Up until about GPT 2, EURISKO was arguably the most interesting achievement in AI. Back in the day on the SL4 and singularitarian mailing lists, it was spoken of in reverent tones, and I’m sure I remember a much younger Eliezer Yudkowsky cautioning that Doug Lenat should have perceived a non-zero chance of hard takeoff at the moment of its birth. I suspect its achievements were slightly overblown and heavily guided by a human hand, but it’s still fascinating and definitely worthy of study. Genetic programming hasn’t yielded many interesting results since, and the unreasonably effectiveness of differentiable programming and backpropagation has sucked up much of the oxygen in the room. But not everything is differentiable, the combination of the two still seems worth investigating, and EURISKO goes to show the power of heuristic approaches to some problems.
> the combination of the two still seems worth investigating
This.
Back in the late 1980's and early 90's the debate-du-jour was between deliberative and reactive control systems for robots. I got my Ph.D. for simply saying that the entire debate was based on the false premise that it had to be one or the other, that each approach had its strengths and weaknesses, and that if you just put the two together the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. (Well, it was a little more than that. I had to actually show that it worked, which was more work that simply advancing the hypothesis, but in retrospect it seems kinda obvious, doesn't it?)
If I were still in the game today, combining generative-AI and old-school symbolic reasoning (which has also advanced a lot in 30 years) would be the first thing I would focus my attention (!) on.
> Up until about GPT 2, EURISKO was arguably the most interesting achievement in AI.
I'm really baffled by such statement and genuinely curious.
How come that studying GOFAI as undergraduate and graduate at many European universities, doing a PhD. and working in the field for several years _never_ exposed me to EURISKO up until last week (thanks to HN)?
I heard about Cyc, many formalism and algorithms that related to EURISKO, but never heard of its name.
"... I’m sure I remember a much younger Eliezer Yudkowsky cautioning that Doug Lenat should have perceived a non-zero chance of hard takeoff at the moment of its birth."
> a much younger Eliezer Yudkowsky cautioning that Doug Lenat should have perceived a non-zero chance of hard takeoff at the moment of its birth
Why is Yudkowsky taken seriously? This stuff is comparable to the "LHC micro black holes will destroy Earth" hysteria.
There are actual concerns around AI like deep fakes, a deluge of un-filterable spam, mass manipulation via industrial scale propaganda, mass unemployment created by widespread automation leading to civil unrest, opaque AIs making judgements that can't be evaluated properly, AI as a means of mass appropriation of work and copyright violation, concentration of power in large AI companies, etc. The crackpot "hard takeoff" hysteria only distracts from reasonable discourse about these risks and how to mitigate them.
The confluence of happenstance that occurs to make this a reality is pretty amazing to witness.
Unfortunately it starts with the passing of Douglas Lenat. But that enabled Stanford to open up their 40 year old archive, which they still had, of Lenats work.
Somehow, someway, someone not only stumbled upon EURISKO, but also knew what it was. One of the most notorious AI research projects of the age that actually broke out of the research labs of Stanford and out into the public eye, with impactful results. Granted, for arguably small values of “public” and “impactful”, but for the small community it affected, it made a big splash.
Lenat used EURISKO to find a very unconventional winning configuration to go on to win a national gaming tournament. Twice.
In that community, it was a big deal. The publisher changed the rules because of it, but Lenat returned victorious again the next year. After a discussion with the game and tournament sponsors, he never came back.
Apparently EURISKO has quite a reputation in the symbolic AI world, but even there it was held close.
But now it has been made available. Not only made available, but made operational. EURISKO is written in an obsolete Lisp dialect, Interlisp. But, coincidentally, we have today machine simulators that can run versions of that Lisp on long lost, 40 year machines.
And someone was able to port it. And it seems to run.
The thought of the tendrils through time that had to twist their way for us to get here leaves, at least me, awestruck. So much opportunity for the wrong butterfly to have been stepped on to prevent this from happening.
But it didn’t, and here we are. Great job by the spelunkers who dug this up.
Enough of the Traveller tournament story is dodgy and inconsistent enough that it's very hard to say what actually happened beyond Lenat winning the tournament twice in a row with some kind of computer assistance,
Basically, with the Traveller tournament Lenat appears to have stumbled onto a story that caught the public's imagination, and then through the milked it for all he could to give his project publicity and to make it appear more
successful than it actually was. And if that required embellishing the story or just making shit up, well, no harm no foul.
Even when something is technically true, it often turns out that it's being told in a misleading way. For example, you say that "the publisher changed the ruleset". That was the entire gimmick of the Traveller TCS tournament rules! The printed rulebook had a preset progression of tournament rules for each year.
EURISKO is basically a series of genetic algorithms over lisp code - the homoiconic nature of lisp making it effectively a meta-optimizer. Amongst many problems was that the solution space, even for things like "be interesting and true", was way too large.
Eurisko (Gr., I discover) is a discovery system written by Douglas Lenat in RLL-1, a representation language itself written in the Lisp programming language. A sequel to Automated Mathematician, it consists of heuristics, i.e. rules of thumb, including heuristics describing how to use and change its own heuristics
thom|1 year ago
lisper|1 year ago
This.
