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EURISKO Lives

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Re: EURISKO Lives

#11

Post by pamoroso »

boffinAudio wrote: post #8
emmelaich wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can anyone give a clear example of how this can be used productively? Its description doesn't help much. What can one do with EURISKO? The fact of its recovery after its authors passing is interesting, in and of itself - but why is EURISKO, specifically, worth the effort of understanding?

This post also explains what EURISKO does by putting it into the context of the later system Doug Lenat worked on, Cyc https://outsiderart.substack.com/p/cyc-historys-forgotten-ai...

Re: EURISKO Lives

#12

Post by varjag »

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.

Re: EURISKO Lives

#13

Post by thom »

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.

Re: EURISKO Lives

#14

Post by cabalamat »

thom wrote: post #13

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 b…

> 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

Re: EURISKO Lives

#15

Post by KineticLensman »

actionfromafar wrote: post #9
KineticLensman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Didn't it build a swarm of tiny boats? That loophole seems to be currently exploited in the real world, too.

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

Re: EURISKO Lives

#16

Post by Animats »

thom wrote: post #13

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 b…

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

Re: EURISKO Lives

#17

Post by radomir_cernoch »

thom wrote: post #13

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 b…

> 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?

Re: EURISKO Lives

#18

Post by radomir_cernoch »

radomir_cernoch wrote: post #17
thom wrote: post #13

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 b…

> 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…

For that reason, a comparison between GPT 2 and EURISKO seems funny to me.

I discussed ChatGPT with my yoga teacher recently, but I bet not even my IT colleagues would have a clue about EURISKO. :-)

Re: EURISKO Lives

#19

Post by craigus »

thom wrote: post #13

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 b…

"... 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."

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rJLviHqJMTy8WQkow/recursion-...

Re: EURISKO Lives

#20

Post by cabalamat »

craigus wrote: post #19
thom wrote: post #13

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 b…

"... 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." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rJLviHqJMTy8WQkow/recursion-...

Also, in 2009 someone suggested re-implementing Eurisko[1], and Yudkowsky cautioned against it:

> This is a road that does not lead to Friendly AI, only to AGI. I doubt this has anything to do with Lenat's motives - but I'm glad the source code isn't published and I don't think you'd be doing a service to the human species by trying to reimplement it.

To my mind -- and maybe this is just the benefit of hindsight -- this seems way too overcautious on Yudkowsky's part.

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

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