Cycorp

Cycorp is a privately held software company founded in 1995 by Doug Lenat. The company's primary focus is on developing a large-scale, common-sense knowledge base, often referred to as the Cyc knowledge base. This knowledge base aims to capture a vast amount of human knowledge and reasoning abilities in a format that can be understood and utilized by artificial intelligence systems. Cycorp's ultimate goal is to enable AI to comprehend and interact with the world in a manner similar to humans, possessing a deep understanding of everyday concepts and their relationships.

The Cyc project has been ongoing for several decades and is one of the longest-running AI research endeavors. The knowledge base is built using a proprietary logic-based language and is populated through a combination of manual knowledge entry by domain experts and ongoing research into automated knowledge acquisition techniques. Cycorp offers this knowledge base and related reasoning tools through licensing agreements to various industries, including defense, government, and commercial sectors, for applications such as intelligent systems, advanced search, and semantic analysis. The company has faced both acclaim for its ambitious vision and criticism regarding the pace of progress and the practical applicability of the Cyc knowledge base.