Back in the late 1980's and early 90's the debate-du-jour was between deliberative and reactive control systems for robots. I got my Ph.D. for simply saying that the entire debate was based on the false premise that it had to be one or the other, that each approach had its strengths and weaknesses, and that if you just put the two together the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. (Well, it was a little more than that. I had to actually show that it worked, which was more work that simply advancing the hypothesis, but in retrospect it seems kinda obvious, doesn't it?)
If I were still in the game today, combining generative-AI and old-school symbolic reasoning (which has also advanced a lot in 30 years) would be the first thing I would focus my attention (!) on.
radomir_cernoch|1 year ago
I'm really baffled by such statement and genuinely curious.
How come that studying GOFAI as undergraduate and graduate at many European universities, doing a PhD. and working in the field for several years _never_ exposed me to EURISKO up until last week (thanks to HN)?
I heard about Cyc, many formalism and algorithms that related to EURISKO, but never heard of its name.
Is EURISKO famous in US only?
craigus|1 year ago
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rJLviHqJMTy8WQkow/recursion-...
api|1 year ago
Why is Yudkowsky taken seriously? This stuff is comparable to the "LHC micro black holes will destroy Earth" hysteria.
There are actual concerns around AI like deep fakes, a deluge of un-filterable spam, mass manipulation via industrial scale propaganda, mass unemployment created by widespread automation leading to civil unrest, opaque AIs making judgements that can't be evaluated properly, AI as a means of mass appropriation of work and copyright violation, concentration of power in large AI companies, etc. The crackpot "hard takeoff" hysteria only distracts from reasonable discourse about these risks and how to mitigate them.
Animats|1 year ago
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343118
cabalamat|1 year ago
I agree.
> I suspect its achievements were slightly overblown and heavily guided by a human hand
So do I. We'll find out how much of its performance was real, and how much bullshit.
> the unreasonably effectiveness of differentiable programming and backpropagation has sucked up much of the oxygen in the room
The Bitter Lesson -- http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
whartung|1 year ago
Unfortunately it starts with the passing of Douglas Lenat. But that enabled Stanford to open up their 40 year old archive, which they still had, of Lenats work.
Somehow, someway, someone not only stumbled upon EURISKO, but also knew what it was. One of the most notorious AI research projects of the age that actually broke out of the research labs of Stanford and out into the public eye, with impactful results. Granted, for arguably small values of “public” and “impactful”, but for the small community it affected, it made a big splash.
Lenat used EURISKO to find a very unconventional winning configuration to go on to win a national gaming tournament. Twice.
In that community, it was a big deal. The publisher changed the rules because of it, but Lenat returned victorious again the next year. After a discussion with the game and tournament sponsors, he never came back.
Apparently EURISKO has quite a reputation in the symbolic AI world, but even there it was held close.
But now it has been made available. Not only made available, but made operational. EURISKO is written in an obsolete Lisp dialect, Interlisp. But, coincidentally, we have today machine simulators that can run versions of that Lisp on long lost, 40 year machines.
And someone was able to port it. And it seems to run.
The thought of the tendrils through time that had to twist their way for us to get here leaves, at least me, awestruck. So much opportunity for the wrong butterfly to have been stepped on to prevent this from happening.
But it didn’t, and here we are. Great job by the spelunkers who dug this up.
jsnell|1 year ago
Basically, with the Traveller tournament Lenat appears to have stumbled onto a story that caught the public's imagination, and then through the milked it for all he could to give his project publicity and to make it appear more successful than it actually was. And if that required embellishing the story or just making shit up, well, no harm no foul.
Even when something is technically true, it often turns out that it's being told in a misleading way. For example, you say that "the publisher changed the ruleset". That was the entire gimmick of the Traveller TCS tournament rules! The printed rulebook had a preset progression of tournament rules for each year.
I wrote a bit more about this a few years ago with some of the other details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28344379
dang|1 year ago
Doug Lenat's sources for AM (and EURISKO+Traveller?) found in public archives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413615 - Nov 2023 (9 comments)
Eurisko Automated Discovery System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37355133 - Sept 2023 (1 comment)
Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work (1983) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343118 - Aug 2021 (17 comments)
Early AI: “Eurisko, the Computer with a Mind of Its Own” (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27298167 - May 2021 (2 comments)
Some documents on AM and EURISKO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443607 - Nov 2018 (10 comments)
Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work (1983) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9750349 - June 2015 (5 comments)
Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work (1984) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219681 - Aug 2014 (2 comments)
Eurisko, The Computer With A Mind Of Its Own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111826 - Jan 2011 (9 comments)
Let's reimplement Eurisko - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656380 - June 2009 (25 comments)
Eurisko, The Computer With A Mind Of Its Own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396796 - Dec 2008 (13 comments)
bosquefrio|1 year ago
This is amusing: https://www.saildart.org/D.SAI[1,DBL]
And it looks like he wrote a story called "Lethe" as a grad student: https://www.saildart.org/LETHE.DOC[1,DBL]
downvotetruth|1 year ago
4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413615
varjag|1 year ago
slavboj|1 year ago
pvitz|1 year ago
peheje|1 year ago
emmelaich|1 year ago
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
nxobject|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
admsmz|1 year ago
monero-xmr|1 year ago
ngvrnd|1 year ago