Lenat and Cyc | Hacker News

n 1984 Doug Lenat began the Cyc Project with encouragement from Marvin Minsky. John McCarthy, Ed Feigenbaum, and other AI pioneers. In 1990, Lenat and Guha published a revised version of the Five-year report on Cyc: Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Reasoning in the Cyc Project.

In 1993, the AI Journal published a special issue with several reviews of that book. Doug sent me a note, saying that my review was the fairest and the most painful. The reason why it was painful is that I pointed out all the unsolved problems they were still working on. They have spent 32 more years working on those problems, and they have made some progress. For a copy of the review, see https://jfsowa.com/pubs/CycRev93.pdf

In June, Doug sent me an article he was working on. and I asked him about giving a talk in the fall (via ZOOM) about ways of connecting Cyc to GPT systems. He said that he was in the hospital for some chemo treatments, and he was enthusiastic about the idea.

In July, I sent him a note about making arrangements, but he didn’t replu.