I was around and actually following AI at the time. After some early success with expert systems, the field had fallen into a trough of disillusionment. Even chess was still "unsolved" in the sense that computers had barely reached master level and were still several years before they'd become truly world class (let alone dominant). The very possibility of accurate speech or image recognition was being called into question. At that time, in sharp contrast to today, AI was a specialty most ambitious people in CS were running away from.
Thus, it was a bit of a shock when Eurisko won the Traveller "Trillion Credit Squadron" tournament. Traveller was a space-themed RPG, and TCS was a very detailed space-combat outgrowth of that. That a new kind of AI (what we now know as genetic programming was far from the AI mainstream) would excel at such an open-ended task was surprising. That it would do so at such an obviously military-relevant task in what was still the Cold War was a little scary. I for one was a bit relieved when Lenat turned his and his creations' attention to more benign tasks instead of disappearing into the military-industrial complex.
Lenat, whose ideas were initially viewed with skepticism and worse, did quite possibly more than anyone else at the time to keep AI interesting and relevant. If you're working on AI/ML and don't know the story, I highly recommend digging into it.