The mathematician who insisted that AI needed a basis of pure common sense died on August 31st, aged 72
one of his favourite very loud shirts. When surveying a page of text he looked not at the black part but the white part, the space where the writer assumed what the reader already knew about the world. That invisible body of knowledge was what he had to write down in a language computers could understand.
It was all extremely slow. When he started the Cyc project, in 1984, he asked the six smartest people he knew how many rules might be needed and how long it might take. Their verdict was around a million rules and about 100 person-years. It took more than 2,000 such years, and counting. At first, Cyc roused a lot of interest; Microsoft invested in it for a while.
He carried on with his project exactly as before. This was partly because he was a bulldog sort, holding on fiercely to what he had built already, and enjoying the fact that his company, Cycorp, operated out of a tiny book-and-quilt-stuffed office outside Austin, not some giant corporate facility. A low profile suited his long, long task. He had to admit thats worked much faster, but they could be brittle, incorrect and unpredictable.
Was his system intelligent, though? He hesitated to say so. After painstaking decades Cyc could now offer both pros and cons in answer to questions, and could revise earlier answers. It could reason in both a Star Wars context, naming several Jedi, and in the real-world context, saying there were none. It had grasped how human emotions influenced actions. He had encouraged it to ask “Why?”, since each “Why? elicited more fundamental knowledge.
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