Cyc

I am familiar with prolog and know what it takes (ish) to make an old school expert system. I have heard about this project. Are there any demos of this system? Like a video sales pitch. I have always wanted to see it in action.

We actually do have reason to believe that, since our current understanding of consciousness is very incomplete. Human consciousness extends far beyond our current understanding. I am referring to the full extent of the capabilities of the human mind, not some isolated aspects of it.

The physics of bridges is well known. That is basically a solved problem. Human consciousness/intelligence is an open problem, and may never be solved.

If there are current employees reading, they might be able to give a better answer than me. Basically, the project is to build a huge knowledge base of basic facts and "common sense" knowledge and an inference engine that could use a lot of different heuristics (including ones derived from semantic implications of contents of the knowledge base) to do efficient inference on queries related to its knowledge. One way of looking at Cyc from a business point of view is that it's a kind of artificial analyst sitting between you and a database. The database has a bunch of numbers and strings and stuff in a schema to represent facts. You can query the database. But you can ask an analyst much broader questions that require outside knowledge and deeper semantic understanding of the implications of the kinds of facts in the database, and then they go figure out what queries to make in order to answer your question - Cyc sort of does that job.

The degree to which it's effective seemed to me to be a case-by-case thing. While working there I tended to suspect that Cyc people underestimated the degree to which you could get a large fraction of their results using something like Datomic and it was an open question (to me at least) whether the extra 10% or whatever was worth how much massively more complicated it is to work with Cyc. I might be wrong though, I kind of isolated myself from working directly with customers.

One issue is just that "useful" always invites the question "useful to whom?"

Part of the tension of the company was a distinction between their long term project and the work that they did to pay the bills. The long term goal was something like, to eventually accumulate enough knowledge to create something that could be the basis for a human-ish AI. Whether that's useful, or their approach to it was useful, is a matter for another comment. But let's just say, businesses rarely show up wanting to pay you for doing that directly, so part of the business model is just finding particular problems that they were good at (lots of data, lots of basic inference required using common sense knowledge) that other companies weren't prepared to do. Some clients found Cyc enormously useful in that regard, others were frustrated by the complexity of the system.

Thank you for the answer, I thought it was simpler than that, I'm glad the assumption was wrong.

I understand that any practical system of this kind would have to be very coarse, but even at the coarse level, does it have any kind of "error bar" indicator, to show how "sure" it is of the possibly incorrect answer? And can it come up with pertinent questions to narrow things down to a more "correct" answer?

I don't work there anymore, though I know some folks that do. I suspect that they're reading this and don't want me to air out their dirty laundry too much.

Here's what I'll say: the degree of isolation between different mindsets and disagreement (that was typically very amicable if it was acknowledged at all) is emblematic of the culture of the company. There are people there with raaadically different ideas of what Cyc is for, what it's good at and even about empirical things like how it actually works. They mostly get along, sometimes there's tension. Over the years, the Cyc as its actually implemented has drifted pretty far from the Cyc that people like Doug Lenat believe in, and the degree to which they're willing or able to acknowledge that seems to sort of drift around, often dependent on factors like mood. Doug would show up and be very confused about why some things were hard because he just believes that Cyc works differently than it does in practice, and people had project deadlines, so they often implemented features via hacks to shape inference or hand-built algorithms to deliver answers that Doug thought ought to be derived from principles via inference. Doug thinks way more stuff that Cyc does is something that it effectively learned to do by automatically deriving a way to solve the general form of a problem, rather than a programmer up late hand-coding things to make a demo work the next day, and the programmers aren't going to tell him because there's a demo tomorrow too and it's not working yet.