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A similar claim (like the one Minksy made) was made about Cyc, that didn't pan out either.

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I remember when Cyc came up with the revelation of "recursion". Then the presenter mentions Cyc was written in Lisp where recursion is everything - so it's wasn't a revelation but rather a base case programmed into Cyc.

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Scott, yes, Cyc is infused with bogosity.

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New term for me "bogosity". It might be slightly different than what I was trying to point out - which applies to the LLM - that basically Cyc (and now AI) pops out a revelation of "new knowledge" - when it's new just polished and then output as new (or new sounding). The "Recursion" concept they thought to be new knowledge - but it was how Cyc was written. It was fed "recursion milk" when it was founded. So it couldn't invent recursion.

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Hi Scott, didn't mean to go off on a tangent, lol. I worked on Cyc, for just under a year, glad it wasn't longer. I have since been under the strong belief that 'common sense reasoning' is an absurd oxymoron, and that common sense is 'common' because it's sensed nearly identically, by us beings - reasoning, which is optional, comes after.

So yes, that claim about recursion fits well with what was proposed, pursued etc.

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I must add that I've since found out Minsky probably never made that actual 3-8 year claim. The claim was probably a fabrication of the Life (fixed my mistakenly mentioning Time) 'journalist'. Minsky was thoroughly convinced GOFAI was on the right track, of course.

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