Why are they creating Cyc ?
The Cyc team doesn’t believe there is any shortcut toward being intelligent or creating an artificial intelligence based agent. Addressing the need for a large body of knowledge complete with content and context may only be done by manually organizing and collating information. This knowledge includes heuristic, rule of thumb problem solving strategies, as well as facts that can only be known to a machine if it is told. Much of the useful common sense knowledge needed for life is prescientific and has therefore not been analyzed in detail. Thus a large part of the work of the Cyc project is to formalize common relationships and fill in the gaps between the highly systematized knowledge used by specialists in the modern world.
