AP Discovers Cycorp, Cyc Discovers Sex
from the still-learning-after-all-these-years dept
It's been a while since we last mentioned Cyc or Cycorp, but it seems the AP has suddenly discovered it and has written an article all about teaching machines to think. If you're already familiar with Cyc, there's not much new in the article. If you're not, it's a eighteen year old project to create an artificial intelligence by feeding it all sorts of data. The big news a while back was that they were finally going to release it to the public to add their own "facts" - and which I thought would lead to people stuffing Cyc's brain with all sorts of nonsense. The article does talk, however, about Cyc's experience helping improve Lycos' search engine. It seems that programmers had to teach Cyc about sex, because of the large number of sex-related queries.
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