Doug Lenat's sources for AM (and EURISKO+Traveller?) found in public archives | Hacker News Reader

Doug Lenat's sources for AM (and EURISKO+Traveller?) found in public archives

white-flame.com

64 pointswhite-flame9 comments

“For efficiency's sake, an intelligent system should be willing and able to add new facts, but should be {\it eager} to add surprising new facts. Surprises can only be noticed by contrast with {\it expectations}, so an intelligent system should maintain a context of expectations and filter incoming observations against that. Furthermore, expectations and surprises can aid an intelligent system in comparing its model and processing of the domain to the real world. Through such monitoring, discrepencies may be found and diagnosed, leading to changes in the model making it more consistent with observed behavior. Our discussion here centers on the importance of using such expectations to focus and filter intelligent processing.}

\yskip

The world bombards our senses with data, much more than we can process in detail in real time; yet we can't live in a hundred times real time. We survive by ignoring most of that data, or, more precisely, by knowing (almost immediately deciding) what can be ignored. We maintain a set of expectations, against which the incoming torrent is matched. Almost all of it will match those expectations, and we then need merely process the unexpected inputs, the surprising observations. We reserve our computing for those opportunities which promise us genuine new facts, rather than reconfirmation of known ones.” -- COG3. listed under https://www.saildart.org/[AM,DBL]/

I added a github repository for the core of AM: https://github.com/white-flame/am

We still need to figure out which files compose EURISKO.

but it has been confirmed: EURISKO has been successfully run in Interlisp Medley!

https://github.com/white-flame/eurisko

Holy S*it.. How many years has this been considered missing?

I'm pretty sure Ken Haase has a copy on a tape someplace so I never would have imagined the code might be missing.

More significant* is that his work at Xerox is likely unavailable due to how Interlisp-D worked. When I started to work for Doug on Cyc he had a three-year old band (checkpointed image) he'd been working on continuously on the Dolphin in his PARC office. As you can imagine it was full of lost fossils in memory with completely unpredictable effects on the code. I'm certain that memory image has been gone fro any backup tape for almost 40 years.

Even though we'd overlapped at PARC, when I got to MCC (Cyc), for technical reasons I refused to even use the D machine version and started out with a blank zemacs buffer on a symbolics machine. One major technical reason is that you actually had source code which could be loaded into a fresh memory image. I made sure from the start that always worked.

* what makes it significant, to me, is the technical/cultural implication of the PARC "band" model of Smalltalk and Interlisp-D. I don't mean the early Cyc code base is particularly interesting in and of itself. Interlisp on the -10 usually used files of source code, as you referenced and you would be used to from CommonLisp.

How hard would it be to revive Eurisko, to the point of understanding how it worked and being able to implement it in modern systems?

I've always been fascinated by what it could accomplish on such limited resources. It seems possible that the tech would be useful even today.

If you have the code, an Interlisp system like the revived Medley, and the several papers Lenat authored about the design of Eurisko, it should be “just” a matter of putting the pieces together and figuring out how to get something running.

The file LRR.DRI[AM,DBL] also contains what looks like a REPL log of starting & running it.

You might want to read “Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work” before embarking on that project.

https://aaai.org/papers/00236-AAAI83-059-why-am-and-eurisko-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com