Career
He has also worked in military simulations and published a critique of conventional random-mutation Darwinism based on his experience with Eurisko. Lenat was one of the original Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Lenat"s quest, in the Cyc project, is to build the basis of a general artificial intelligence by manually representing knowledge in the formal language, CycL, based on extensions to first-order predicate calculus. At the University of Pennsylvania, Lenat received his Bachelor"s degree in Mathematics and Physics, and his Master"s degree in Applied Mathematics in 1972.
He received his Doctor of Philosophy from Stanford University (published in Knowledge-based systems in artificial intelligence, along with the Doctor of Philosophy thesis of Randall Davis, McGraw-Hill, 1982) in 1976.
His advisor was Professor Edward Feigenbaum. In 1976 Lenat started teaching at Carnegie Mellon and commenced his work on Eurisko, but returned to Stanford in a teaching role in 1978.
His continuing work on Eurisko led to attention in 1982 from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Master Control Console in Austin, Texas. In 1984 he left Stanford to commence work on Cyc, the fruits of which were spun out of Master Control Console into Cycorp in 1994.
In 1986, he estimated the effort to complete Cyc would be 250,000 rules and 350 man-years of effort.
As of 2006, Lenat continues his work on Cyc at Cycorp. "Intelligence is ten million rules." "The time may come when a greatly expanded Cyc will underlie countless software applications. But reaching that goal could easily take another two decades." "Once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as knowledge, then the human-software system will be superhuman, in the same sense that mankind with writing is superhuman compared to mankind before writing.".