AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

I'm thinking also of Cyc, an earlier and more centralized effort to build a universal knowledge base, also seems like a failure, even though its goals and methodology were quite different than those of the Semantic Web.

from MUE

May be related to structuralism, although I never really understood what that was all about to be honest, whereas algebraic is something deeply felt. GOFAI tends towards the algebraic: Cyc, but even more Meaningness's early work cognitive cliches

I came up with the phrase "alpha ontologist" during a short stint working with Doug Lenat's Cyc project. At the time, they were trying to encode all of botany and had a small staff of professional botanists doing knowledge entry. Naturally it was quite difficult for the botanists to try to translate their knowledge into the formalisms required by Cyc, and they would regularly puzzle over various questions (I wish I had written some of these down) and if they could not come to a consensus, would have to take it before the Master, Doug Lenat, who would think for a bit, maybe draw some diagrams on a whiteboard, and come up with the Right Representation.

This grand concept of a universal knowledge calculus made my computational senses tingle. Is this not what GOFAI aims at? Particularly in efforts like the Cyc project, the apotheosis of the dream of "knowledge representation". However, the logical formalisms of KR seem pretty crude compared to what Hesse is describing. Cyc was based on a notion of representation as formalized statements or graphs,; while the Glass Bead Game is an entry into a higher, more spiritual plane, a practice, not a body of knowledge.

Cyc

30 Oct 2021 - 14 Feb 2026

A grand project to build a formal representation of all human knowledge! Not wikipedia, but knowledge in a formalized frame system, including everything from common sense facts about objects, money, botany, human relationships, and the economic activity of Indonesia. This was sort of the moonshot project of GOFAI, led by Douglas Lenat first at MCC (a big semi-governmental research lab in Austin) and later as its own company Cycorp which is still going.

I worked with the Cyc team for a couple of summers as a graduate student, but it was at a time when I was absorbing a lot of the situated action critique of AI, and the approach of Cyc was quite antithetical. But it was still a neat project! I got past my intellectual qualms by focusing on the user interface, a oft-used strategy of mine, and got a paper out of it A Visual Representation for Knowledge Structures (See MUE)

Doug Lenat died recently archive.ph the NYT obit cites his last paper, join with Gary Marcus, on how to hybridize Cyc and LLMs.