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Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

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Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#81

Post by jnwatson »

tunesmith wrote: post #30
mepian wrote: post #3

I wonder what is the closest thing to Cyc we have in the open source realm right now. I know that we have some pretty large knowledge bases, like Wikidata, but what about expert system shells or inference engines?

At a much lower level, I've been having fun hacking away at my Concludia side project over time. It's purely proposition level and will eventually support people being able to create their own arguments and contest others. http://concludia.org/

Very cool! I've had this idea for 20 years. I'm glad I didn't get around to making it.

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#82

Post by lispm »

pfdietz wrote: post #23
mepian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes: https://cyc.com/archives/glossary/subl/ Also see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMMiaCtOzV0

Interesting that they're still using Allegro Common Lisp. I would be interested in knowing what technical issues (if any) prevented them from migrating to other implementations.

Maybe it's not "technical issues", but features and support? Allegro CL has a proven GUI toolkit, for example, and now they moved it into the web browser.

FYI: here are the release notes of the recently release Allegro CL 11.0: https://franz.com/support/documentation/current/release-note...

IIRC, Cyc gets delivered on other platforms&languages (C, JVM, ... ?). Would be interesting to know what they use for deployment/delivery.

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#83

Post by totetsu »

p_l wrote: post #25
totetsu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I try to write a query for GitHub’s graphql API I lose a few hours and go back to rest. May be it’s easy if all the edges and inputs are actually implemented in ways you would expect.

GraphQL isn't exactly a proper graph database query language. The name IIRC comes from Facebook Graph API, and the language isn't actually designed as graph database interface.

Thanks for the correction

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#84

Post by optimalsolver »

mtraven wrote: post #21

I worked on Cyc as a visiting student for a couple of summers; built some visualization tools to help people navigate around the complex graph. But I never was quite sold on the project, some tangential learnings here: https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/alpha-ontologist

>if they could not come to a consensus, would have to take it before the Master, Doug Lenat, who would think for a bit, maybe draw some diagrams on a whiteboard, and come up with the Right Representation

So looks like Cyc did have to fall back on a neural net after all (Lenat's).

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#85

Post by carlsborg »

The Cyc project proposed the idea of software "assistants" : formally represented knowledge based on a shared ontology, reasoning systems that can draw on that knowledge, handle tasks and anticipate the need to perform them.[1]

The lead author on [1] is Kathy Panton who has no publications after that and zero internet presence as far as i can tell.

[1] Common Sense Reasoning – From Cyc to Intelligent Assistant https://iral.cs.umbc.edu/Pubs/FromCycToIntelligentAssistant-...

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#86

Post by jerven »

nextos wrote: post #4
mepian wrote: post #3

I wonder what is the closest thing to Cyc we have in the open source realm right now. I know that we have some pretty large knowledge bases, like Wikidata, but what about expert system shells or inference engines?

There are some pretty huge ontology DBs in molecular biology, like GO or Reactome. But they have never truly exploited logic-based inference, except for some small academic efforts.

I think that GO with GO-CAM is definitely going that way. Basic GO is rather simple and can't infer that much (as in GO by itself has low classification or inference logic build in). Uberon, for anatomy, does use a lot of OWL power and shows that the logic-based inference can help a lot.

Reactome, is a graph, because that is the domain. But technically it does little with that fact (In my disappointed opinion).

Given that GO and Reactome are also relatively small academic efforts in general...

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#88

Post by mike_hearn »

tkgally wrote: post #29
zopf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder to what degree an LLM could now produce frames/slots/values in the knowledge graph. With so much structure already existing in the Cyc knowledge graph, could those frames act as the crystal seed upon which an LLM could crystallize its latent knowledge about the world from the trillions of tokens it was trained upon?

I had the same thought. Does anybody know if there have been attempts either to incorporate Cyc-like graphs into LLM training data or to extend such graphs with LLMs?

The problem is not one of KB size. The Cyc KB is huge. The problem is that the underlying inferencing algorithms don't scale whereas the transformer algorithm does.

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#89

Post by dredmorbius »

astrange wrote: post #76

I have a vague memory in the 90s of a website that was trying to collect crowdsourced somewhat-structured facts about everything that would be used to build GOFAI. Was trying to find it the other day and AI searches suggested Cyc; I feel like that's not it, but maybe it was? (It definitely wasn't Everything2.)

Portland Pattern Repository?

https://c2.com/ppr/>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Pattern_Repository>

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