Cyan comments on Let's reimplement EURISKO! - Less Wrong

19 Post author: cousin_it 11 June 2009 04:28PM

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Comment author: ChrisHibbert 13 June 2009 03:18:03AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Cyan 13 June 2009 03:34:59AM 6 points [-]

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.