(I lost my notes on this presentation due operator error. Um, I mean, Windows crashed. Yeah, that’s the ticket.)

Doug Lenat’s been running the CYC project for twenty years. CYC is a computer program intended to understand enough of common sense that it can answer questions and make deductions useful in the real world. To do this, Lenat’s team — and now anyone with Internet access — feed it millions of rules about how the world and its humans work. Lenat says that the project has now crossed the line from “priming the pump” to being useful. He pointed to some deductions CYC had made about oil shipments based on information from several large databases. The surprisingly labored demo showed CYC making reasonable assumptions about the implictions of someone giving someone else a gift of a Segway. For example, it “knew” that the Segway, as a transportation vehicle, needs a light if it’s going to be used at night.

Lenat said that CYC can think the way any particular culture does by specifying the rules relevant to that context. So, to use Lenat’s example, it could think the way an 18th century Italian nobleman did, although it seems to me that that would require us knowing which millions of rules model such a person, a project that would seem to require putting in more knowledge than we have and more than could result from the effort.

My reaction to the presentation and the demo was that this just proves that humans don’t think the way CYC does.

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