Those will come later. For now, it's still learning to coordinate its eye, head, and hand ''muscles.'' You can almost believe it wants to grasp the hand of its proud father, Rodney A. Brooks, associate director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge. Call it the bottom-up approach. The flip side of the AI coin can be found in Texas.
Birds have feathers.
When people die, they stay dead. Such facts may seem obvious, yet their omission regularly trips up AI programs, says Cyc's creator, Douglas B. Lenat, president of Cycorp Inc. in Austin and a consulting professor at Stanford University. Lenat, however, figures he's already negotiating for Manhattan. They've been snapped up by a half-dozen companies, including Glaxo Wellcome, Digital Equipment, IBM, and United Healthcare. Glaxo Wellcome and United Healthcare use their Cycs to manage huge online thesauruses of pharmaceutical and health-care terms that are a pain for people to deal with.