Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. I Built Non-Autoregressive Decision Models with RL a Year Ago(convaiinnovations.com ↗)
    155comments
  2. AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible(john.hartnup.uk ↗)
    509comments
  3. Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds(stanford.edu ↗)
    190comments
  4. A graphical desktop for the ZX Spectrum(github.com/mindbox77 ↗)
    76comments
  5. Tin: full-text search for Postgres(planetscale.com ↗)
    50comments
  6. “The Secret Life of Circuits” is here(coredump.cx ↗)
    57comments
  7. Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP(grapheneos.social ↗)
    566comments
  8. Supabase (YC S20) Is Hiring for OrioleDB(supabase.link ↗)
    discuss
  9. Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar over 'Little Red Dots'(quantamagazine.org ↗)
    17comments
  10. Asking Authors About Their Own Papers(medium.com/tmlrorg ↗)
    46comments
  11. New evidence for hidden chambers beyond Tutankhamun's tomb(nature.com ↗)
    10comments
  12. GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher(prinzai.com ↗)
    138comments
  13. San Francisco Onion Futures Company(onionfutures.com ↗)
    123comments
  14. What Zig felt like, coming from Rust(besok.github.io ↗)
    125comments
  15. Almost Never Use AI to Write Anything Substantive(erichgrunewald.substack.com ↗)
    12comments
  16. If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it(terrytao.wordpress.com ↗)
    200comments
  17. Cloudflare Quick Tunnels(cloudflare.com ↗)
    301comments
  18. How to Write with an LLM(sockpuppet.org ↗)
    364comments
  19. Adventures in Microcontroller Circuit Debugging(bigmessowires.com ↗)
    1comments
  20. You can run Git on object storage if you re-make packfiles(tigrisdata.com ↗)
    27comments
  21. Saving another 100TB of RAM(cloudflare.com ↗)
    93comments
  22. Communication by means of modulated Johnson noise(pnas.org ↗)
    20comments
  23. SDCC – Small Device C Compiler(sourceforge.net ↗)
    25comments
  24. Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early(reproof.app ↗)
    16comments
  25. Science Is Open Software(jepedersen.dk ↗)
    51comments
  26. Why building a Rust LSP is hard(rust-glancer.github.io ↗)
    49comments
  27. OpenJev(openjev.com ↗)
    281comments
  28. The first new cat species discovered in 100 years(nationalgeographic.com ↗)
    127comments
  29. Ctenophores: Wonders of Biology(quantamagazine.org ↗)
    9comments
  30. How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip(ieee.org ↗)
    123comments

Eurisko, The Computer With A Mind Of Its Own

34 pointsby 18y agoaliciapatterson.org
13 comments
18y agoHN ↗

Unit of bogosity is the lenat, named after Douglas Lenat. Like the farad it is considered far too large a unit for practical use, so bogosity is usually expressed in microlenats.

18y agoHN ↗

But it wasn't always thus. In the dawn of time Lenat actually did stuff.

Funnily enough, I've been playing around with a port of AM for the past coupla weeks. I've had the code for years and never looked at it until now. What got you on Lenat, Peter?

I think the world's coolest AI programs are Eurisko, Copycat and AM.

18y agoHN ↗

In the dawn of time Lenat actually did stuff.

Harsh, but probably fair. Or as Eliezer Yudkowsky put it "EURISKO may still be the most sophisticated self-improving AI ever built [...] by Douglas Lenat before he started wasting his life on Cyc."

I've been playing around with a port of AM for the past coupla weeks.

From where is the code for AM available? I ask because some people on an AI list I subscribe to think the Eurisko code is unavailable (but would like to get hold of it). You wouldn't have the Eurisko code too, by any chance?

I think the world's coolest AI programs are Eurisko, Copycat and AM.

I would agree, in terms of modelling general cognition.

18y agoHN ↗

No, eurisko nobody has :) The version of AM I have was written by one of my professors at the University of Texas Austin, and is in an ancient dialect of prolog. I'm not sure if it was ok to redistribute. Let me check.

I got it working on gprolog last week, but it seems to cause stack overflows :(

18y agoHN ↗

No, eurisko nobody has :)

So why is that? Does Lenat not want anyone to see it? Or was the code lost?

BTW am I right in presuming that the original AM was written in Lisp?

18y agoHN ↗

Yes, the original papers indicate it was in lisp. "Why AM appears to work" suggested that a lot of the reason math was a good domain for discovery was just that lisp is well-suited to the domain. And Eurisko could modify heuristics expressed as s-expressions.

People have asked him, but I'm not aware of Lenat ever commenting on the source code. Cycorp is substantially funded by DARPA, and I wouldn't be surprised if Eurisko is part of its IP now.

Feel free to email me to take this offline.

18y agoHN ↗

I used to play Traveller, and our group at college didn't play the ship-to-ship combat part, just the role playing game (think of it as D&D with only 6-sided dice, space ships and other planets instead of dungeons).

Thanks for bringing this story back up.

18y agoHN ↗

"We're building a machine that will be proud of us"

18y agoHN ↗

interesting read until i came to the part where douglas photo is displayed... is it just me or does he look like jake gyllenhaal?..

18y agoHN ↗

Dr. Lenat still refuses to disclose the source code of Eurisko. He is even on record as having claimed that it was "lost", which seems unlikely.

What is more probable is that the program's much-hyped accomplishments were done with substantial human hand-holding a la Deep Blue, and the author will not risk his decades of academic prestige by allowing us to see the code and judge how high it could have flown on its own.