Justin Mullins seems to have missed the real reason why many AI researchers are unhappy about the claims of the creators of Cyc. Many modern fields within AI, such as behaviour-based robotics, artificial life and evolutionary robotics, were developed as a response to the problems of symbolically representing the world - problems that are typified by the traditional rule-based techniques of Cyc.
Cyc may manipulate the symbol "house" and statistically link it to the symbols "garden" and "roof" within its database, but as the program has no functional relationship with a house, it can never know what a house actually is. This issue in AI is highly contentious and is referred to as the symbol grounding problem.
Although it is true that Joseph Weizenbaum's program Eliza was highly influential in AI, it is worth pointing out that he used it not to demonstrate that computers could be intelligent, but to ...
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