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by jagged-chisel 80 days ago
Can someone in the know give a little summary of what we’re looking at here? What’s the purpose? How effective is the code/system at accomplishing its purpose? Etc…
3 comments

Automated Mathematician is a historically significant step in the evolution of classic AI based on evaluating symbols and rules. This branch of AI seems to have hit a dead end although one can never be certain of such things.

Obviously stuff like LLMs produces much more impressive results as of now, that's a given. OTOH who knows - neural networks have also had a long-ish period when OCR seemed to be the pinnacle of what they can deliver before they exploded via Deep Learning/Transformers/LLMs and what not.

Indeed, AFAIK neural networks have caused at least two AI winters before finally breaking through thanks to a few good new ideas and the fact that the needs of computer games incidentally led to the development of a big industry of specialized, programmable, high-performance dot product calculators.
Speaking of winters; there's a good article about Cyc, a successor to Automated Mathematician. Cyc was the last big project in symbolic AI: https://yuxi.ml/cyc
Automated Mathematician was what lead to Eurisko: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko

Eurisko demonstrated superhuman abilities to play strategy games in early 1980-th, and even used strategies from VLSI place-and-route task in planning fleet placement in games. This is knowledge transfer between tasks.

Pioneering and seminal early Lisp AI work, ~50 years before LLMs. From the mind behind the Cyc project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Mathematician