zlacker

>>snewma+(OP)
Cyc ("Syke") is one of those projects I've long found vaguely fascinating though I've never had the time / spoons to look into it significantly. It's an AI project based on a comprehensive ontology and knowledgebase.

Wikipedia's overview: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc>

Project / company homepage: <https://cyc.com/>

>>dredmo+83
I worked with Cyc. It was an impressive attempt to do the thing that it does, but it didn't work out. It was the last great attempt to do AI in the "neat" fashion, and its failure helped bring about the current, wildly successful "scruffy" approaches to AI.

It's failure is no shade against Doug. Somebody had to try it, and I'm glad it was one of the brightest guys around. I think he clung on to it long after it was clear that it wasn't going to work out, but breakthroughs do happen. (The current round of machine learning itself is a revival of a technique that had been abandoned, but people who stuck with it anyway discovered the tricks that made it go.)

>>jfenge+B7
Why not combine the two approaches? A bicameral mind, of sorts?

>>rvbiss+9m
There are absolutely people working on this concept. In fact, the two day long "Neuro-Symbolic AI Summer School 2023"[1] just concluded earlier this week. It was two days of hearing about cutting edge research at the intersection of "neural" approaches (taking a big-tent view where that included most probabilistic approaches) and "symbolic" (eg, "logic based") approaches. And while this approach might not be the contemporary mainstream approach, there were some heavy hitters presenting, including the likes of Leslie Valiant and Yoshua Bengio.

[1]: https://neurosymbolic.github.io/nsss2023/