The Voice of the Turtle: Whatever Happened to AI?

Doug Lenat has worked in diverse parts of AI – natural language understanding and generation, automatic program synthesis, expert systems, machine learning, etc. – for going on 40 years now, just long enough to dare to write this article. His 1976 Stanford PhD thesis, AM, demonstrated that creative discoveries in mathematics could be produced by a computer program (a theorem proposer, rather than a theorem prover) guided by a corpus of hundreds of heuristic rules for deciding which experiments to perform and judging "interestingness" of their outcomes. That work earned him the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, and sparked a renaissance in machine learning research. Dr. Lenat was on the CS faculty at CMU and Stanford, was one of the founders of Teknowledge, and was in the first batch of AAAI Fellows. He worked with Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold to launch Microsoft Research Labs, and to this day he remains the only person to have served on the technical advisory boards of both Apple and Microsoft.