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From: eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: The Success of AI
Message-ID: <237@snark.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 20-Oct-87 10:48:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: snark.237
Posted: Tue Oct 20 10:48:35 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Oct-87 20:47:09 EDT
References: <228@snark.UUCP>
Organization: Benevolent Space Xist Retirement Home
Lines: 24
Summary: Oops! Thanks for the correction -- and more

In article <9320@ut-sally.UUCP>, brian@ut-sally.UUCP (Brian H. Powell) writes:
>      I feel compelled to challenge this, but not necessarily the rest of your
> article.
>      AM wasn't a theorem prover.  From the July, 1976 dissertation:

Thanks for the correction, which I also received by email from another comp.ai
regular. I never saw Lenat's dissertation, just an expository paper in one of
journals. I guess maybe the reason I thought the sucker had a theorem prover
attached was that I was working on LISP support for a theorem prover at the
time, and my associative memory got a collision in its hash tables :-).

Nevertheless, I think my more general observations about AI's definitional
problem remain valid. Compilers are a 'success' of AI. So are heuristic-based
search-and-backtrack algorithms. So is the visual analysis preprocessing used
in seeing pick-and-place robots. So (most recently) are 'expert systems'.
In *each case*, these problem areas were defined out of the AI field as soon
as they spawned halfway-usable technologies and acquired their own research
communities.

I think the same thing is about to happen to neural nets, BTW...
-- 
      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