Cyc: history's forgotten AI project - by I. A. Fisher

The Cyc group at MCC is attempting to build a single intelligent agent whose knowledge base contains […] tens of millions of entries. We believe such a system will be a useful, perhaps necessary, platform on which to undertake the next generation of work in expert systems, natural language understanding, and machine learning. 1

Six miles north of downtown Austin, Texas, in an unassuming office park just off the Mopac Expressway, stands the headquarters of Cyc, one of the most ambitious artificial intelligence projects in history – a four decade-long effort to codify the common-sense knowledge that is the foundation of human reasoning. Its researchers have produced a corpus of 1.5 million concepts and 25 million rules that feed an inference engine with more than a thousand specialized submodules. The system can use both common-sense knowledge and deep domain expertise to make deductions from chains of reasonings that are thousands of steps long. Its users range from an Ohio research hospital to the National Security Agency.

Yet despite its impressive achievements, Cyc has been largely forgotten, left behind by a new generation of machine-learning algorithms that power the chatbots and self-driving cars of today. How did one of the grandest experiments in AI end up as a historical footnote?

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