[FabHK]

Lovely article, in particular the small but deep excursion into AI history and the AI winter after the publication of Minsky/Papert's "Perceptrons" (though it was 70's, not 80's).

Wonder when the current AI summer will come to an end...

[gumby]

I posted this on his site but it needed to be approved. Also, there's actually a comment in the book (I just borrowed my gf's copy) in which they speculate that multilayer networks could be built, but since they only computers they had were .15 MIPS KA-10s (and all the figures in the book were hand drawn) they didn't pursue it.

My guess is it's still early days on the AI boom.

My comment on AI Winter:

Minor correction: Marvin and Seymour's Perceptrons book was published around 1969 and nuked neural nets around there. AI winter set in in the 80s as expert systems and similar crude symbolic systems proved not to be scalable (I was at that AAAI in 1984 and remember that panel well).

Moore's law rescued NNs and is about to rescue symbolic AI as well.

[wz1000]

> Wonder when the current AI summer will come to an end...

Are we really closer to AI in a significant way today? Chomsky makes an interesting argument to the contrary. He points out that any physical system, say the motion of falling bodies, can be closely modeled statistically given enough data points. However, this modeling gives us very little insight into why the system behaves in that manner, i.e. gravity.

Of course, this presumes that the human brain isn't just an advanced statistical model trained by billions of years of evolution.