Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!phri!marob!cowan
From: cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: What Has Traditional AI Accomplished?
Message-ID: <27147BB0.11EA@marob.masa.com>
Date: 11 Oct 90 14:03:27 GMT
References: <1990Oct9.184502.106@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <3649@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <2067@jimi.cs.unlv.edu>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
Lines: 21

In article <2067@jimi.cs.unlv.edu>,
	maniac@sonny-boy.cs.unlv.edu (Eric J. Schwertfeger) writes:

>Our definition of AI is basically "whatever we haven't figured out how
>to do yet."  As soon as AI research refines the methods, the problem
>falls out of the AI category.

[cites chess as an example]

One of the earliest AI efforts still continuing, "automatic programming",
shows this phenomenon happening over and over.  Automatic programming is
the effort to make human programmers, er, impotent and obsolete.

The first breakthrough in this field produced a program that, indeed, would
(based on general instructions from a human being) generate a program
all by itself.  This software miracle was what we now call "an assembler".

Unfortunately, I don't have a reference for this story.  Does anybody?
-- 
cowan@marob.masa.com			(aka ...!hombre!marob!cowan)
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban