Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work (1983) [pdf]

>>zetaly+(OP)
Context: AM (Automated Mathematician) is a program that starts with a knowledge base of set theory and heuristics and builds its way up to natural numbers, Goldbach's conjecture (depending on how you interpret the print-outs), etc. Eurisko takes AM one step further by having heuristics to guide the development of new heuristics.

I read this because I'm working on a history/review of AM and Eurisko. It's one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of AI: a good old fashioned symbolist AI program that has all these impressive success stories, and defines the SOTA. Source code was never published and it was never reproduced. Eliezer Yudkowsky said[0] of Eurisko that it "may still be the most sophisticated self-improving AI ever built". Like something out of a Borges story!

Further reading for those interested:

  AM: An artificial intelligence approach to discovery in mathematics as heuristic search.
    Douglas B. Lenat. 1976.
    https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:sb448rj9905/sb448rj9905.pdf

  The Nature of Heuristics I
    Douglas B. Lenat. 1982.
    http://blog.funcall.org/docs/am-eurisko/Heuristics_I.pdf

  The Nature of Heuristics II
    Douglas B. Lenat. 1983.
    http://blog.funcall.org/docs/am-eurisko/Heuristics_II.pdf

  The Nature of Heuristics III
    Douglas B. Lenat. 1983.
    http://blog.funcall.org/docs/am-eurisko/Eurisko_Heuristics_III.pdf

  On the thresholds of knowledge.
    Douglas B. Lenat, Edward A. Feigenbaum. 1991.
    http://blog.funcall.org/docs/am-eurisko/On_the_thresholds_of_knowledge.pdf

  AM: A Case Study in AI Methodology
    G.D. Ritchie, F.K. Hanna. 1984.
    https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.89.4342&rep=rep1&type=pdf

AM has been reimplemented[1] in Prolog.

[0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rJLviHqJMTy8WQkow/recursion-...

[1]: https://github.com/akkartik/am-utexas/tree/master

>>zetaly+R6
There was a brief discussion/effort to reimplement Eurisko on LessWrong about a decade ago[0], of course it rapidly devolved into whether such effort would promote the end of the human race.

[0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t47TeAbBYxYgqDGQT/let-s-reim...

>>janzer+ms
The hardest part of this is there just aren't enough implementation details to reverse engineer Eurisko.

Especially the heuristics are only ever described very abstractly.

zlacker