OpenCyc is the open source version of the Cyc technology, the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine. OpenCyc can be used as the basis for a wide variety of intelligent applications. This is release 1.0 of OpenCyc featuring the complete Cyc ontology of over 260,000 terms and their definitional assertions numbering over 1.8 million. OpenCyc requires about 500MB of disk space and performs best with over 512 MB RAM. One GB of RAM is recommended for Cyc when accessed by Java applications.
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Member since:2006-02-10
And here I thought everyone had given up on this dead end
Actually, everyone has given up. Otherwise, Cyc would be making billions by now, and I would be chatting with a room sized computer, named HAL, with colorful lights blinking and magnetic tapes rotating ;-)
Cyc is the last dinosaur from an older time of AI research. This makes it interesting (learn from the errors of a previous approach, for example, and pick up some tried ideas).
Actually, Cyc reminds me of a game I tried to write when I was 10 years old learning BASIC (notice the caps). I didn't know about loops yet, so I was drawing a grid, line by line. I didn't know about exponential complexity either, so the entire program logic consisted of deep, nested IF-THEN-ELSEs, describing every possible path. Somehow, I'm not sure why, this approach failed ;-)
Edited 2006-07-15 08:52
Member since:2006-03-18
Ha, sounds like my experience with basic. I knew about loops, and goto, but had no clue what that darned 'gosub' did. So before I'd call 'goto', I'd set a flag indicating where I was calling from, and then for my 'return' I'd test the flag to figure out where to 'goto' back to.
Back on topic, I thought Cyc's makers had a number of commercial customers for their product. Granted it's not full AI, but the ability to make automated inferences from large sets of data might be attractive to certain companies.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-02-15
dimosd summed it up pretty well in replying to me: http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=15194&comment_id=143183
Member since:
2006-02-15
And here I thought everyone had given up on this dead end after Terry Winograd's rants in the 90s.
It's funny how the AI community cycles over the same old ground every couple of decades.