41 ms·

EURISKO Lives

129 points by wodow 2y ago

whartung 2y ago
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.
- jsnell 2y ago
  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. I wrote a bit more about this a few years ago with some of the other details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28344379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28344379
peheje 2y ago
What is it?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- emmelaich 2y ago
  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 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko
  - KineticLensman 2y ago
    It got a lot of kudos for winning a multi player naval wargame by building a bizarre but successful fleet that exploited all the loopholes and quirks in the rules.
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      Didn't it build a swarm of tiny boats? That loophole seems to be currently exploited in the real world, too.
      - KineticLensman 2y ago
        IIRC it had at least one small (?) purely defensive boat that couldn’t be destroyed by typical weapons so its parent fleet couldn’t be defeated. It wasn’t like a modern drone swarm
        PaulHoule 2y ago
        It makes me think of the battles in Doc Smith’s Lensman series where the Galactic Patrol would develop a game-breaking fleet formation to use against Boskone in every major naval battle.
downvotetruth 2y ago
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40095121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40095121 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413615
varjag 2y ago
I shall correct belatedly, the heuristic I point at after IsA is not in fact not-IsA. Also, the system runs out of stack space not of heap space.
thom 2y ago
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.
- cabalamat 2y ago
  > Up until about GPT 2, EURISKO was arguably the most interesting achievement in AI. 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 http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
- Animats 2y ago
  Not really. Read [1], which references "Why AM and Eurisko appear to work". There's a reason that line of development did not continue. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343118
- radomir_cernoch 2y ago
  > 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. Is EURISKO famous in US only?
admsmz 2y ago
For a moment there I thought it was talking about this high school project, https://www.eurisko.us/ https://www.eurisko.us/
- ngvrnd 2y ago
  No, the high school project is talking about this.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  And the classic X-Files episode "Ghost in the Machine" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Machine_(The_X-Files) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Machine_(The_X-Fi...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? Doug Lenat's sources for AM (and EURISKO+Traveller?) found in public archives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413615 - Nov 2023 (9 comments) Eurisko Automated Discovery System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37355133 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27298167 - May 2021 (2 comments) Some documents on AM and EURISKO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443607 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111826 - Jan 2011 (9 comments) Let's reimplement Eurisko - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656380 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396796 - Dec 2008 (13 comments)
slavboj 2y ago
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.
nxobject 2y ago
Random funfact I didn't anticipate learning: Eurisko ran on Altos as well. Talk about a resource-constrained environment...
bosquefrio 2y ago
There are some interesting files in Doug's archive: https://www.saildart.org/[*,DBL]/ https://www.saildart.org/[*,DBL]/ This is amusing: https://www.saildart.org/D.SAI[1,DBL] 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] https://www.saildart.org/LETHE.DOC[1,DBL]
pvitz 2y ago
The code can be found here: https://github.com/white-flame/eurisko/blob/main/src/EUR https://github.com/white-flame/eurisko/blob/main/src/EUR

129 points by wodow 2y ago

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.

jsnell 2y ago
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. I wrote a bit more about this a few years ago with some of the other details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28344379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28344379

peheje 2y ago

What is it?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
emmelaich 2y ago
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 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko
- KineticLensman 2y ago
  It got a lot of kudos for winning a multi player naval wargame by building a bizarre but successful fleet that exploited all the loopholes and quirks in the rules.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    Didn't it build a swarm of tiny boats? That loophole seems to be currently exploited in the real world, too.
    - KineticLensman 2y ago
      IIRC it had at least one small (?) purely defensive boat that couldn’t be destroyed by typical weapons so its parent fleet couldn’t be defeated. It wasn’t like a modern drone swarm
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        It makes me think of the battles in Doc Smith’s Lensman series where the Galactic Patrol would develop a game-breaking fleet formation to use against Boskone in every major naval battle.

downvotetruth 2y ago

dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40095121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40095121 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413615

varjag 2y ago

I shall correct belatedly, the heuristic I point at after IsA is not in fact not-IsA. Also, the system runs out of stack space not of heap space.

thom 2y ago

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.

cabalamat 2y ago
> Up until about GPT 2, EURISKO was arguably the most interesting achievement in AI. 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 http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
Animats 2y ago
Not really. Read [1], which references "Why AM and Eurisko appear to work". There's a reason that line of development did not continue. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343118
radomir_cernoch 2y ago
> 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. Is EURISKO famous in US only?

admsmz 2y ago

For a moment there I thought it was talking about this high school project, https://www.eurisko.us/ https://www.eurisko.us/

ngvrnd 2y ago
No, the high school project is talking about this.
monero-xmr 2y ago
And the classic X-Files episode "Ghost in the Machine" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Machine_(The_X-Files) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Machine_(The_X-Fi...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? Doug Lenat's sources for AM (and EURISKO+Traveller?) found in public archives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413615 - Nov 2023 (9 comments) Eurisko Automated Discovery System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37355133 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27298167 - May 2021 (2 comments) Some documents on AM and EURISKO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443607 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111826 - Jan 2011 (9 comments) Let's reimplement Eurisko - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656380 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396796 - Dec 2008 (13 comments)

slavboj 2y ago

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.

nxobject 2y ago

Random funfact I didn't anticipate learning: Eurisko ran on Altos as well. Talk about a resource-constrained environment...

bosquefrio 2y ago

There are some interesting files in Doug's archive: https://www.saildart.org/[*,DBL]/ https://www.saildart.org/[*,DBL]/ This is amusing: https://www.saildart.org/D.SAI[1,DBL] 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] https://www.saildart.org/LETHE.DOC[1,DBL]

pvitz 2y ago

The code can be found here: https://github.com/white-flame/eurisko/blob/main/src/EUR https://github.com/white-flame/eurisko/blob/main/src/EUR