time. It knows who is talking to it. It knows that a conversation or a run of an application is happening. It has the same kind of time sense that you and I do." [4]

Bibliography

[1] Guha, R.V and Lenat, D.B. Pittman K., Pratt, D. Shepherd M. Cyc: Toward Programs With Common Sense. MCC Technical report archive 1990.

[2] www.cyc.com

[3] Guha, R.V and Lenat, D.B. Pittman K., Pratt, D. Shepherd M. CYC: a midterm report. Communications of the ACM. August 1990/ Vol 33. No 8.

[4] Garfinkel, S. 2001 Double Take. Wired Magazine. January 1997/5.01.

[5] Guha, R.V and Lenat, D.B. Ideas for Applying CYC. MCC Technical report archive 1991.

[6] www.mcc.com