The Cycic Friends Network: getting Cyc agents to reason together

We describe the initial results of a project aimed at adapting the Cyc system for use in an agent architecture. Two Cyc systems that share a large common core of knowledge but differ in additional knowledge they possess were able to reason together to solve problems that neither could solve on its own. A rudimentary interface was constructed for Cyc that allowed it to communicate with other KQML-speaking agents. The Cyc reasoning algorithm was modified to allow it to ask other agents for help in developing a proof to answer a query. We were able to demonstrate that Cyc can be adapted to work in an agent-oriented architecture and to get several Cyc-based agents to reason in a tightly-coupled manner. A number of interesting research issues remain concerning how to do so efficiently.