Cyc has hand-coded common-sense knowledge since 1984

In his 1995 Communications of the ACM article, Douglas Lenat reported that “since 1984, a person-century of effort has gone into building CYC,” with roughly 10^5 general concepts and on the order of 10^6 hand-crafted common-sense axioms. The project has continued for about four decades without producing the general intelligence the manual-encoding approach pointed toward.

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Last verified June 6, 2026