Douglas Bruce Lenat (September 13, 1950 – August 31, 2023) was an American computer scientist and researcher in artificial intelligence[1][2] who was the founder and CEO of Cycorp, Inc. in Austin, Texas.

[15] His after-school job was cleaning rat cages and goose pens at Beaver College which motivated him to learn programming as a better occupation.

[15] He attended the University of Pennsylvania, supporting himself by programming, including the design and development of a natural language interface for a United States Navy online operations manual.

[citation needed] To settle an argument with Dr. Gabor, Lenat computer-generated a five-dimensional hologram, by photo-reducing computer printout of the interference pattern of a globe rotating and expanding over time, reducing the large two-dimensional paper printout to a moderately large 5-cm square film surface through which a conventional laser beam was then able to project a three-dimensional image, which changed in two independent ways (rotating and changing in size) as the film was moved up-down or left-right.

[citation needed] Lenat was a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Stanford University, where his published research included automatic program synthesis from input/output pairs and from natural language clarification dialogues.

[19] In 1976, Lenat started teaching as an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and commenced his work on the AI program Eurisko.

[citation needed] Lenat returned to Stanford as an assistant professor of computer science in 1978 and continued his research building the Eurisko automated discovery and heuristic-discovery program.

Lenat (working with John Seely Brown at Xerox PARC) published in 1984 an analysis of what were the limitations of his AM and Eurisko lines of research.

[22] The successes, and analysis of the limitations, of this AM and Eurisko approach to AI, and the concluding plea for the massive (multi-thousand-person-year, decades-long) R&D effort would be required to break that bottleneck to AI, led to attention in 1982 from Admiral Bob Inman and the then-forming MCC research consortium in Austin, Texas, culminating in Lenat's becoming principal scientist of MCC from 1984–1994, though he continued even after this period to return to Stanford to teach approximately one course per year.