Douglas Lenat

American computer scientist who devoted four decades to CycCyc, prop. n.: An AI system built by specialists who spent decades typing in millions of everyday truths, such as 'people cannot be in two places at once', hoping to give computers common sense., the largest effort to hand-encode common sense for computers. His Stanford doctoral program AM (Automated Mathematician, 1976) explored elementary mathematics guided by hundreds of heuristicsheuristic, n.: A rule of thumb: a quick, usually good-enough way to make a decision or to estimate how close you are to a goal, without any guarantee of finding the best answer., rediscovering concepts such as prime numbers, and its successor Eurisko (early 1980s) also learned new heuristics, famously designing the winning starship fleets in the Traveller science-fiction war-game tournament (1981 and 1982); he received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (1977). Concluding that such programs lacked everyday knowledge, he began Cyc in 1984 at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation and led it from 1994 at Cycorp: a knowledge baseknowledge base, n.: A store of facts and rules that a program can reason with: like a database, but organized so that new conclusions can be worked out from it, not just looked up. of millions of hand-written assertions in a logic-basedfirst-order logic, n.: A precise formal language for statements about objects and their relations, using 'for all' and 'there exists', such as 'every person has a mother'. It is the standard logic of mathematics and of classic AI. language, with an inference engineinference engine, n.: The part of an AI system that does the working-out: in older AI, the program that applies rules to facts; in today's AI, the software that runs a trained model to produce answers. for commonsense reasoningcommonsense reasoning, n.: The everyday background knowledge and reasoning people take for granted — dropped glasses break, hungry people eat, nobody is in two places at once — which machines long struggled to match.. Seen by critics as a cautionary tale for symbolic AIsymbolic AI, n.: An approach to AI that writes knowledge down as human-readable symbols and rules, such as 'every bird has wings', and reasons by manipulating them step by step instead of learning patterns from data., Cyc was offered by Lenat, in a 2023 paper with Gary MarcusGary Marcus, prop. n.: An American cognitive scientist and leading critic of deep learning, who argues that today's AI cannot reason reliably and needs to be combined with symbolic methods., as a source of the trustworthy reasoning that language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. lack.