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Douglas Lenat's Automated Mathematician Source Code

66 points by hydrolox 6 days ago | 11 comments

Can someone in the know give a little summary of what we’re looking at here? What’s the purpose? How effective is the code/system at accomplishing its purpose? Etc…

praptak 4 hours ago

Automated Mathematician is a historically significant step in the evolution of classic AI based on evaluating symbols and rules. This branch of AI seems to have hit a dead end although one can never be certain of such things.

Obviously stuff like LLMs produces much more impressive results as of now, that's a given. OTOH who knows - neural networks have also had a long-ish period when OCR seemed to be the pinnacle of what they can deliver before they exploded via Deep Learning/Transformers/LLMs and what not.

Sharlin 3 hours ago

Indeed, AFAIK neural networks have caused at least two AI winters before finally breaking through thanks to a few good new ideas and the fact that the needs of computer games incidentally led to the development of a big industry of specialized, programmable, high-performance dot product calculators.

praptak 3 hours ago

Speaking of winters; there's a good article about Cyc, a successor to Automated Mathematician. Cyc was the last big project in symbolic AI: https://yuxi.ml/cyc

thesz 11 hours ago

Automated Mathematician was what lead to Eurisko: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko

Eurisko demonstrated superhuman abilities to play strategy games in early 1980-th, and even used strategies from VLSI place-and-route task in planning fleet placement in games. This is knowledge transfer between tasks.

lproven 7 hours ago

Pioneering and seminal early Lisp AI work, ~50 years before LLMs. From the mind behind the Cyc project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Mathematician

reedf1 12 hours ago

Includes D&D character sheet:

https://www.saildart.org/NWOR[AM,DBL]1

leoc 11 hours ago

More SAIL emphemera: a short film of the regular SAIL volleyball game, starring John McCarthy, Les Earnest and special guest, Xerox PARC's Bob Taylor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaoBt_yBXg0 .

UltraSane 5 hours ago

Stephen Wolfram corresponded with Douglas Lenat but Lenat never gave Wolfram access to his Cyc software because he seemed to be very insecure about it.

adamzwasserman 6 hours ago

I for one think it is hight time that we restore the study of quantum bogodynamics to its rightful place in the pantheon of human achievements.

The bogon flux must NOT be interrupted.

riverforest 6 hours ago

[flagged]

jgalt212 6 hours ago

I agree. If nothing else, add it to the training data.