
Some documents on AM and EURISKO - sctb
http://blog.funcall.org//lisp/2018/11/03/am-eurisko-lenat-documents/
======
notacoward
For those unaware of the context...

I was around and actually following AI at the time. After some early success
with expert systems, the field had fallen into a trough of disillusionment.
Even chess was still "unsolved" in the sense that computers had barely reached
master level and were still several years before they'd become truly world
class (let alone dominant). The very possibility of accurate speech or image
recognition was being called into question. At that time, in sharp contrast to
today, AI was a specialty most ambitious people in CS were running away from.

Thus, it was a bit of a shock when Eurisko won the Traveller "Trillion Credit
Squadron" tournament. Traveller was a space-themed RPG, and TCS was a very
detailed space-combat outgrowth of that. That a new kind of AI (what we now
know as genetic programming was far from the AI mainstream) would excel at
such an open-ended task was surprising. That it would do so at such an
obviously military-relevant task in what was still the Cold War was a little
scary. I for one was a bit relieved when Lenat turned his and his creations'
attention to more benign tasks instead of disappearing into the military-
industrial complex.

Lenat, whose ideas were initially viewed with skepticism and worse, did quite
possibly more than anyone else at the time to keep AI interesting and
relevant. If you're working on AI/ML and don't know the story, I highly
recommend digging into it.

------
panic
This bit about EURISKO exploiting its own heuristic scoring mechanism is cute:

 _> One of the first heuristics that EURISKO synthesized (H59) quickly
attained nearly the highest Worth possible (999). Quite excitedly, we examined
it and could not understand at first what it was doing that was so terrific.
We monitored it carefully, and finally realized how it worked: whenever a new
conjecture was made with high worth, this rule put its own name down as one of
the discoverers! It turned out to be particularly difficult to prevent this
generic type of finessing of EURISKO'S evaluation mechanism. Since the rules
had full access to EURISKO'S code, they would have access to any safeguards we
might try to implement. We finally opted for having a small 'meta-level' of
protected code that the rest of the system could not modify._

~~~
khafra
It's not just cute, it's an open problem in the theory of recursively self-
modifying AI design--there's no general solution to an AI hijacking its own
reward channel, so far.
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/upLot6eG8cbXdKiFS/reward-
fun...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/upLot6eG8cbXdKiFS/reward-function-
learning-the-learning-process) is the most recent thing I know of in the area.

------
Cybiote
What I find most incredible about EURISKO is it did all that on what, by
today's standards, is a very small amount of computational power.

Just as outstanding is that, in all these years, in terms of open-ended
problem solving, nothing has truly managed to surpass it.

The conjunction of those two things is a bit scary because it suggests to me
that current methods are probably not making the most effective use of
compute. What happens when that is corrected?

~~~
TezlaKoil
There is no credible documentation of EURISKO's achievements. No one has every
actually seen EURISKO's source code except for Lenat.

Despite huge advances in technology, in computational power, and in the amount
of engineers and grad students thrown at these problems, the magical reasoning
feats have never been reproduced by anyone else - not even by Lenat's much
more expensive project Cyc.

What's more, Lenat did not give a consistent account of the Traveler
tournament. One time he claimed "ninety-six ships in Eurisko’s fleet, most of
which were slow and clumsy because of their heavy armor", other times he would
claim the winning strategy was "astronomical number of small ships like P.T.
boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility".

The most probable explanation is that there's more myth than truth in the
stories about EURISKO.

(on a less serious note, the jargon file entry for "bogosity" references
Lenat; see
[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003515.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003515.html))

~~~
abecedarius
IIRC there were two different Traveler entries in different years, and they
changed the rules in between to fix the problems the first win had revealed.
After the second win they said they'd cancel the tournament if he entered
again.

------
erikj
There are more documents in this archive: [http://nosuchlabs.com/pub/lenat-
leaks.tar.gz](http://nosuchlabs.com/pub/lenat-leaks.tar.gz)

------
ASipos
I hoped some source code would surface.

~~~
inetsee
There is a link to a basic AM clone, "Pythagoras" by Steven L. Tanimoto.
[http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mperkows/CLASS_ROBOTICS/LISP/tanimo...](http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mperkows/CLASS_ROBOTICS/LISP/tanimoto/PYTHAG.CL)

~~~
abecedarius
It's really basic. When I read the code I felt disappointed, though maybe
someone else will feel energized to expand it.

I thought I had seen another recreation, in Bratko's book on Prolog
programming for AI, but if it is there then it got dropped in the second
edition. Maybe my memory got confused between that book and Tanimoto's.

