Ahh, another one of the old guard has moved on. Here are two excerpts from the book AI: The Tumultuous History Of The Search For Artificial Intelligence (a fantastic read of the early days of AI) to remember him by;

"Lenat found out about computers in a a manner typical of his entrepreneurial spirit. As a high school student in Philadelphia, working for $1.00 an hour to clean the cages of experimental animals, he discovered that another student was earning $1.50 to program the institution's minicomputer. Finding this occupation more to his liking, he taught himself programming over a weekend and squeezed his competitor out of the job by offering to work for fifty cents an hour less.31 A few years later, Lenat was programming Automated Mathematician (AM, for short) as a doctoral thesis project at the Stanford AI Laboratory." p. 178

And here's an count of an early victory for AI in gaming against humans by Lenat's EURISKO system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko):

"Ever the achiever, Lenat was looking for a more dramatic way to prove teh capabilities of his creation. The identified the occasion space-war game called Traveler TCS, then quite popular with the public Lenat wanted to reach. The idea was for each player to design a fleet of space battleships according to a thick, hundred-page set of rules. Within a budget limit of one trillion galactic credits, one could adjust such parameters as the size, speed, armor thickness, autonomy and armament of each ship: about fifty adjustments per ship were needed. Since the fleet size could reach a hundred ships, the game thus offered ample room for ingenuity in spite of the anticlimactic character of the battles. These were fought by throwing dice following complex tables based on probability of survival of each ship according to its design. The winner of the yearly national championship was commissioned inter galactic admiral and received title to a planet of his or her choice ouside the solar system.

Several months before the 1981 competition, Lenat fed into EURISKO 146 Traveler concepts, ranging from the nature of games in general to the technicalities of meson guns. He then instructed the program to develop heuristics for making winning war-fleet designs. The now familiar routine of nightly computer runs turned into a merciless Darwinian contest: Lenat and EURISKO together designed fleets that battled each other. Designs were evaluated by how well they won battles, and heuristics by how well they designed fleets. This rating method required several battles per design, and several designs per heuristic, which amounted to a lot of battles: ten thousand in all, fought over two thousand hours of computer time.

To participants in the national championship of San Mateo,California, the resulting fleet of ninety-six small, heavily armored ships looked ludicrous. Accepted wisdom dictated fleets of about twenty behemoth ships, and many couldn't help laughing. When engagements started, they found out that the weird armada held more than met the eye. One interesting ace up Lenat's sleeve was a small ship so fast as to be almost unstoppable, which guaranteed at least a draw. EURISKO had conceived of it through the "look for extreme cases" heuristic (which had mutated, incidentally, into mutated, incidentally, into "look for almost extreme cases")." p. 182

If you're a young person working in AI, by which I mean you're less than 30, and if you have not already done so, you should read about AI history in three decade 60s - 90s.