Automated Mathematician

The Automated Mathematician (AM) is one of the earliest successful discovery systems.[1] It was created by Douglas Lenat in Lisp,[2] and in 1977 led to Lenat being awarded the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award.[3]

AM worked by generating and modifying short Lisp programs which were then interpreted as defining various mathematical concepts;[4] for example, a program that tested equality between the length of two lists was considered to represent the concept of numerical equality, while a program that produced a list whose length was the product of the lengths of two other lists was interpreted as representing the concept of multiplication. The system had elaborate heuristics for choosing which programs to extend and modify, based on the experiences of working mathematicians in solving mathematical problems.

  1. ^ Ritchie, G.D.; Hanna, F.K. (August 1984). "am: A case study in AI methodology". Artificial Intelligence. 23 (3): 249–268. doi:10.1016/0004-3702(84)90015-8.
  2. ^ Lenat, Douglas Bruce (1976). Am: An artificial intelligence approach to discovery in mathematics as heuristic search (Thesis).
  3. ^ Lenat, Douglas B. (1977), "The Ubiquity of Discovery (Computers and Thought Lecture)", IJCAI (PDF), pp. 1093–1103, archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-08-06.
  4. ^ Koza, John R. (1992), "9.3 AM and Euroski", Genetic Programming: On the Programming of Computers by Means of Natural Selection, MIT Press, pp. 232–236, ISBN 9780262111706.