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From: loren@tristan.llnl.gov (Loren Petrich)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: What Has Traditional AI Accomplished?
Message-ID: <69607@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 11 Oct 90 09:59:37 GMT
References: <69460@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <1990Oct9.184502.106@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <3649@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
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In article <3649@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>
>
>In article <69367@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> loren@tristan.llnl.gov (Loren
>Petrich) writes: (I may have the attribution wrong)
>
>>	I know that this question may well start a big flame war, but
>>I would like an idea of exactly what traditional AI has accomplished.
>
>Someone at Arthur Anderson Inc told me that half of their
>multi-billion dollar income was coming from the expert systems
>supplied by them, about a year or so ago.  The ES part of the company
>had become as large as the rest of it, and this led to the company's
>splitting into two parts.

	Pretty remarkable. I have not heard much of it. What are the
capabilities of Arthur Anderson's systems? Do they have anything to
help out in working out inference rules?

	Any successful applications?

>It is hard to say what AI is, after a few years, because the heuristic
>methods get refined.  For example, there are many computer vision
>systems working in different places, but no one regards them as AI any
>more.  OCR and speech recognizers are today on the edge of being major
>industries; ...

	I haven't heard much of that either.

	How much can they accomplish? How well developed are they?

>Look at any bookshelf of texts on ES's to see industrial applications,
>or any shelf of books on computational linguistics, to see what has
>become of earlier AI language systems.

	I'd love to hear about some examples. Any accessible
introductions?

>The big future, in my view, will come when common sense data bases
>(none of which yet exist, expect perhaps for CYC as a prototype) help
>the field move from "expert" applications to "commonsense"
>applications.  Only then will general-purpose language translation be
>feasible.

	I see. I saw an article about CYC some time ago in _Discover_;
it is apparently able to learn. I wonder how "intelligent" does it
seem to those who have worked with it?

	I also get the impression that it is a rather monstrous
system. I guess my ideal would be to have a relatively simple "kernel"
system, which would proceed to build up a large database of
information on whatever it was working on, by employing some learning
algorithm.


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Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster: loren@sunlight.llnl.gov

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