Douglas Lenat
Douglas Bruce Lenat (also Doug Lenat for short ; born September 13, 1950 in Philadelphia ) is an American researcher in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
Lenat studied from 1968 at the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics and subsequently a master's degree in applied mathematics (both in 1972). Via a course from John W. Carr III. he came to work with AI there. He then went to Stanford University at the invitation of John McCarthy . But since he was absent on a sabbatical soon afterwards , he dealt with Cordell Green , who introduced him to empirical access to AI programs, especially in automatic evidence systems. For his doctoral thesis in 1976, he developed the Automated Mathematician (AM) program, which used heuristics to gain “new” insights into numbers and mathematical concepts within the world of the program. It was based on 115 concepts from set theory and 243 heuristic rules and Lenat was able to "discover" around 300 mathematical concepts such as elementary arithmetic, but also conjectures like the Goldbach conjecture . On the other hand, it was very different from what Lenat had originally expected. The program received a lot of attention from, for example, George Pólya and Donald Knuth .
After receiving his doctorate, he was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University for two years before returning to Stanford University. He initially pursued his research on heuristics and developed Eurisko, a program that tries out new heuristics. He applied it to a special war game (Traveler TCS) and was so successful in it that Lenat was excluded from the game's initiators. Around 1983 Lenat found that heuristics in AI research led to a dead end, as a program mainly learned new things similar to what it already knew. He concluded that the program's knowledge base should initially be made as large as possible. With that, the Cyc project was born, which was supposed to incorporate the general knowledge of the average adult. With Marvin Minsky and Alan Kay, he estimated the necessary effort and found that this would take around 1 million frames and 10 years. They found a financier at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) in Austin , led by former NSA chief Admiral Bobby Ray Inman .
He is currently CEO of Cycorp, Inc. in Austin, which among other things develops the knowledge database Cyc .
In 1977 he received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award .
literature
- Dennis Shasha, Cathy Lazere Out of their minds. The lives and discoveries of 15 great computer scientists , Copernicus 1998, chapter Lenat A twenty year bet
Web links
- A list of his important publications
- Thomas J. Schult: Encyclopedia of Banalities - US researchers have been working on the last giant project of machine intelligence for ten years. In: Die Zeit from November 25, 1994, p. 84.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Lenat: We thought it would discover different kinds of infinity and Cantor sets. It never discovered that stuff. Out of their Minds, p. 231
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lenat, Douglas |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Lenat, Douglas Bruce; Lenat, Doug (short form) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American researcher in the field of artificial intelligence |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 13, 1950 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Philadelphia |