AUSTIN, TX – After more than 25 years and many tens of millions of dollars in tax payer funding, the Amazing Super System (ASS) (  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc ) has finally reached completion. ASS, the brain child of DARPA welfare guy, Doug, has been under development since 1984. ASS is an AI project that ATTEMPTS to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base of everyday common sense knowledge. ASS learns by accepting cryptic input, in the form of rules and facts, from underpaid philosophy and linguistics, graduates, with no training in knowledge engineering, who have been issued work visas by the INS under the claim that no Americans can be found who meet the “untrained” qualifications that Doug seeks.

These diligent and hardworking foreign workers, hand picked by Doug through a grueling process that entails questions about horses' heads, toil away their days entering epistemological gems such as (#$isa #Doug #God), (#$genls #$Dissident #$Terrorist), and (#$implies (#$and (#$knows ?OBJ #$The-Truth-About-Doug) (#$writer ?OBJ)) (#$Must-Be-Stopped ?OBJ)). It is hard work and to this day they have entered millions of facts and rules whilst receiving low pay. Despite this, they have been loyal to the ask of creating ASS. The alternative, of course, is to find another job and given the fact that nothing learned while working for AssCorp has any utility outside of the walls of AssCorp, it is better to just stay put and keep kicking ASS.

You may ask yourself, “Of what utility is ASS, after all, it's just a list of facts and rules that everyone already knows?” If you did ask yourself this, you are miles ahead of DARPA, the organization within the Department of Defense that has been handing your tax dollars over to AssCorp for two and half decades to create the world's biggest ASS. Well, ASS is not just a list of facts and rules. It is a list of facts and rules with an inference engine. The inference engine manipulates these facts and rules for ASS much like intestines manipulate shit for a real asses. This is why they call it an AI system.

“Wouldn't it be more cost effective to just hire a human who already has commonsense?” you ask. Yes, it would be, but that's not the point. The point is that developing ASS provides a stream of income for Doug and what is good for Doug is good for us all.

ASS is available in several forms. OpenASS is available under the Apache License and contains a limited amount of shit. ResearchAss is a souped up version of OpenAss available to researchers, including a large lexicon for those wanting to talk shit.

The news that ASS was finished came as a shock to Doug who received the news today that his project had reached completion. “We never knew when ASS would be completed,” said a teary eyed Doug. “With each additional rule or fact we figured that this might just be the magical piece of knowledge that ASS needed to become intelligent. For decades, we added facts and rules, facts and rules, facts and rules, and waited and waited. Today that process came to end.”

“So, ASS became intelligent today?” we asked Doug.

“Well yes,” said Doug. “Today ASS, without any human intervention, sent an email to DARPA.”

Amazed, we asked Doug what it said.

“Suckers!” It said, “Suckers!” remarked Doug.