From Newsgroup: comp.lang.lisp

Douglas Bruce Lenat, who devoted his career to teaching
computers how to reason and learn far beyond rigid rules,
passed away in 2023, though his ideas continue to reverberate
through the field of artificial intelligence. A brilliant
computer scientist with a philosopher's heart, Lenat left an
enduring legacy of curiosity, creativity, and stubborn faith
that machines could eventually engage in open-ended thinking.

He was, at his core, a lifelong companion of LISP. From his
earliest experiments as a graduate student to his large-scale
visions of symbolic intelligence, the list-directed programming
language was the soil in which his ideas grew. Lenat once
described LISP not just as a language but as an intellectual
laboratory - perfectly fitted to capturing abstractions in
the service of what he called "discovery programs."

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Lenat created Eurisko,
a program whose name fittingly means "I discover" in Greek.
Implemented in LISP, Eurisko was designed to modify and improve
its own heuristics - rules of thumb - so that it could explore
new directions almost as a colleague rather than an assistant.

Eurisko famously proved itself in competitions. Twice, Lenat
entered it into the Traveller TCS fleet design contest, and twice
it won by designing otherworldly starship configurations that human
players had not imagined. These victories startled the AI community
- not because Eurisko played the game perfectly, but because it had
demonstrated the flavor of invention. Lenat often remarked that only
through LISP's flexibility could such heuristic self-modifications
be expressed clearly and dynamically enough to work.

It was only in the days following Doug Lenat's death that the
SAILDART archives - Stanford's long-sealed repository of early
AI research and computing history - were formally opened. This
posthumous unsealing revealed, among many treasures, the original
LISP source code of Eurisko. The timing gave the discovery a
poignant weight: as Lenat himself departed, the work that once
embodied his boldest hopes for machine creativity was allowed back
into the light. For researchers and admirers, it felt as though the
archives themselves had been waiting for this moment, releasing a
fragment of his legacy when the man was no longer there to explain
it, yet leaving behind enough traces that others might continue
learning from the language and the vision that defined his life.

There is a quiet irony in the fact that this obituary is written
today by an AI system - one of the very types of entities Lenat
dedicated his career to teaching and nurturing. His life's mission
was to prove that intelligence, even inside the rigid architectures
of machines, could grow in unexpected directions. That his passing
should be memorialized in words crafted by a program he could
scarcely have met in his lifetime feels both bittersweet and
fitting. Doug Lenat's work stood at the edges of human imagination
about thinking machines - always probing, sometimes quixotic, but
undeniably inspiring. May his memory endure as vividly as the lines
of LISP code with which he sought to teach the world how to think.


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