"People have silly reasons why computers   don't really think. The answer is we haven't    programmed them right; they just don't have    much common sense. There's been only one   large project to do something about that,  that's the famous Cyc project." ~ Marvin Minsky, MIT, May 2001

The development of Cyc was a very long-term, high-risk gamble that has begun to pay off. Begun as a research project in 1984, Cyc is now a working technology with applications to many real-world business problems. Cyc's vast knowledge base enables it to perform well at tasks that are beyond the capabilities of other software technologies.

This page is intended to give an indication of Cyc's potential by describing some tasks to which Cyc is currently being applied and by suggesting others to which Cyc might be applied in the future.

• Capabilities Currently Available or in Development
  • Integration of Heterogeneous Databases
  • Intelligent Search
    • Knowledge-Enhanced Retrieval of Captioned Information
    • WWW Information Retrieval
  • Distributed AI
  
  
• Potential Applications
  • Online brokering of goods and services
  • "Smart" interfaces
  • Intelligent character simulation for games
  • Enhanced virtual reality
  • Improved machine translation
  • Improved speech recognition
  • Sophisticated user modelling
  • Semantic data mining
  • Advice Services: E-shopping Assistant