Newsgroups: comp.ai.games
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!udel!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!activis
From: activis@netcom.com (ActiVision)
Subject: Re: Eurisko
Message-ID: <activisD5nr28.M75@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL1]
References: <3k7osd$mas@ousrvr.oulu.fi>
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 1995 22:42:08 GMT
Lines: 33
Sender: activis@netcom22.netcom.com

Ritvaliisa Snellman (rlsnell@phoenix.oulu.fi) wrote:

:   A few years back i read from Readers Digest (DONT LAUGH OUT THERE) of a self-
: learning AI named Eurisko. The programmer, i think that his name was Lenat, had
: made a learning algortihm for the AI, given it the rules of some game, and 
: finally sent Euriskos strategy to some kind of tournament. It won all of its 
: matches, and was finally banned when it won all the matches on the second year
: of the tournament too. I have been trying to find info on this AI, the game 
: that it played, the strategies it used, and stuff like that, but have never 
: found anything. So does anyone around here know anything about it, or could
: anyone give some pointers to anything written about it ?

You remember largely correctly.  Eurisko was one of the relatively early
efforts of Doug Lenat.  The `game' that Eurisko played was large-scale modern
naval warfare, and the `tournament' that it won was being stacked against the
graduating class of the United States Naval Academy.

Lenat has since gone on to continue his work on knowledge representation
issues.  His current project, which is even more ambitious in scope than
Eurisko was, is Cyc, and you can read all about it in `Building Large
Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project,'
published by Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-51752-3.

Be warned: the above book isn't exactly light reading.

For a more gentle look at the more-or-less-current state of similar systems,
try `Principles of Semantic Networks,' published by Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN
1-55860-088-4.

: -Poke Snellman

Paul Snively
activis!paul_snively@netcom.com
