

Eurisko, The Computer With A Mind Of Its Own - motters
http://aliciapatterson.org/APF0704/Johnson/Johnson.html

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beagle3
Quoting myself (from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859185> ):

I've been looking for material about Eurisko. Other than this championship,
there appears to be no credible documentation of any of Eurisko's reported
achievements.

It might be super-duper, but the fact that he wouldn't let anyone else use it,
and that those amazing feats have not been reproduced by others despite huge
advances - might just mean that there's more myth to truth in the stories
about Eurisko.

(and ... quoting jonoff from same thread:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861890> )

Adding to the mystery, I read the newyorker article (2009) linked from
wikipedia on Eurisko, and it seems Lenat forgot the winning strategy Eurisko
developed, or the first article is wrong.

"Eurisko, however, had judged that defense was more important than offense,
that many cheap, invulnerable ships would outlast fleets consisting of a few
high-priced, sophisticated vessels. There were ninety-six ships in Eurisko’s
fleet, most of which were slow and clumsy because of their heavy armor" - 1984
article

"astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but
absolutely no defense and no mobility, Lenat said. They just sat there.
Basically, if they were hit once they would sink." - 2009 article <

~~~
jsnell
I don't really see the mystery (unless you're suggesting that he never did win
the tournament, which seems very unlikely). It'd be surprising if he did
remember the exact strategy 30 years after the fact.

The Eurisko/Traveller story has never made sense to me psychologically though.
People who are hardcore enough to enter a tournament for a very math-heavy
game have probably already spent ages hacking the system, twisting it into an
unrecognizable shape. It should have been very unlikely for these loopholes to
have first been found by a program years later.

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recampbell
Is Cyc/OpenCyc dead?

<http://blog.cyc.com/> \- last post Nov 2009

<http://www.cycfoundation.org/> \- last post Nov 2008

<http://cyc.com/cyc/company/press> \- last post Sept 2009

If Cycorp is dead, what is Doug Lenat up to now?

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rms
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/10g/lets_reimplement_eurisko/>

------
_delirium
FWIW, Doug Lenat founded Cyc after doing Eurisko (<http://www.cyc.com/>). His
first discovery system along these lines was AM ("automated mathematician"),
which was math-only, and Eurisko was an attempt to make it domain independent,
so it could target things like the famous gameplay-strategies example. He
eventually grew frustrated at how much domain knowledge had to be hand-coded
for a new domain, though, so hoped that by building one massive database of
commonsense background knowledge, future systems could more easily be
retargeted to new domains: the system would be able to assume most "normal"
knowledge, and only the information unique to that domain would have to be
added.

And that sort of turned into its own multi-decade project...

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randallsquared
One recurring theme in these discussions is that no one has actually seen
Eurisko's source code except Lenat, so it's very difficult to know how much
directed guidance was required to get the results in question.

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wccrawford
Very interesting read. I can only imagine how exciting it must have been for
him to utilize these concepts so effectively.

For anyone choosing not to read, it's about one man's invention of a program
that is the closest thing to Artificial Intelligence that I've ever seen. See
the last paragraph for the best example.

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kabdib
I got a security pop-up going there (Exploit: HTML/IFrameRef.gen).

