How to Play FACTory

FACTory is a game that lets people enter knowledge into the Cyc Knowledge Base, a large store of common-sense knowledge, and hopefully have fun doing it. This means that every time you answer a question, you're helping push the frontier of artificial intelligence. (You may also want to know How You're Helping AI).
Cyc is trying to determine the truth or falsehood of a series of facts. It will ask about things someone has told it, things it read about on the web, and things that it's just guessing about. You will be presented with these facts and asked whether you think they're true or false.
As people play the game, Cyc accumulates votes; when enough people have agreed that a fact is true or not, Cyc considers it confirmed and stops asking about it.

Playing the game is simple. Cyc presents a screen with a statement that it's trying to find out about; you are asked to click buttons saying whether that statement is true, false, don't know, or "doesn't make sense" (since Cyc sometimes asks some pretty strange things).
They're not all right...
Sometimes, Cyc will ask multiple questions on the same screen, usually ones that are connected in some way.
After you've played through ten screens of questions, you'll have finished a round. Cyc will then give you a score for that round, as well as your current total score.

You always get points for playing FACTory, because Cyc is always grateful for every bit of knowledge. You get two points for every question you answer, so you always get a minimum of twenty points in a round. There are two ways to do better then that:
- Sometimes you'll get a screen with more than one question on it, which means you'll get four or six points, depending on how many questions it offers. This happens randomly—just watch for it to show up.
- When Cyc has gotten enough votes on the answer to a question—say, eight other people have agreed that whooping cough causes coughing, and you're the tenth—it becomes convinced of that answer. That's worth a ten-point bonus, because Cyc is now confident of its knowledge.
It doesn't matter whether the fact it's asking about is true or false, as long as you agree with other players about it. That means answering each question truthfully will give you the best score over time, not to mention helping Cyc most!
If you tell Cyc something that disagrees with what others have said, it gets confused.

Of course, it's always all right to say you don't know whether a fact is true or not.
Cyc will always keep a list of the top ten scorers of all time, very like a traditional arcade game. Cycorp is considering ways of awarding prizes the top ten scorers each month; check back for more information, or make a suggestion!

Have fun playing!