Cyc: toward Programs with Common Sense. Cyc: toward Programs with Common Sense Motivation: The

Cyc, a massive project to create a knowledge base spanning all human consensus knowledge, is discussed. The project will require the development of a new logic language for expressing knowledge before sets of procedures can be created and the knowledge base itself built. Cyc programmers developed CycL, a unique representation language and inference engine. Inferencing in Cyc at the heuristic level involves a variety of ’logically superfluous’ mechanisms that make procedures more efficient, as well as highly specialized inference rules. The dependency analysis procedure used in the knowledge base is also described. Objects and properties can be either ’spatially’ or ’temporally’ intrinsic. Several application programs making use of Cyc are currently under development.