zlacker

>>fogus+(OP)
Before you try to encapsulate common sense in a collection of obvious facts, you might want to start with a simpler task: Collect a database of elementary-school math problems and their associated answers until the database is so large that it coalesces into a fully functioning CPU.

If this seems like a bad idea, it's because it is.

>>goodsi+42
I'm not convinced by Cyc either, but this argument is a bit off. A system like this would need to define axioms and inference rules. But it wouldn't need to collect upfront a database of every possible inference which might be made from them.

(In mathematics you don't technically need very many axioms or inference rules, although you do need a large body of heuristics and hints if you want a proof system which confines itself to proving inferences that are actually useful in some sense of the word, rather than proving a combinatorial explosion of trivial theorems. Dealing with the body of elementary arithmetic problems, however, wouldn't necessarily be particularly intractable -- last time I checked software proof systems can already deal with proving theorems in areas of mathematics like this and a fair bit further.)