The Intelligence Age: A History of AI

From ancient automata to modern neural networks — the story of thinking machines

75 Milestones
700+ Years of history
∞ Growing daily

Douglas Lenat

Developing Cyc

  • Founded Cycorp, Inc. in Austin, Texas.
  • Awarded the biannual IJCAI Award for Research Excellence.
  • Contributed to the development of the Cyc knowledge base system, aimed at enabling machines to reason like humans.

Douglas Bruce Lenat was an American computer scientist and researcher in artificial intelligence. His work focused on the creation of Cyc, a large knowledge base and reasoning engine designed to enable machines to understand and reason about human concepts and ideas.

Milestones

  • The Program That Invented Its Own Rules
    Expert Systems and the Knowledge Boom Research
    The Program That Invented Its Own Rules

    Doug Lenat's Eurisko discovered winning strategies by rewriting its own heuristics, dominating a naval wargame so thoroughly the organizers threatened to cancel the competition.

    1983
  • 1984
    Expert Systems and the Knowledge Boom Research
    The Audacious Attempt to Encode All Human Knowledge

    Doug Lenat launched Cyc, a project to hand-code millions of common-sense facts into a machine — a decades-long bet that AI needed to know what every child knows.

    1984
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