The Winner of a Twenty-Year Bet

"How many people have in their lives a 2 to 10 percent chance of dramatically affecting the way the world works? When one of those chances comes along, you should take it."

- Douglas Lenat

From a very early age, science has been an outlet for curiosity for Douglas B. Lenat, born in Philadelphia in 1950, and fortunately for Lenat, science is a theme that resonated throughout his life. Although he did not receive very good primary education, he had a natural talent. In 1967, for example, he became a finalist in an International Science Fair for his work on the closed form definition of the nth prime number which was judged by a company of scientists, researchers, and engineers. In 1968, Lenat entered the University of Pennsylvania initially pursuing a degree in physics and mathematics. He quickly changed his mind however after taking a course in 1971 with John W. Carr III, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who had introduced Lenat to artificial intelligence. The research in the field was just starting out, so Lenat decided to pursue it. In 1972, he attended CalTech for a PhD program in applied mathematics and computer science but promptly realized that a lot of work on artificial intelligence at the time was done at Stanford, so he transferred in order to begin his work with McCarthy. Unfortunately, McCarthy left on sabbatical for MIT the same fall that Lenat arrived at Stanford, so instead, Lenat ended up working with Cordell Green on the theory of automatic programming that tested falsifiable hypotheses. Falsifiable hypotheses were an extremely important part of artificial intelligence because AI has to "interact directly with the external world" (228). Therefore, purely mathematical or logic predictions about these expert systems have to be tested. Lenat also applied these theories, and all the heuristics theories, to his doctoral thesis - a modest Lisp program that worked out various mathematical concepts named Automated Mathematician (AM); to this day, this thesis remains "one of the most original AI programs ever written" (229). After he had received his PhD in 1976, Lenat developed on AM with a project named Eurisko which brought a lot of interesting applications - including circuit design and minimization, solutions to tactical game problems, and searches for missed loopholes in game situations - to the table but never took off in the markets because it could not be extended to other various useful domains. In 1984, Lenat left the academia to pursue a business opportunity embodies by the project Cyc, a piece of artificial intelligence which possesses a large part of the entire existing body of knowledge. A lot of research, design, and implementation have been put into the project, but its success have yet to be seen. The project is currently considered to be one of the most controversial in the discipline, yet Lenat still "believes that AI projects like Cyc can become 'knowledge utilities'" in the future (242). Social reception of the technology cannot yet be considered; a much better question is - will Cyc actually work? According to Shasha and Lazere, yes, but only in part, due to various flaws in the current approach to expert systems and lack of understanding of the inner workings of the human mind. With all this evidence in mind, it is clear why Lenat remains "the boldest kind" of explorer of artificial intelligence leading the way to a bright future in the world of computing (242).