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SoullessAutomaton comments on Let's reimplement EURISKO! - Less Wrong
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I've just been Googling to see what became of EURISKO. The results are baffling. Despite its success in its time, there has been essentially no followup, and it has hardly been cited in the last ten years. Ken Haase claims improvements on EURISKO, but Eliezer disagrees; at any rate, the paper is vague and I cannot find Haase's thesis online. But if EURISKO is a dead end, I haven't found anything arguing that either.
Perhaps in a future where Friendly AI was achieved, emissaries are being/will be sent back in time to prevent any premature discovery of the key insights necessary for strong AI.
The most sensible explanation has, I think been mentioned previously: that EURISKO was both overhyped and a dead end. Perhaps the techniques it used fell apart rapidly in less rigid domains than rule-based wargaming, and perhaps its successes were very heavily guided by Lenat. It's somewhat telling that Lenat, the only one who really knows how it worked, went off to do something completely different from EURISKO.
In this regard, one could consider something like EURISKO not as a successful AI, but as a successful cognitive assistant for someone working in a mostly unexplored rule-based system. Recall the results that AM, EURISKO's predecessor, got--if memory serves me, it rediscovered a lot of mathematical principles, none of them novel, but duplicating mostly from scratch results that took many years and many mathematicians to find originally.
Not that I'm certain this is the case by a long shot, but it seems the most superficially plausible explanation.
From what I remember of the papers, it was pretty clear (though perhaps not stated explicitly) that AM "happened across" many interesting factoids about math, but it was Lenat's intervention that declared them important and worth further study. I think your second paragraph implies this, but I wanted it to be explicit.
A reasonable interpretation of AM's success was that Lenat was able to recognize many important mathematical truths in AM's meanderings. Lenat never claimed any new discoveries on behalf of AM.
Lenat was also careful to note that AM's success, such as it was, was very much due to the fact that LISP's "vocabulary" started with a strong relation to mathematics. EURISKO didn't show anything like reasonable performance until he realized that the vocabulary it was manipulating needed to be "close" to the modeled domain, in the sense that interesting (to Lenat) statements about the domain needed to be short, and therefore easy for EURISKO to come across.
Yeah, that was basically what I meant. My hypothesis was that if you gave AM to someone with good mathematical aptitude but little prior knowledge, they would discover a lot more interesting mathematical statements than they would have without AM's help, by analogy to Lenat discovering more interesting logical consequences of the wargaming rules with EURISKO's help than any of the experienced players discovered themselves.