[tootie]

I'm curious what you saw it doing. Cyc has been a vaporware product for many many years. It's had corporate backing on and off for a long time and produced next to nothing.

[tkosan]

I spend 1-2 hours each day learning Cyc, and each day I see it do something new. For example, I just asked Cyc "Where did the 2012 Summer Olympics take place?" and this was its response:

  %cycl,microtheory="InferencePSC"
  
  (eventOccursAt 
      (SummerOlympicsFn 
        (YearFn 2012))
      ?VAR)
  
  %/cycl
  
      %output,mpversion=".257",preserve="false"
         #  ?VAR                          
        --- ---------------------------------------------------------------------
          1 UnitedKingdomOfGreatBritainAndNorthernIreland
          2 England                       
          3 EasternContinent              
          4 ContinentOfEurasia            
          5 Occident                      
          6 MilkyWay-Galaxy               
          7 PlanetEarth                   
          8 NorthernHemisphere-Region     
          9 ContinentOfEurope             
         10 CityOfLondonEngland           
  .   %/output

[modeless]

Google, Bing, Wolfram Alpha, and Siri all parse that query properly and answer it perfectly. Do you have an example of something Cyc does that none of those services do?

[tkosan]

Cyc is used in the MathCraft application, which is currently in beta:

http://www.cyc.com/mathcraft/

I don't think Google, Bing, Wolfram Alpha, or Siri can be used for applications like this.

[nl]

Wolfram Alpha + Wolfram Mathematica certainly could.

[nl]

And it's worth noting that Google and Bing generate that answer without human intervention, so no complex data engineering etc..

[PeterisP]

Not really, Google Knowledge Graph is an ages-old project and the side-panel "fact sheets" have involved manual curation of the automated results.

[nl]

There's manual curation of the schemes which map some human-eneterd data on web pages to facts, but the extraction is automatic.

See [1], noting that human annotation is responsible for 250K of the 100 million high confidence facts in the system.

I believe they have some manual overrides in a few cases, but the system itself is automatic.

[1] https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45634.html

[anc84]

Do they really though?

[nl]

That is exactly replicable in SPARQL against DBPedia (and probably Wikidata).

It's also fairly useless in that it doesn't give the "commonsense" answer of London as the first result and commonsense is what Cyc has always been supposed to do. (And yes I understand that CityOfLondonEngland probably has a plain English label too).

[squarerootof-1]

City of London is one of the central boroughs of London. It's basically the historic city, now turned into a financial district. So I wouldn't say that's the correct answer either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London

[zeristor]

Hmmm. The "City of London "is the "square mile", the but around St Paul's. Technically the 2012 Olympics were held at Stratford, what was once known as Stratford-atte-Bower.

Although London is good enough for me. William Shakespeare would be spinning in his grave.

[zimpenfish]

> Technically the 2012 Olympics were held at Stratford

To be pedantic, only some of the Olympic events were held at Stratford. Horse dancing was held in Greenwich, for example, and many of the over-water events were held on Eton Dorney ("bloody miles away from Stratford").

[rtkwe]

> 4 ContinentOfEurasia

> 9 ContinentOfEurope

> 10 CityOfLondonEngland

Given it also has 4 & 9 I wonder if that's more of a tag than the name and it just unfortunately lines up with an actual place name. Don't know Cyc to check but I'd wager that if the location was City of London it would output CityOfCityOfLondonEngland.