Comment by thom

Up until about GPT 2, EURISKO was arguably the most interesting achievement in AI. Back in the day on the SL4 and singularitarian mailing lists, it was spoken of in reverent tones, and I’m sure I remember a much younger Eliezer Yudkowsky cautioning that Doug Lenat should have perceived a non-zero chance of hard takeoff at the moment of its birth. I suspect its achievements were slightly overblown and heavily guided by a human hand, but it’s still fascinating and definitely worthy of study. Genetic programming hasn’t yielded many interesting results since, and the unreasonably effectiveness of differentiable programming and backpropagation has sucked up much of the oxygen in the room. But not everything is differentiable, the combination of the two still seems worth investigating, and EURISKO goes to show the power of heuristic approaches to some problems.