Eurisko ( Gr., ''I discover'') is a discovery system written by

Douglas Lenat Douglas Bruce Lenat (born 1950) is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas, and has been a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence; he was awarded the biannual IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1976 for creating the machine learning p ...

in RLL-1, a representation language itself written in the

Lisp programming language Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1960, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common us ...

. A sequel to

Automated Mathematician The Automated Mathematician (AM) is one of the earliest successful Discovery system (AI research), discovery systems. It was created by Douglas Lenat in Lisp programming language, Lisp, and in 1977 led to Lenat being awarded the IJCAI Computers and ...

, it consists of

heuristics A heuristic (; ), or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, ...

, i.e. rules of thumb, including heuristics describing how to use and change its own heuristics. Lenat was frustrated by Automated Mathematician's constraint to a single domain and so developed Eurisko; his frustration with the effort of encoding domain knowledge for Eurisko led to Lenat's subsequent (and, , continuing) development of

Cyc Cyc (pronounced ) is a long-term artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc fo ...

. Lenat envisions ultimately coupling the Cyc knowledgebase with the Eurisko discovery engine.

History

Development commenced at

Carnegie Mellon Carnegie may refer to: People * Carnegie (surname), including a list of people with the name * Clan Carnegie, a lowland Scottish clan Institutions Named for Andrew Carnegie *Carnegie Building (Troy, New York), on the campus of Rensselaer Polyt ...

in 1976 and continued at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1978 when Lenat returned to teach. "For the first five years, nothing good came out of it", Lenat said. But when the implementation was changed to a

frame language Frames are an artificial intelligence data structure used to divide knowledge into substructures by representing " stereotyped situations". They were proposed by Marvin Minsky in his 1974 article "A Framework for Representing Knowledge". Frames are ...

based representation he called RLL ( Representation Language Language), heuristic creation and modification became much simpler. Eurisko was then applied to a number of domains with surprising success, including

VLSI Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) c ...

chip design. Lenat and Eurisko gained notoriety by submitting the winning fleet (a large number of stationary, lightly-armored ships with many small weapons) to the United States Traveller TCS national championship in 1981, forcing extensive changes to the game's rules. However, Eurisko won again in 1982 when the program discovered that the rules permitted the program to destroy its own ships, permitting it to continue to use much the same strategy. Tournament officials announced that if Eurisko won another championship the competition would be abolished; Lenat retired Eurisko from the game. The Traveller TCS wins brought Lenat to the attention of

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

, which has funded much of his subsequent work.

In popular culture

In the first-season ''

The X-Files ''The X-Files'' is an American science fiction on television, science fiction drama (film and television), drama television series created by Chris Carter (screenwriter), Chris Carter. The series revolves around Federal Bureau of Investigation ...

'' episode "

Ghost in the Machine The "ghost in the machine" is a term originally used to describe and critique the notion of the mind existing alongside and separate to the body. In more recent times, the term has several uses, including the concept that the intellectual part of ...

", Eurisko is the name of a fictional software company responsible for the episode's "

monster of the week "Villain of the week" (or, depending on genre, "monster of the week", "freak of the week" or "alien of the week") is an antagonist that only appears in one episode of a multi-episode work of fiction. A villain of the week is commonly seen in Brit ...

", facilities management software known as "Central Operating System", or "COS". COS (described in the episode as an "adaptive network") is shown to be capable of learning when its designer arrives at Eurisko headquarters and is surprised to find that COS has given itself the ability to speak. The designer is forced to create a virus to destroy COS after COS commits a series of murders in an apparent effort to prevent its own destruction. Lenat is mentioned and Eurisko is discussed at the end of

Richard Feynman Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superflu ...

's Computer Heuristics Lecture as part of the Idiosyncratic Thinking Workshop Series. Lenat and Eurisko are mentioned in the 2019

James Rollins James Paul Czajkowski (born August 20, 1961), better known by his pen name of James Rollins, is an American veterinarian and writer of action-adventure/ thriller, mystery, and techno-thriller novels who gave up his veterinary practice in Sacramen ...

novel ''Crucible'' that deals with

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

and

artificial general intelligence Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal of some artificial intelligence research and a common topic in science fictio ...

Notes

References

* * * {{Cite web , last=Haase , first=Kenneth W , date=February 1990 , title=Invention and exploration in discovery , url=http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/14257/22713693.pdf?sequence=1 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050122170922/http://web.media.mit.edu/~haase/thesis/ , archive-date=2005-01-22 , access-date=2008-12-13 , publisher=

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

, format=PDF Heuristics Applications of artificial intelligence Genetic programming