Ramanathan V. Guha

Enabling agents to work together

l Paradigm 1: Competence emerges from a large number of relatively simple agents integrated by some cleverly engineered architecture. The choice of architecture is the make-or-break theoretical part of this; the detailed characteristics of the implementation of the architecture (and the algorithms that crawl around it) are the make-orbreak pragmatic parts. The archetype of this paradigm is SOAR [61; its forerunners were the early “pure production systems.”

Cyc: a mid-term report

After explicating the need for a large commonsense knowledge base spanning human consensus knowledge, we report on many of the lessons learned over the first five years of attempting its construction. We have come a long way in terms of methodology, representation language, techniques for efficient inferencing, the ontology of the knowledge base, and the environment and infrastructure in which the knowledge base is being built. We describe the evolution of Cyc and its current state and close with a look at our plans and expectations for the coming five years, including an argument for how and why the project might conclude at the end of this time.

The evolution of CycL, the Cyc representation language

CycL is the language in which the Cyc Knowledge Base is being encoded. This paper reviews some of the methodological considerations and the technical decisions (resulting from these considerations) that are both different from conventional thinking and that have significantly influenced the design of the language.

CYC: a mid-term report

Abstract After explicating the need for a large common-sense knowledge base spanning human consensus knowledge, we report on many of the lessons learned over the first five years of attempting its construction. We have come a long way, in terms of methodology, representation language, techniques for efficient inferencing, the ontology of the knowledge base, and in terms of the environment and infrastructure in which it is being built. We describe the evolution of Cyc, its current state, and close with a look ahead at our plans and expectations for the coming five years, including an argument for how and why the project may conclude at that time.