Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project

"The Cyc Project is outrageously ambitious; it is actually doing what AI has been theorizing about for three decades. In an entertaining fashion, Lenat and Guha describe Cyc's collision of software development and philosophy in loving engineering detail." - Patrick J. Hayes, Principal Scientist, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center; President-Elect AAAI Knowledge-based systems today lack common sense. As a result, the coming decade may see horrifying catastrophes blamed on software. The Cy Project addresses that limitation. Is is the world's first attempt to encode the hundreds of millions of facts and heuristics that comprise human consensus reality. This book is a mid-term report on that 1984-1994 effort going on at MCC in Austin and Palo Alto. Through its various representation language techniques, inference schemes, and ontology of common-sense knowledge, Cyc will change the nature of AI research, and the scope and nature of what AI applications can do. As a system engineer, programmer, or project leader, one needs to better understand the dangers of relying on AI programs that have only a thin veneer of competence. The discoveries and techniques of the Cyc Project provide answers for anyone faced with bringing knowledge-based systems beyond their fragile limits and into the 1990s. Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project provides: * the authoritative status report on Cyc - the size, scope, and organization of its knowledge base; and a look ahead * a detailed understanding of the CycL representation language, from frames to constraints to meta-level control * an explanation of how and why Cyc draws on two dozen different built-in inference mechanisms - the familiar, unfamiliar, and exotic - each with its own Truth Maintenance Systems * solutions to encoding representation "thorns", such as time, space, substance, and causality - techniques that expand the boundaries of knowledge-based systems Douglas B. Lenat is head of the Cyc Project and the Principal Scientist at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC). R.V. Guha, a mechanical engineer and computer scientist, is coleader of the Cyc effort at MCC.