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
I'm so looking forward to the next swing of the pendulum back to "neat", incorporating all the progress that has been made on "scruffy" during this current turn of the wheel.

>>sander+Dr
The GP had the terms "neat" and "scruffy" reversed. CYC is scruffy like biology, and neural nets are neat like physics.

See my sibling post citing Roger Schank who coined the terms, and quoting Marvin Minsky's paper, "Logical Versus Analogical or Symbolic Versus Connectionist or Neat Versus Scruffy" and the "Neats and Scruffies" wikipedia page.

>>37354564