And there were description if EURISCO (with claims that it not only "win some game" but also that it "invented new structure of NAND-gate in silicon, used by industry now") and other expert systems.
One of the mentioned expert systems (without technical details) said was 2 times better in diagnose cancer than best human diagnostician of some university hospital.
And after that... Silence.
I always wonder, why did this expert system were not deployed in all USA hospitals, for example? If it is so good?
Now we have LLMs, but they are LANGUAGE models, not WORLD models. They predict distribution of possible next words. Same with images — pixels, not world concepts.
Looks like such systems are good for generating marketing texts, but can not be used as diagnosticians by definition.
Why did all these (slice of) world model approaches dead? Except Cyc, I think. Why we have good text generators and image generators but not diagnosticians 40 years later? What happens?..
Expert systems were so massively oversold... and it's not at all clear that any of the "super fantastic expert" systems ever did what was claimed of them.
We definitely found out that they were, in practice, extremely difficult to build and make do anything reasonable.
The original paper on Eurisko, for instance, mentioned how the author (and founder of Cyc!) Douglas Lenat, during a run, went ahead and just hand-inserted some knowledge/results of inferences (it's been a long while since I read the paper, sorry), asserting, "Well, it would have figured these things out eventually!"
Later on, he wrote a paper titled, "Why AM and Eurisko appear to work" [0].
0: https://aaai.org/papers/00236-aaai83-059-why-am-and-eurisko-...