Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!cbmvax!snark!eric From: eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: The Success of AI Message-ID: <228@snark.UUCP> Date: Sat, 17-Oct-87 18:09:05 EDT Article-I.D.: snark.228 Posted: Sat Oct 17 18:09:05 1987 Date-Received: Mon, 19-Oct-87 00:15:34 EDT Organization: Justified Ancients of Muammu Lines: 64 Summary: You forgot Lenat's AM In article <1922@gryphon.CTS.COM>, tsmith@gryphon.CTS.COM (Tim Smith) writes: > Computers do not process natural language very well, they cannot > translate between languages with acceptable accuracy, they > cannot prove significant, original mathematics theorems. I am in strong agreement with nearly everything else you say in this article, especially your emphasis on a need for a new paradigm of mind. But you are, I think, a little too dismissive of some real accomplishments of AI in at least one of these difficult areas. Doug Lenat's Amateur Mathematician program was a theorem prover equipped with a bunch of heuristics about what is 'mathematically interesting', essentially methods for grinding out interesting generalizations and combinations of known theorems. Lenat fed it the Zermelo-Frankel set theory axioms and let it run. After n hours of chugging through a lot of nontrivial but already-known mathematics, it 'conjectured' and then proved a bunch of new results on the number-theoretic properties of Pythagorean triples (3-tuples of integers of the form ). I was a theoretical mathematician at the time I saw the AM paper. It was *fascinating*. The program could probably have done a lot more, but it eventually choked on the size of its own LISP data structures. So at least one of your negative assertions is incorrect. I never heard of this line of research being followed up by anyone but Doug Lenat himself, and I've never been able to figure out why. He later wrote a program called EURISKO that (among other things) won that year's Trillion-Credit Squadron tournament (this is a space wargame related to the _Traveller_ role-playing game) and designed an ingenious fundamental component for VLSI logic. I think all this was in '82. > I believe the great success of AI has been in showing that > the old dualistic separation of mind and body is totally > inadequate to serve as a basis for an understanding of human > intelligence. Correct. But while recognizing this, let's not lose sight of the real accomplishments of AI in the purely-symbolic domain (whatever happened to Steve Harnad, anyhow?). I think AI has the same negative-definition problem that "natural philosophy" did when experimental science got off the ground -- that once people get a handle on some "AI" problem (like, say, playing master-level chess or automated proof of theorems) there's a tendency to say "oh, now we understand that; it's *just* computation, it's not really AI" and write it out of the field (it would be interesting to explore the hidden vitalist premises behind such thinking). So at any given time the referents for AI in peoples' minds are failures and unproved speculations, and the field goes through these manic-depressive cycles as it regroups around a new theory, problem or technology, explores it enough to make it useful for others, and then loses it to the rest of the world. Case in point: in the 1950s, *compilers* were considered "AI". I'm not old enough to remember that, but some of you may be. So, don't throw out the ship with the bath water -- er, that is, don't give up the baby -- er, oh, *you* know what I mean. AI is a useful category not in spite of all the ambiguity and confusion and excitement that surrounds it, but *because* of that. -- Eric S. Raymond UUCP: {{seismo,ihnp4,rutgers}!cbmvax,sdcrdcf!burdvax,vu-vlsi}!snark!eric Post: 22 South Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355 Phone: (215)-296-5718