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From: dwt@umich.UUCP.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Re: Lenat's AM program
Message-ID: <281@umich.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 23-Oct-87 12:35:26 EST
Article-I.D.: umich.281
Posted: Fri Oct 23 12:35:26 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Oct-87 01:21:06 EST
References: <8710211650.AA18715@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
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Reply-To: umix!zippy.eecs.umich.edu!dwt@uunet.UU.NET (David West)
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In article <8710211650.AA18715@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> tgd@ORSTCS.CS.ORST.EDU 
(Tom Dietterich) writes:
>The exact reasons for the success of AM (and for its eventual failure
>to continue making new discoveries) have not been established. [...]
>
>The problem with all of these explanations is that they have not been
>subjected to rigorous experimental and analytical tests, so at the
>present time, we still (more than ten years after AM) do not
>understand why AM worked!

Some possible contributing reasons for this sort of difficulty in AI:
1) The practitioners of AI routinely lack access at the nuts-and-bolts level 
   to the products of others' work. (At a talk he gave here three years ago,
   Lenat said that he was preparing a distribution version of AM.  Has
   anyone heard whether it is available? I haven't.)   Perhaps widespread
   availability and use of Common Lisp will change this.  Perhaps not.
2) The supporting institutions (and most practitioners) have little 
   patience for anything as unexciting and 'unproductive' as slow, 
   painstaking post-mortems.
3) We still have no fruitful paradigm for intelligence and discovery.
4) We are still, for the most part, too insecure to discuss difficulties
   and failures in ways that enable others as well as ourselves to learn
   from them.  (See an article on the front page of the NYTimes book review
   two or three weeks ago for a review of a book claiming that twentieth-
   century science writing in general is fundamentally misleading in this 
   respect.)

   David West                dwt@zippy.eecs.umich.edu