> Cyc concluded that while shaving the man was not human since the razor was an electrical device and electrical devices were not human.
I can't parse this sentence? Is there supposed to be a comma before and after "while shaving"?
Yes. Sorry. I was actually just googling this and realised this same anecdote is in cited the intro to the Deep Learning book by Goodfellow et al. Their write-up is hopefully clearer:
"For example, Cyc failed to understand a story about a person named Fred shaving in the morning (Linde, 1992). Its inference engine detected an inconsistency in the story: it knew that people do not have electrical parts, but because Fred was holding an electric razor, it believed the entity “FredWhileShaving” contained electrical parts. It therefore asked whether Fred was still a person while he was shaving"
https://www.deeplearningbook.org/contents/intro.html
The (Linde, 1992) citation is they give is the 4th episode of a TV series - presumably the one I saw as a kid!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_That_Changed_the...
And of course it's on YouTube:
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxRcsHT-s1iZ-VRWFRXA-qg4kjTYe-a6j...