From what I remember of the papers, it was pretty clear (though perhaps not stated explicitly) that AM “happened across” many interesting factoids about math, but it was Lenat’s intervention that declared them important and worth further study. I think your second paragraph implies this, but I wanted it to be explicit.
A reasonable interpretation of AM’s success was that Lenat was able to recognize many important mathematical truths in AM’s meanderings. Lenat never claimed any new discoveries on behalf of AM.
Lenat was also careful to note that AM’s success, such as it was, was very much due to the fact that LISP’s “vocabulary” started with a strong relation to mathematics. EURISKO didn’t show anything like reasonable performance until he realized that the vocabulary it was manipulating needed to be “close” to the modeled domain, in the sense that interesting (to Lenat) statements about the domain needed to be short, and therefore easy for EURISKO to come across.
Yeah, that was basically what I meant. My hypothesis was that if you gave AM to someone with good mathematical aptitude but little prior knowledge, they would discover a lot more interesting mathematical statements than they would have without AM’s help, by analogy to Lenat discovering more interesting logical consequences of the wargaming rules with EURISKO’s help than any of the experienced players discovered themselves.
From what I remember of the papers, it was pretty clear (though perhaps not stated explicitly) that AM “happened across” many interesting factoids about math, but it was Lenat’s intervention that declared them important and worth further study. I think your second paragraph implies this, but I wanted it to be explicit.
A reasonable interpretation of AM’s success was that Lenat was able to recognize many important mathematical truths in AM’s meanderings. Lenat never claimed any new discoveries on behalf of AM.
Lenat was also careful to note that AM’s success, such as it was, was very much due to the fact that LISP’s “vocabulary” started with a strong relation to mathematics. EURISKO didn’t show anything like reasonable performance until he realized that the vocabulary it was manipulating needed to be “close” to the modeled domain, in the sense that interesting (to Lenat) statements about the domain needed to be short, and therefore easy for EURISKO to come across.
Yeah, that was basically what I meant. My hypothesis was that if you gave AM to someone with good mathematical aptitude but little prior knowledge, they would discover a lot more interesting mathematical statements than they would have without AM’s help, by analogy to Lenat discovering more interesting logical consequences of the wargaming rules with EURISKO’s help than any of the experienced players discovered themselves.