Re:Meanwhile (Score 1)

Your points are well taken, but I think still slightly miss the purpose of Cyc. Have you, in fact, entered "Is a cat a mammal?" into Google? With the quotes, it returns 3 hits; without the quotes, about 1.5 million. In neither case is it apparent what the answer to the question is. More importantly, even if one or more of the top articles DID contain the answer, what will it take for some other computer program to be able to understand the answer in some usable form? The goal of Cyc is to get this kind of information (and all the things inferrable from it) into a machine-usable form, not to be a replacement for the wealth of human-readable information now available on the web. Yes, the two need to interact and will be interesting to see how that plays out, but it's a mistake to think that just because you as a human can sift through google responses, however good they may be, that a computer (software) can make use of those responses in the same way. If (when?) computers can read and understand natural language text, then it will be a different ballgame indeed. One of the arguments for something like Cyc is that there's a high-level of knowledge that computers must have, in a form they can use, before they stand a chance of reading and comprehending unstructured stuff.