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Pioneer

Douglas Lenat

Also Known As Douglas Bruce Lenat · Doug Lenat · Doug B. Lenat · Doug B Lenat · D. B. Lenat · D B Lenat
Computing Methodologies

Douglas Lenat was an American artificial intelligence researcher who founded and led Cycorp, the company built around Cyc, a decades long project to encode common sense human knowledge into a machine usable form, ultimately built from an estimated 2,000 person years of effort into roughly 24 million rules and assertions. Earlier in his career he created AM, a 1976 program that proposed new mathematical concepts rather than simply proving given theorems, and its successor Eurisko, which treated its own heuristic rules as objects it could inspect and improve, letting the program discover new heuristics on its own.

Facts
Birth Year
1950 1
Birth Date
1950-09-13 1
Death Year
2023 1
Death Date
2023-08-31 1
Nationality
American 1
Award
AAAI Fellow 2
Award
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 2
Award
IJCAI Computers and Thought Award 2
Award
Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society 2
FAQs

Was Cyc built on statistics or neural networks?

Cyc stores its knowledge as logical assertions and reasons deductively, not by statistics or neural networks.

No. A computing dictionary entry on Cyc from the 1990s describes it as an attempt to do symbolic artificial intelligence on a massive scale. It says Cyc is not based on numerical methods such as statistical probabilities, nor on neural networks or fuzzy logic, and that all of its knowledge is represented declaratively as logical assertions, with an inference engine that derives new conclusions by deductive reasoning. The same entry says the Cyc team was led by Doug Lenat and that a new independent company, Cycorp, was created in January 1995 to continue the project.
Connections

In Field

Artificial Intelligence, Fields
Source Wikipedia: Douglas Lenat
In the Other Atlases

Nationality

United States

Also in Geography Atlas: the nationality of this subject.

Sources
1. Wikipedia: Douglas Lenat
Wikimedia Foundation
  • Lead section
    Douglas Bruce Lenat (September 13, 1950 - August 31, 2023) was an American computer scientist and researcher in artificial intelligence who was the founder and CEO of Cycorp, Inc. in Austin, Texas.
  • In Field: Artificial Intelligence, Lead paragraph
View the Source
2. Wikidata: Douglas Lenat
Wikidata Q559334, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)View the Source
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