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C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	Encyclopedia of common sense knowledge
C00006 00003	Some common sense facts:
C00007 00004	Subdivisions of common sense
C00008 00005	containers
C00009 ENDMK
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Encyclopedia of common sense knowledge

	The CYC project expects to get common sense knowledge as
a byproduct of the activities required to encode knowledge from
the encyclopedia.  My own opinion is that a special concerted
effort to identify and encode common sense knowledge will be
required in order to make the encyclopedia knowledge usefully
accessible to AI programs.  Most likely, however, the common
sense part of the project can be postponed until its nature
becomes more clear.  The residual doubt that it can be postponed
stems from the possibility that the entire format in which
knowledge is encoded might have to be changed in order to make
it compatible with common sense knowledge.

	However, it is worthwhile to think about what a common
sense encyclopedia would contain.

1. Basic information about the effects of actions and other events.

A purely classificatory AI system has no sense of time at all.  For
example, MYCIN has expert knowledge about the relations between
symptoms and results of tests on the one hand and diagnoses on the
other.  However, MYCIN's ontology does not include times or events,
and it cannot be told that one event follows another.  A fortiori
MYCIN cannot make a prognosis, and it cannot plan.  Thus it cannot
plan to reduce a patient's fever in order to administer a drug
for which fever is a contra-indication.

2. Information about arithmetic of resources.
If a car requires 1,000 pounds of
steel, then a million pounds of steel is more than enough for
500 cars but not enough for 2,000 cars.

3. Relations between substances and objects, e.g. between
steel and pieces of steel and between these and objects
wholly or partially made of steel.

4. The relations between concepts and objects.  Napoleon sought
a way to beat the Russians; he didn't find it.  Wellington
successfully sought a way to beat Napoleon.  Arthur Conan Doyle
invented Sherlock Holmes; Holmes was a consulting detective.
Kepler thought the number of planets was prime.

5. 
Some common sense facts:
Subdivisions of common sense
(no criticism)

effects of actions and other events
	presumption of independence

possession

is-a

has-part

knows, information in a book

communication

appearance and reality

space and objects

arithmetic

substances
containers

	It is a property of space that some subsets can separate
others.  An object can move from one of two separated sets to
the other only by penetrating the separating set.

A container  c  satisfies

separates(c,inside c, outside c)