Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!agate!ucbvax!decwrl!shelby!glacier!jbn From: jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: 2 talks by Herb Simon at Rutgers Thursday Feb. 23 Message-ID: <18151@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> Date: 4 Mar 89 07:21:38 GMT References: <2493@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Sender: John B. Nagle Reply-To: jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle) Organization: Stanford University Lines: 12 See "Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work", by Lenat and Brown, in Huberman's "Computational Ecology" work. This is an important paper, and explains why AM seemed to do so well at first but eventually hit a wall. They say it best: "Although we generally described it as 'exploring in the space of math concepts', what it really was doing from moment to moment was "syntactically mutating small LISP programs'. Rather than disdaining it for that reason, we saw that that was its salvation, its chief source of power, the reason that it had such a high hit rate; AM was exploting the natural tie between LISP and mathematics." John Nagle