What is Cyc in the context of AI?

• A. A programming language for AI
• B. A knowledge base system adding common knowledge for AI
• C. A neural network architecture
• D. A data visualization tool

Answer: (B)

Cyc is a knowledge base system that adds common knowledge for AI, enabling machines to reason about everyday situations. It provides a large, structured repository of facts, relationships, and rules about real-world concepts, encoded in a formal language called CycL, and supported by an inference engine that can derive conclusions from that knowledge. This setup lets AI systems incorporate human-like common sense to understand, disambiguate, and reason about problems beyond what data alone can capture. It is not a programming language, nor a neural network architecture, nor a data visualization tool.