If you read "Why AM and Eurisko Appear To Work" [1] and the precursor papers it becomes clear that they relied heavily on humans annotating what counted as an "

If you read "Why AM and Eurisko Appear To Work" [1] and the precursor papers it becomes clear that they relied heavily on humans annotating what counted as an "interesting" concept, both for training and for extraction of concepts to publicize. Not necessarily a bad thing (every supervised algorithm need supervision) but it was a little hype-y ("my robot has independently discovered natural numbers!"). They also ran into major tractability problems as the heuristics got more involved. Under the hood it was basically genetic algorithms over a meta-object protocol to extract well-scoring arrangements from ontologies, which is damn interesting, but combinatoric complexity bites you every time. Kenneth Haase published a couple of papers dealing with some of the issues in more depth. [1] http://eksl.isi.edu/files/library/Lenat_Brown-1984-why-AM-and-EURISKO-work.pdf http://eksl.isi.edu/files/library/Lenat_Brown-1984-why-AM-an...