CYC -- Basic Knowledge, Structure and Applications

CYC -- Lead to the future world of software

Abstraction

The CYC (enCYClopedic) project is so far the most ambitious exploration which requires long- term research and has very high risk in the area of software. The CYC project will completely achieve the goal of a general artificial intelligence and finally change the 21st-centry world radically. This paper intends to introduce the basic knowledge as well as the structure and applications of the CYC project.

First, an overview of the CYC project will be demonstrated in order to provide basic knowledge of the concepts involved in CYC. Based upon the introduction, the structure and applications of the project as well as other related topics will be discussed to provide a deeper observation of it. This paper will not give you any implementation detail of the project which is still ongoing research due to its complexity and very vast knowledge base. Rather than a utopian imagination, CYC already makes significant applications in sight in many areas.

Introduction of CYC

CYC is a very large, multi-contextual knowledge base and inference engine. The development of CYC was started at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation(MCC) during the early 1980s and continued at Cycorp, Inc. On January 1, 1995 at Austin, Texas. Doug Lenat, the former head of the CYC Project at MCC and the president of Cycorp at present, has lead the development of the CYC project from the beginning. The goal of the Cyc project is to break the software brittleness bottleneck once and for all by constructing a foundation of basic common sense knowledge system and semantic substratum of terms, rules, and relations that will enable a variety of knowledge-intensive products and services. T...

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...ing knowledge base to comprehend a wide variety of texts laden with ambiguity and metaphor; information drawn from CYC's readings will augment its concepts and enable further extensions. CYC will also learn by discovery, forming plausible hypotheses about the world and testing them. Like people, CYC will learn at the fringes of what it already knows, and its capacity for education will depend strongly on its existing knowledge.

CYC will eventually succeed in that artificial intelligence and the whole world will be changed in an amazing way. The late Allen Newell, one of the field's founders, likened the coming era to the land of Faery: inanimate objects such as appliances conversing with you, not to mention conversing and coordinating with one another. Unlike the creatures of most fairy stories, though, they will generally be plotting to do people good, not ill.