[praptak]

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.

[Sharlin]

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.

[praptak]

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