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assembled and organized since 1984 by Cycorp, of Austin, Texas. In its scope, Cyc was as ambitious as the eighteenth-century French encyclopedists, headed by Denis Diderot, who attempted to catalogue all of modern knowledge (which had grown significantly since the days of Aristotle). Cyc, headed by a computer scientist named Douglas Lenat, aspired to fill a similar role for the computer age. It would lay out the relationships of practically everything, from plants to presidents, so that intelligent machines could make inferences. If they knew, for example, that Ukraine produced wheat, that wheat was a plant, and that plants died without water, it could infer that a historic drought in Ukraine would curtail wheat production. By 2010, Cyc has grown to nearly half a million terms, from plants to presidents. It links them together with some fifteen thousand types of relations. A squirrel, just to pick one example, has scores of relationships: trees (climbed upon), rats (cousins of), cars (crushed by), hawks (hunted by), acorns (food), and so on. The Cyc team has now accumulated five million facts, or assertions, relating all of the terms to one another. Cyc represents more than six hundred researcher-years but is still limited in its scope. And in the age of information, the stratospheric growth of knowledge seems sure to outstrip the efforts of humans to catalogue it manually.

[>] And there were still so many: Before working on a new algorithm for Watson, team members had to come up with a hypothesis for the goals and effectiveness of the algorithm, then launch it on a Wiki where all the team members could debate the concept, refine it, and follow its progress. Here’s an example of one hypothesis: “A Pun-Relation classifier based on a statistical combination of synonymy, ngram associations, substring and sounds like detectors will increase Watson’s accuracy and precision at 70 by more than 10 percent on pun questions while not negatively impacting overall performance on non-pun questions.”

Sources and Further Reading

Bailey, James, Afterthought: The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence, Basic Books, 1997

Benjafield, John G., Cognition, Oxford University Press, 2007

Bringsjord, Selmer, and David Ferrucci, Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine, Psychology Press, 1999

Dyson, George B., Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, Basic Books, 1997

Harris, Bob, Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!, Crown Publishers, 2006

Hawkins, Jeff, with Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence, Henry Holt and Co., 2004

Hsu, Feng-Hsiung, Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion, Princeton University Press, 2002

Jennings, Ken, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs, Villard Books, 2006

Johnson, Steven, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, Scribner, 2004

Kidder, Tracy, The Soul of a New Machine, Little, Brown and Co., 1981

Klingberg, Torel, The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory, Oxford University Press, 2009

Lanier, Jaron, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010

Ma, Jeffrey, The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big in Business, Palgrave MacMillan, 2010

McNeely, Ian F., with Lisa Wolverton, Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet, W. W. Norton & Co., 2008

Nass, Clifford, with Corina Yen, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach us about Human Relationships, Current, 2010

Norretranders, Tor, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, Penguin, 1999

Pinker, Steven, How the Mind Works, W. W. Norton & Co., 1997

Rasskin-Gutman, Diego, Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, MIT Press, 2009

Richmond, Ray, This Is Jeopardy!: Celebrating America’s Favorite Quiz Show, Barnes & Noble Books, 2004

Storrs Hall, J., Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine, Prometheus Books, 2007

Wright, Alex, Glut: Mastering