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From: wray@nswitgould.OZ.AU (Wray Buntine)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Re: Exciting work in AI
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Date: 25 Apr 88 01:52:00 GMT
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Ehud Reiter (V6#69) was eliciting the following (summarised by Spencer Star)
>  Exiting work in AI.  The three criteria are:
>     1. Highly thought of by at least 50% in the field.
>     2. Positive contribution
>     3. Real AI

Spencer Star made a number of suggestions of "exiting" work.
I disagree on some of them.  I mention only 1 below.

>  Another area involves classification trees of the sort generated by
>  Quinlan's ID3 program.
Ross's original ID3 work (and the stuff usually reported in Machine Learning
overviews) and much subsequent work by him and others (e.g. pruning)
actually fails the "real AI" test.  It was independently developed by
a group of applied statisticians in the 70's and is well known
	Breiman, L., Friedman, J.H., Olshen, R.A. and Stone, C,J. (1984)
	"Classification and Regression Trees", Wadsworth
Ross's more recent work does significantly improve on Breiman et al.s stuff.
To my knowledge, however, it is not yet widely known.  Try looking in IJCAI-87.
His latest program is actually called C4 (heard of it?), has been for years,
and I think it is closer to real AI (e.g. concern for comprehensibility),
though it still has an applied statistics flavour.  Perhaps this fails the
"highly thought of by 50%" test.  Another year maybe.

--------------
Wray Buntine
wray@nswitgould.oz
University of Technology, Sydney