What are Cycs capabilities right now?
The basic hypothesis behind symbolic Artificial Intelligence is that it is possible to simulate intelligence in a particular “microworld” by manipulating a set of symbols that represent that “microworld”. The Cyc team believes this involves picking a particular task domain and then solving the problems encountered in that task domain by a combination of 1. Defining appropriate symbol-manipulation techniques 2. Building an adequate symbol set for representation 3. Find some general purpose reasoning mechanism 4. Build a reasoner using that mechanism Cyc’s chosen “microworld” is more or less every particular task domain, but only down to a pre-expert level of detail. The symbol set and symbol manipulations should be biased by the special cases encountered in modeling the regularities in the world as encountered by the ‘common man’.
