zlacker

Wolfram is able to write it in such a way that somehow it is mostly about him. :-(

There is some overlap between Cyc and his Alpha. Cyc was supposed to provide a lot of common sense knowledge, which would be reusable. When Expert Systems were a thing, one of the limiting factor were said to be limited amount of broader knowledge of the world. Knowledge a human learns by experience, interacting with the world. This would involve a lot of facts about the world and also about all kinds of exceptions (Example: a mother typically is older than its child, unless the child was adopted and the mother is younger). Cyc knows a lot of 'facts' and also many ways of logic reasoning plus many logic 'reasoning rules'.

Wolfram Alpha has a lot of knowledge about facts, often in some form of maths or somewhat structured data.

>>lispm+(OP)
Ok, but let's avoid doing the mirror image thing where we make the thread about Wolfram doing that.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

>>dang+02
Well, it's a disappointing and shallow read, because the topic of the usefulness of combining Cyc and Alpha would have been interesting.

>>lispm+w4
Wolfram writes good historical articles. One just needs to put on some glasses that filter out the annoyance part of the spectrum.