Word: cyc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Douglas Lenat has similar hopes for his artificially intelligent brainchild--a sprawling, data-rich computer program called CYC (as in encyclopedic). But where Brooks expects Cog to teach itself about the world, Lenat is leaving nothing to chance. For more than a decade, his CYC development team in Austin, Texas, has been typing in the rules of "human consensus reality" (otherwise known as common sense) one thuddingly obvious assertion at a time. "Bread is a food," for example, or "You're wet when you sweat." CYC knows nearly a million of these rules now, and when it has another million...
Compared with beating the world's greatest chess player at his own game, of course, infant-like flailing or knowing about wetness might not sound like much. But programs like CYC and Cog, not chess machines like Deep Blue, currently define the cutting edge of applied artificial intelligence--the 40-year effort to build machines that think. Ten years ago, when AI was as hot as the Internet is today, researchers raced to build programs that showed deep expertise in a narrow field of endeavor--like chess, for example, or medical diagnosis. These days, however, it's the promise...
...with the proliferation of cheap, powerful computers and the rapid growth of the Internet, there's new interest in all kinds of "intelligent" machinery--not just chess-playing supercomputers or grandiose AI research projects like CYC and Cog. The past few years have seen a burst of entrepreneurial activity in what are called intelligent agents--programs of rather more modest IQ that are nonetheless smart enough to be released on the Internet to do small, useful chores like tracking stock prices or digging for nuggets of research data...
...F.I.S. or Olympic Alpine championship. He may also have to beat the F.I.S.-which at week's end was threatening to cancel the championships because East Germany's ski team had been refused papers for travel in the West. But even if the F.I.S. cleared the slopes, Cyc Ferries would remain the most devastating cyclone on skis...
...also-ran on the fiercely competitive European ski circuit. A member of the U.S. Alpine ski team since 1960, Ferries had won a couple of races in the U.S., none at all in the Alps, was noted mainly for a helter-skelter skiing style that neatly matched his nickname: "Cyc," for cyclone. But last week Cyc Ferries was the sensation of the 1962 season. He had scored successive slalom victories at Austria's Kitzbühel and Italy's Cortina d'Ampezzo, was a solid favorite to capture the slalom again this week...