
 
•  To discover chances and take advantage of 
them, a system which can perform deductive 
reasoning is needed.  
Therefore, we consider chance discovery as a 
process that tries to identify possibly important 
consequences of change with respect to a particular 
person or organization at a particular time. For this 
to happen, a logical reasoning system that 
continuously updates its knowledge base, including 
its private model of chance seekers (CS) is 
necessary. A chance discovery process may act as an 
advisor who asks relevant “what if” question in 
response to a change and present significant 
consequences much like seasoned parents advise 
their children. Such advice incorporates knowledge 
about the chance seekers, their capabilities, and 
preferences along with knowledge about the world 
and how it changes.   
In a word, to discover chances, we need three 
things: First, a knowledgeable KB which can infer 
and understand commonsense knowledge and that 
can incorporate a model of the chance seeker. 
Second, we need a source for information about 
change in the world. Third, we need a temporal 
projection system that would combine information 
about change with the background knowledge and 
that would assess the magnitude of the change with 
respect to the knowledge seeker.  Cyc knowledge 
base is supposed to become the world's largest and 
most complete general knowledge base and 
commonsense reasoning engine and therefore 
represents a good candidate as a source for 
background knowledge. Information about changes 
occurring in the world is usually documented in 
natural languages. For example, a newspaper can 
serve as a source for information about change. We 
need Nature Language Processing (NLP) tool to 
understand this newspaper. We assume that Cyc 
natural language module will be able to generate a 
working logic representation of new information in 
the newspaper. However, for the purpose of the 
present work, understanding news and converting it 
to Cyc representation has been done manually. This 
paper proposes an approach for assessing the 
implications of change to the chance seeker and 
bringing to the attention of the chance seeker 
significant risks or opportunities. 
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 
establishes the notion that chance and change are 
tied together. Section 3 introduces Cyc knowledge 
base and its technology. Section 4 presents the 
chance discovery system based on Cyc. 
2  CHANCES IN CHANGES 
Chances and changes exist everywhere in our daily 
life. In general, changes are partially observable by a 
small subset of agents. Therefore, it is more likely to 
learn about changes happening in the world through 
others. For example, information about change could 
be deduced from conversations in chat rooms, 
newspapers, e-mail, news on the WWW, TV 
programs, new books and magazines, etc. In another 
word, change causing events occur daily around the 
world. The amount and rate of those events is very 
large. However, a relatively small portion of these 
changes represent risks or opportunities to any 
particular chance seeker.  
Initially, the system starts with a stable 
knowledge base KB. The knowledge base represents 
the set of widely held knowledge. As part of KB’s 
knowledge, each chance seeker maintains its own 
private knowledge that describes its current 
attributes. In addition to KB, each chance seeker 
also maintains its private goals and plans about how 
to achieve those goals. If chance seeker doesn’t 
maintain its goals, the system will use default goals 
that are widely accepted as common goals. For 
example, the system assumes that all people want to 
become more famous or richer, want their family 
members and relatives to be rich and healthy, etc. 
We assume that the chance seeker has already 
exploited the chances present in the current KB and 
that the current plans of chance seeker are the best 
according to current KB. However, current plans 
may only be able to achieve part of the goals. For 
example, the goal to own a house in Mars is 
unachieved by current knowledge.  
A goal of chance seeker can be represented by a 
set of sentences describing a future status of chance 
seeker’s attributes. For example, if chance seeker set 
up the goal to be a famous scientist, the system can 
judge the achievement of the goal by measuring 
chance seeker’s current attributes, such as education, 
occupation, published papers, social class, etc. The 
system maintains an attribute framework of chance 
seeker in KB. The attribute framework can be able 
to change if necessary. A goal can be considered as a 
future projection of current framework. On the other 
hand, a future set of attributes could satisfy many 
goals of chance seeker. Current plans of chance 
seeker project current set of attributes to the most 
achievable set of attributes.  
As new information B becomes available, an 
update operation is triggered. The update operation 
proceeds in two phases: a explanation phase and a 
projection phase. The explanation phase tries to 
revise current plans that may have been proven to be 
inaccurate by the occurrence of B. Similarly, the 
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