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.
