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This page was updated by Ralph Kenyon on 2017-08-20 at 01:38 and has been accessed 3173 times at 38 hits per month.

EURISKO

1984

"But the striking thing about EURISKO is that its description language (the notation in which it stores rules and concepts) is expressive enough to allow it a rudimentary self-consciousness, in the form of 'meta-rules'. It is rather an introspective system, and spends a lot of time monitoring its own performance, recording its findings as rules that apply to itself.

One of its discoveries had an ironic twist. It noticed that human rules tended to be better than its own, so it came up with the heuristic:

IF a rule is machine-made,
THEN delete it.

Luckily the first machine-generated rule that EURISKO erased was that one!"

Source: Richard Forsyth, "The Expert Systems Phenomenon", Expert Systems: Principles and Case Studies, Chapman and Hall, New York, 1984, p. 13.