CYC: Using Common Sense Knowledge to Overcome Brittleness and Knowledge Acquisition Bottlenecks

The recent history of expert systems, for example, highlights how constricting the brittleness and knowledge acquisition bottlenecks are. Moreover, standard software methodology (e.g., working from a detailed "spec") has proven of little use in AI, a field which by definition tackles ill-structured problems. How can these bottlenecks be widened? Attractive, elegant answers have included machine learning, automatic programming, and natural language understanding. But decades of work on such systems (Green et al., 1974; Lenat et al., 1983; Lenat & Brown, 1984; Schank & Abelson, 1977) have convinced us that each of these approaches has difficulty "scaling up" for want of a substantial base of real world knowledge.