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. To show how Cyc's common-sense method can help find information that other software might miss, Cycorp has a database of captioned photos.
Most database managers retrieve photos based on a precise word match in the caption.
Cyc knows that a man is a person, and that mountain climbing demands strength and is dangerous. MCC funded a decade's work by a crew of linguists, philosophers, anthropologists, and engineers who spoon-fed data to Cyc. By the end of 10 years, Cyc was ready to earn its keep, so MCC spun off Cyc in 1994. The next step calls for Cyc to begin learning on its own by reading newspapers, books, and scientific journals. Then, in eight or nine years, Lenat figures Cyc will be smart enough for postgraduate work.