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EURISKO Lives

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Re: EURISKO Lives

#21

Post by rjsw »

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…

> Is EURISKO famous in US only?

It was featured in a BBC radio series on AI made by Colin Blakemore [1] around 1980, the papers on AM and EURISKO were in the library of the UK university that I attended.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Blakemore#Public_engagem...

Re: EURISKO Lives

#23

Post by randallsquared »

cabalamat wrote: post #20
craigus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... 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 -- t…

Machinery can be a lot simpler than biology. Birds are incredibly complex systems: wing structure, musculature, feathers, etc. An airplane can be a vaguely wing-shaped piece of metal and a pulse jet. It doesn’t seem super implausible that there is some algorithm that is to human consciousness what a pulse jet with wings is to a bird. Maybe LLMs are that, but maybe they’re far more than is really needed because we don’t yet know what we are doing.

I would bet against it being possible to implement consciousness on a PDP, but I wouldn’t be very confident about it.

Re: EURISKO Lives

#25

Post by pfdietz »

KineticLensman wrote: post #7
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

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.

Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron

Traveller was (and is) a space-based RPG, although the original publisher is long out of business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_(role-playing_game)

Re: EURISKO Lives

#26

Post by api »

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…

> 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

Why is Yudkowsky taken seriously? This stuff is comparable to the "LHC micro black holes will destroy Earth" hysteria.

There are actual concerns around AI like deep fakes, a deluge of un-filterable spam, mass manipulation via industrial scale propaganda, mass unemployment created by widespread automation leading to civil unrest, opaque AIs making judgements that can't be evaluated properly, AI as a means of mass appropriation of work and copyright violation, concentration of power in large AI companies, etc. The crackpot "hard takeoff" hysteria only distracts from reasonable discourse about these risks and how to mitigate them.

Re: EURISKO Lives

#28

Post by PaulHoule »

KineticLensman wrote: post #15
actionfromafar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It makes me think of the battles in Doc Smith’s Lensman series where the Galactic Patrol would develop a game-breaking fleet formation to use against Boskone in every major naval battle.

Re: EURISKO Lives

#29

Post by isaacfrond »

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?

Excellent question. I have no clue either.

Re: EURISKO Lives

#30

Post by TeMPOraL »

api wrote: post #26
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…

> 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 Why is Yudkowsky taken seriously? This stuff is comparable to the "LHC micro black holes will destroy Earth" hysteria. There are actual concerns around AI like deep fakes, a deluge of un-filterable spam, mass manipulation via industrial scale propaganda, mass unemployment cr…

> Why is Yudkowsky taken seriously?

  Trivialities    Annoyances    Immediate harm     X-Risk
  |------------------------------------------------------|
         \----stuff you mention-------/
                                 \---stuff Eliezer------/
                                      wrote about
> The crackpot "hard takeoff" hysteria only distracts from reasonable discourse about these risks and how to mitigate them.

IDK, I feel endless hand-wringing about copyright and deepfakes distract from risks of actual, significant harm at scale, some of which you also mentioned.

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