>The program in question is called EURISKO. Although you can read about
I haven't seen that name since... last night. I was watching an
old rerun of The X-Files (first season) which prominently featured
a fictional AI corporation named Eurisko.
>new heuristics. This is all done in a fashion similar to the way the
>Automated Mathematician (same author, book available) formulated the
>Goldbach Conjecture, primes, or numbers, except that Lenat figured out
>how to make it work on heuristics instead of just set theory. What
>coding he used for heuristics, I have been unable to find.
Though AM was pretty impressive for its time, I think further
investigation by grad students trying to reproduce Lenat's results
showed that the "new" theorems it produced were actually latent
in the heuristics that Lenat seeded the system with. Something like
"look for patterns when you divide integers by each other", then
presto, AM "discovers" prime numbers.
-- David McFadzean david@kumo.com Memetic Engineer http://www.kumo.com/~david/ Kumo Software Corp. http://www.kumo.com