VanderZanden preaches the insurgent's creed
/“‘Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,’ Lenat explained. ‘What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.’ So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, ‘socially horrifying’: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.”
This is from Malcolm Gladwell calls the “insurgent’s creed” in “How David Beats Goliath” and it’s a good way to look at Bird and the crazy year the company has had.