[dfrage]

To quote Wikipedia it is:

> attempting to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and "rules of thumb" about how the world works (think common sense knowledge but focusing more on things that rarely get written down or said, in contrast with facts one might find somewhere on the internet or retrieve via a search engine or Wikipedia), with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning and be less "brittle" when confronted with novel situations that were not preconceived.

As explained by Douglas Lenat in a talk in the 1980s, he said his AI efforts had reached a point where there was a mattress on the road blocking him, and he decided to do something about it. As the article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc) alludes to in passing, it started out as an effort to capture the information needed to understand all the entries in a 2 volume encyclopedia", "Cyc" itself is from encyclopedia.

Image recognition? Well, I suppose once you identify an object, Cyc might be useful to reason about it, but....