Douglas Lenat facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Douglas Lenat
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | September 13, 1950 |
| Died | August 31, 2023 (aged 72) Austin, Texas, U.S.
|
| Nationality | American |
| Education | University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University (Ph.D.) |
| Occupation | Computer scientist |
| Employer | Cycorp, Inc. |
| Known for | Lisp programming language, CEO of Cycorp, Inc., AM, Eurisko, Cyc |
| Awards | 1977 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award |
Douglas Bruce Lenat (born September 13, 1950 – died August 31, 2023) was an American computer scientist. He was a leading researcher in artificial intelligence (AI). AI is about making computers think and learn like humans.
Lenat was the founder and CEO of Cycorp, Inc., a company in Austin, Texas. He was known for creating special computer programs. These programs included AM, Eurisko, and Cyc. These programs helped computers learn and understand information.
He received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1976. This award was for his work on the AM program. Lenat also worked on how computers can represent knowledge. He called this "ontological engineering" in 1984.
Lenat was a Fellow of the AAAI. He was also a Fellow of the AAAS. He was the only person to serve on the science boards for both Microsoft and Apple.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Douglas Lenat was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 13, 1950. When he was five, his family moved to Wilmington, Delaware. He went to Cheltenham High School. His after-school job was cleaning animal cages. This job made him want to learn computer programming instead.
Lenat studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He paid for his studies by working as a programmer. He created a system for the U.S. Navy. This system helped sailors find information in a database. It was like an early online manual for aircraft carriers.
He earned his bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Physics in 1972. He also got his master's degree in Applied Mathematics in the same year.
For his senior project, he worked on holograms. He created the first known acoustic hologram. He also made a five-dimensional hologram using computer printouts. This showed a 3D image that could rotate and change size.
Later, Lenat became a Ph.D. student at Stanford University. He studied how computers could create programs on their own.
Making Computers Discover and Learn
Lenat earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1976. His main project was called AM. AM was one of the first computer programs designed to make discoveries. Instead of just checking math proofs, it tried to find new math ideas.
Building AM helped researchers understand human creativity better. They learned how to teach computers to think. They also learned how to make computers judge if new ideas were "interesting." AM was a big step toward teaching computers to learn by discovery. It showed that computers could be creative.
In 1976, Lenat became a professor at Carnegie Mellon. He started working on a new AI program called Eurisko. The AM program had a fixed set of rules for finding interesting things. Eurisko was different. It could explore and discover new rules for itself. This made it even more flexible.
Lenat returned to Stanford in 1978. He continued his work on Eurisko there. Eurisko made many important discoveries. Lenat's paper on Eurisko won an award in 1982.
The Need for Common Sense
In 1984, Lenat realized something important. His AM and Eurisko programs were smart, but they lacked "common sense." For computers to truly think like humans, they needed a huge amount of basic knowledge. This knowledge would be like the everyday facts we all know.
He believed that building this "common sense" knowledge base would take a lot of time and effort. This idea caught the attention of Admiral Bob Inman. It led to Lenat joining the MCC in Austin, Texas, in 1984. At MCC, he had a team of researchers working on this common sense project.
Cycorp and the Cyc Project
The work on the common sense knowledge base led to the creation of Cyc. In 1994, this project became its own company, Cycorp, Inc.. Lenat became the CEO of Cycorp.
He estimated that building Cyc would take many years and a lot of effort. By 2017, he and his team had spent about 2,000 person-years on Cyc. They created about 24 million rules and facts. These rules help Cyc understand and reason about the world.
Lenat continued to work on Cyc until he passed away. In the beginning, Cyc was funded by large American companies. Then, US government agencies supported it. More recently, Cyc has been used in real-world applications. These include finance, energy, and healthcare.
In 2022, a new Cyc application called MathCraft was announced. This program helps middle school students understand math better. Instead of the AI teaching the student, Cyc acts like a fellow student. This AI student is always a little confused. As the user explains things to MathCraft, the AI learns. This "learning by teaching" method could be useful for many future training programs.
Personal Life
Douglas Lenat was married to Mary Shepherd. He passed away on August 31, 2023, at the age of 72.
Quotes
- "Once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as knowledge, then the human-software system will be superhuman, in the same sense that mankind with writing (or language itself) is superhuman compared to mankind before writing (or language itself). We look back on pre-linguistic cavemen and think 'they weren't quite human, were they?' In much the same way, our descendants will look back on pre-AI homo sapiens with exactly that mixture of otherness and pity."
- "Sometimes the veneer of intelligence is not enough."
Images for kids
-
Douglas Lenat
-
Doug Lenat in his office at Cycorp
See also
In Spanish: Douglas Lenat para niños
