Computerizing Common Sense

Computerworld - Austin, Texas-based Cycorp Inc. claims to be "the leading supplier of formalized common sense." CEO and founder Doug Lenat has labored 17 years to codify facts such as "Once people die, they stop buying things." He uses a form of symbolic logic called "predicate calculus" to classify and show the properties of information in a standard way.

The Cyc knowledge base adds power to applications by adding common-sense information on top of the domain-specific knowledge that occurs in every application, Lenat tells Computerworld's Gary H. Anthes.

"We see it as the next great thing," says Morrie Sigel, a partner at Atlantic Capital Partners LLC in Darien, Conn. "The knowledge base provides such a broad platform for a multiplicity of products that it's mind-boggling."

What have you accomplished so far? We've put in 600 person-years of effort, and we've assembled a knowledge base containing 3 million rules of thumb that the average person knows about the world, plus about 300,000 terms or concepts.

Can you give an example? Terms like "first date" and rules of thumb like "People are more polite on their first date than they are on their nth date." A lot of these things were true 50,000 years ago, like "If you are carrying a container that's open on one side, you should carry it with the open end up." The idea is to represent these in formal logic as opposed to English sentences. You want the machine to be able to crank through the logical deductions—the consequences of these assertions—the same way you or I would.

Doug Lenat, leader of the human "memome" project

Are there any applications so far? Yes, it's called CycSecure, and we are beta-testing it. Cyc knows what are normal, legitimate actions and what are actions taken by hackers, [and it knows about operating system vulnerabilities]. It uses its [artificial intelligence] planning ability and knowledge of the world to come up with network attack plans. You tell it about your network, and instead of running canned exploits against it and doing the old-fashioned intrusion detection, you do hypothetical reasoning. You experiment on the model instead of the actual network.

What is OpenCyc? It's a daring gamble to gradually make everything in the Cyc knowledge base public. An initial release last week made available about 5,000 concepts and 50,000 axioms or assertions about them. We will gradually, over the next two years, migrate everything to the public mode. But OpenCyc will always lag by 24 to 30 months.