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From: tgd@ORSTCS.CS.ORST.EDU (Tom Dietterich)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Re: Gilding the Lemon
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Date: Sun, 1-Nov-87 18:37:01 EST
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Posted: Sun Nov  1 18:37:01 1987
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Ken Laws says
   ...progress in
   AI is driven by the hackers and the graduate students who "don't
   know any better" than to attempt the unreasonable.

I disagree strongly.  If you see who is winning the Best Paper awards
at conferences, it is not grad students attempting the unreasonable.
It is seasoned researchers who are making the solid contributions.

I'm not advocating that everyone do rational reconstructions.  It
seems to me that AI research on a particular problem evolves through
several stages: (a) problem definition, (b) development of methods,
(c) careful definition and comparative study of the methods, (d)
identification of relationships among methods (e.g., tradeoffs, or
even understanding the entire space of methods relevant to a problem).

Different research methods are appropriate at different stages.
Problem definition (a) and initial method development (b) can be
accomplished by pursuing particular application problems, constructing
exploratory systems, etc.  Rational reconstructions and empirical
comparisons are appropriate for (c).  Mathematical analysis is
generally the best for (d).  In my opinion, the graduate students of
the past two decades have already done a great deal of (a) and (b), so
that we have lots of problems and methods out there that need further
study and comparison.  However, I'm sure there are other problems and
methods waiting to be discovered, so there is still a lot of room for
exploratory studies.  

--Tom Dietterich