Douglas Lenat, Who Tried to Make A.I. More Human, Dies at 72

Douglas Lenat, an artificial intelligence researcher who spent nearly 40 years trying to build common sense into computers, recreating human judgment one logical rule at a time, died on Thursday in Austin, Texas.

system he called Eurisko — a Greek word meaning “I discover.” It was designed to automate the discovery of new scientific concepts, methods and laws by analyzing data.

In 1981, he used this system to analyze the rules of an exceedingly complex role-playing game called Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron, in which players used a trillion-dollar budget to design and deploy a fleet of warships.

Rather than spending the trillion-dollar budget on large, mobile, well-protected warships — as other players did — it suggested building hundreds of tiny ships that barely moved and were not well protected but carried enormous firepower.

He set out to define the fundamental but largely unspoken laws that outline how the world works, including everything from “you can’t be in two places at the same time” to “when drinking a cup of coffee, you hold the open end up.” He knew it could take decades — perhaps centuries — to complete the project.

In the fall, as ChatGPT captured the public imagination, Dr. Lenat and the cognitive scientist Gary Marcus began a new paper meant to show the new generation of researchers what they could learn from his nearly 40 years of work on Cyc.

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