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.

The confluence of happenstance that occurs to make this a reality is pretty amazing to witness.

Unfortunately it starts with the passing of Douglas Lenat. But that enabled Stanford to open up their 40 year old archive, which they still had, of Lenats work.

Somehow, someway, someone not only stumbled upon EURISKO, but also knew what it was. One of the most notorious AI research projects of the age that actually broke out of the research labs of Stanford and out into the public eye, with impactful results. Granted, for arguably small values of “public” and “impactful”, but for the small community it affected, it made a big splash.

Lenat used EURISKO to find a very unconventional winning configuration to go on to win a national gaming tournament. Twice.

In that community, it was a big deal. The publisher changed the rules because of it, but Lenat returned victorious again the next year. After a discussion with the game and tournament sponsors, he never came back.

Apparently EURISKO has quite a reputation in the symbolic AI world, but even there it was held close.

But now it has been made available. Not only made available, but made operational. EURISKO is written in an obsolete Lisp dialect, Interlisp. But, coincidentally, we have today machine simulators that can run versions of that Lisp on long lost, 40 year machines.

And someone was able to port it. And it seems to run.

The thought of the tendrils through time that had to twist their way for us to get here leaves, at least me, awestruck. So much opportunity for the wrong butterfly to have been stepped on to prevent this from happening.

But it didn’t, and here we are. Great job by the spelunkers who dug this up.

Related. Others?

Doug Lenat's sources for AM (and EURISKO+Traveller?) found in public archives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413615 - Nov 2023 (9 comments)

Eurisko Automated Discovery System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37355133 - Sept 2023 (1 comment)

Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work (1983) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343118 - Aug 2021 (17 comments)

Early AI: “Eurisko, the Computer with a Mind of Its Own” (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27298167 - May 2021 (2 comments)

Some documents on AM and EURISKO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443607 - Nov 2018 (10 comments)

Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work (1983) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9750349 - June 2015 (5 comments)

Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work (1984) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219681 - Aug 2014 (2 comments)

Eurisko, The Computer With A Mind Of Its Own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111826 - Jan 2011 (9 comments)

Let's reimplement Eurisko - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656380 - June 2009 (25 comments)

Eurisko, The Computer With A Mind Of Its Own - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=396796 - Dec 2008 (13 comments)

There are some interesting files in Doug's archive: https://www.saildart.org/[*,DBL]/

This is amusing: https://www.saildart.org/D.SAI[1,DBL]

And it looks like he wrote a story called "Lethe" as a grad student: https://www.saildart.org/LETHE.DOC[1,DBL]

dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40095121

4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413615

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.

EURISKO is basically a series of genetic algorithms over lisp code - the homoiconic nature of lisp making it effectively a meta-optimizer. Amongst many problems was that the solution space, even for things like "be interesting and true", was way too large.

The code can be found here: https://github.com/white-flame/eurisko/blob/main/src/EUR

What is it?

Random funfact I didn't anticipate learning: Eurisko ran on Altos as well. Talk about a resource-constrained environment...

For a moment there I thought it was talking about this high school project, https://www.eurisko.us/