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Douglas Lenat




Lenat's quest, in the Cyc project, to build the basis of a general Artificial Intelligence by manually representing knowledge in the formal language, CycL, based on extensions to First-order Predicate Calculus has not been without its critics. It is perhaps for this reason that " Bogosity " is measured in microlenats according to the Jargon File (also known as the Hacker's dictionary). (The lenat is considered too large a unit for practical use.)

At the University Of Pennsylvania , Lenat received his Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics and Physics, and his Master's Degree in Applied Mathematics in 1972 . He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1976 . His advisor was Professor Edward Feigenbaum .

Quotes:

"Intelligence is 10 million rules."

"The time may come when a greatly expanded Cyc will underlie countless software applications. But reaching that goal could easily take another two decades (from TechnologyReview.com, March 2005)."

"Once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as knowledge, then the human-software system will be superhuman, in the same sense that mankind with writing is superhuman compared to mankind before writing."