I worked on Cyc as a visiting student for a couple of summers; built some visualization tools to help people navigate around the complex graph. But I never was quite sold on the project, some tangential learnings here: https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/alpha-ontologist
>if they could not come to a consensus, would have to take it before the Master, Doug Lenat, who would think for a bit, maybe draw some diagrams on a whiteboard, and come up with the Right Representation
So looks like Cyc did have to fall back on a neural net after all (Lenat's).