FWIW, Doug Lenat founded Cyc after doing Eurisko (
http://www.cyc.com/). His first discovery system along these lines was AM ("automated mathematician"), which was math-only, and Eurisko was an attempt to make it domain independent, so it could target things like the famous gameplay-strategies example. He eventually grew frustrated at how much domain knowledge had to be hand-coded for a new domain, though, so hoped that by building one massive database of commonsense background knowledge, future systems could more easily be retargeted to new domains: the system would be able to assume most "normal" knowledge, and only the information unique to that domain would have to be added.
And that sort of turned into its own multi-decade project...