Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!SAIL.STANFORD.EDU!JMC From: JMC@SAIL.STANFORD.EDU (John McCarthy) Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: re: The Grand Challenge is Foolish Message-ID: Date: 27 Sep 88 04:10:00 GMT Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 20 Approved: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu [In reply to message sent Mon 26 Sep 1988 23:22-EDT.] I shall have to read the article in Science to see if the Computer Science and Technology Board has behaved as foolishly as it seems. Computer science is science and AI is the part of computer science concerned with achieving goals in certain kinds of complex environments. However, defining the goals of AI in terms of reading a physics book is like defining the goal of plasma physics in terms of making SDI work. It confuses science with engineering. If the Computer Science and Technology Board takes science seriously then they have to get technical - or rather scientific. They might attempt to evaluate the progress in learning algorithms, higher order unification or nonmonotonic reasoning. If John Nagle thinks that "The lesson of the last five years seems to be that throwing money at AI is not enormously productive.", he is also confusing science with engineering. It's like saying that the lesson of the last five years of astronomy has been unproductive. Progress in science is measured in longer periods than that.