Forum OpenACS Development: Response to Enhanced KM in OpenACs 4.0 -- interface to OpenCyc

Here is another article about Cyc and its descendant OpenCyc. This article places its creator somewhere other than the top of the AI field. In particular, it questions the methodology of his approach.

Well, I think you have to consider the source and the context. To begin with, "Lingua Franca" isn't exactly the highest authority on these things. At times, they verge on being little more than the gossip rag of academia. Second, what are they criticizing about the methodology? They're skeptical that he'll achieve true, Hal-like AI using brute force. Real, honest-to-goodness, Turing-level AI is obviously an extremely hard problem, and Lenat gets slammed for having the audacity to think he can solve it--and solve it without neural nets or any other fancy new approaches. Does it matter to us whether he can or can't do what he's trying to do? Not at all. Fortunately, we don't need Hal-like AI in order for OpenCyc to be useful for OpenACS. We just need something that helps us organize our information a little more accessibly than we can right now. There's nothing in that article to indicate that OpenCyc is incapable of achieving this rather modest end.