Obituary for Cyc

Summary

--- title: "Cyc" author: "Yuxi Liu" date: "2025-04-01" date-modified: "2025-04-01" categories: [AI, scaling, history] format: html: toc: true description: "Obituary for the greatest monument to logical AGI. After 40 years, 30 million rules, 200 million dollars, 2000 person-years, and many promises, Cyc has failed to reach intellectual maturity, and may never will. Exacerbated by the secrecy and insularity of Cycorp, there remains no evidence of its general intelligence." image-alt: "A symbolic representation of the Cyc project. The vanishing point covered by mist represents the project that keeps growing without ever reaching completion, a destination that is a mirage. The rows of pyramids make up a larger pyramid, due to perspective. This creates the sense of a recursive pyramid, a hierarchy of hierarchies, representing the hierarchy of microtheories in Cyc's ontology. The pyramid is also a monument to the dead, of vast ambitions that failed to secure their design purposes. For Egyptian pyramids, the purpose was a good afterlife. For Cyc, the purpose was AGI.\nA one-point perspective image of a path towards infinity, banked by two rows of pyramids. The pyramids are stepped pyramids made of concrete. The path fades into a distant mist. The point of view is above the tops of the pyramids. Monochromatic photo. Created by GPT-4o." image: "figure/banner/banner_3.png" status: "done" confidence: "likely" importance: 5 --- {{< include ../../../utils/blog_utils/_macros.tex >}} ## Abstract The legendary Cyc project, Douglas Lenat's 40-year quest to build artificial general intelligence by scaling symbolic logic, has failed. Based on extensive archival research, this essay brings to light its secret history so that it may be widely known. Lenat's journey began with his PhD work on automated mathematical discovery through heuristic search. He observed that such systems initially make promising discoveries but quickly "run out of steam" as they exhaust their initial pool of heu...