
Eurisko, The Computer With A Mind Of Its Own - petercooper
http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF0704/Johnson/Johnson.html
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asciilifeform
Dr. Lenat still refuses to disclose the source code of Eurisko. He is even on
record as having claimed that it was "lost", which seems unlikely.

What is more probable is that the program's much-hyped accomplishments were
done with substantial human hand-holding a la Deep Blue, and the author will
not risk his decades of academic prestige by allowing us to see the code and
judge how high it could have flown on its own.

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Tangurena
I used to play Traveller, and our group at college didn't play the ship-to-
ship combat part, just the role playing game (think of it as D&D with only
6-sided dice, space ships and other planets instead of dungeons).

Thanks for bringing this story back up.

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gaika
_Unit of bogosity is the lenat, named after Douglas Lenat. Like the farad it
is considered far too large a unit for practical use, so bogosity is usually
expressed in microlenats._

~~~
akkartik
But it wasn't always thus. In the dawn of time Lenat actually did stuff.

Funnily enough, I've been playing around with a port of AM for the past coupla
weeks. I've had the code for years and never looked at it until now. What got
you on Lenat, Peter?

I think the world's coolest AI programs are Eurisko, Copycat and AM.

~~~
cabalamat
> _In the dawn of time Lenat actually did stuff._

Harsh, but probably fair. Or as Eliezer Yudkowsky put it "EURISKO may still be
the most sophisticated self-improving AI ever built [...] by Douglas Lenat
before he started wasting his life on Cyc."

> _I've been playing around with a port of AM for the past coupla weeks._

From where is the code for AM available? I ask because some people on an AI
list I subscribe to think the Eurisko code is unavailable (but would like to
get hold of it). You wouldn't have the Eurisko code too, by any chance?

> _I think the world's coolest AI programs are Eurisko, Copycat and AM._

I would agree, in terms of modelling general cognition.

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akkartik
No, eurisko nobody has :) The version of AM I have was written by one of my
professors at the University of Texas Austin, and is in an ancient dialect of
prolog. I'm not sure if it was ok to redistribute. Let me check.

I got it working on gprolog last week, but it seems to cause stack overflows
:(

~~~
cabalamat
> _No, eurisko nobody has :)_

So why is that? Does Lenat not want anyone to see it? Or was the code lost?

BTW am I right in presuming that the original AM was written in Lisp?

~~~
akkartik
Yes, the original papers indicate it was in lisp. "Why AM appears to work"
suggested that a lot of the reason math was a good domain for discovery was
just that lisp is well-suited to the domain. And Eurisko could modify
heuristics expressed as s-expressions.

People have asked him, but I'm not aware of Lenat ever commenting on the
source code. Cycorp is substantially funded by DARPA, and I wouldn't be
surprised if Eurisko is part of its IP now.

Feel free to email me to take this offline.

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speek
"We're building a machine that will be proud of us"

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wooby
Lenat's been working on this since the 80s: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc>

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rejoyy
interesting read until i came to the part where douglas photo is displayed...
is it just me or does he look like jake gyllenhaal?..

