Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has claimed preliminary success in Project Halo, a hitherto secret project to enable computers to answer questions they’ve never seen before and to state their reasoning.

The project’s early phases are limited to facts in hard science, so Allen’s Vulcan Inc. investment arm stands a better chance of success than did earlier, sweeping AI projects seeking to reduce all human knowledge to computer-readable form, said project manager Noah Friedland.

The project may result in technology that could, for example, replace the one-third of the work force at Amazon.com handling customer service, he said. It could also have an effect on home schooling and education.

Vulcan funded three teams — Cycorp Inc. of Austin, Texas, ontoprise GmbH of Karlsruhe, Germany and a team composed of SRI International, Menlo Park, Calif., the University of Texas-Austin, and Boeing Phantom Works — which competed to render 71 pages of advanced-placement inorganic chemistry into laws and rules a computer can understand.

Now Project Halo is into Phase II, selecting new companies to make it simple enough for non-computer scientists to create knowledge bases and the questions that interrogate them.