Eurisko is a group of high schoolers working on advanced projects in computer science. It was formed during the summer of 2020 as a collaboration between App Academy and Math Academy.

How rigorous is the program?
Eurisko is the most advanced high school math/CS sequence in the USA. Students write all their code from scratch before they are allowed to import from external libraries. Being in Math Academy, these students have already learned a large amount of college-level math, including multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations, so our courses are presented at a level of intensity comparable to those offered at elite technical universities.

What kinds of things are the students building?
Our first course is inspired by MIT's Introduction to Computer Science and goes far beyond it. In addition to implementing canonical data structures and algorithms (sorting, searching, graph traversals), students write their own machine learning algorithms from scratch (polynomial and logistic regression, k-nearest neighbors & k-means, parameter fitting via gradient descent).

In subsequent courses, students implement more advanced machine learning algorithms such as decision trees & neural networks. They also reproduce academic research papers in artificial intelligence leading up to Blondie24, an AI computer program that taught itself to play checkers. At the same time, they work together to implement Space Empires, an extremely complex board game that pushes their large-scale project skills (object-oriented design, version control, etc) to the limit. more

Where does the name "Eurisko" come from?
"Eurisko" is Greek for "I discover", and is the namesake of an AI system from the 1980s that won a particular game competition twice in a row, even when the rules were changed in an attempt to handicap it.