| Well, there was this place called "The Turing Institute" which was in Glasgow. It was run by a very nice man called Don Michie. I met Don a handful of times, and he was extremely kind and generous to me. He worked at Bletchley Park and died aged 91 having hit a bridge at 120mph going the wrong way up the M11 at 2am sitting next to his wife who had defected to Russia thirty years before. Don was driving, at the time he had been blind for six months. Anyway, The Turing Institute existed because of Don's drive to commercialise Expert Systems. Don was a driver in the Alvey project which was a grand project to solve issues around Expert Systems in response to the Japanese Fifth Generation project. A man called Lighthill then rumbled the Expert System movement. If you want to watch a demolition of it see the following video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yReDbeY7ZMU and the other 5 of them (you will find them in the sidebar!) Fun fact. In video 6 you can watch Christopher Strachey have a pop at AI. Christopher didn't work at Bletchley, he was too young, but he did work at Manchester with Alan Turing and they created computer music and love poetry in collaboration before Turing killed himself. Strachey went on to be the first Professor of Computer Science at Oxford, he was a scion of a great family of artists and poets. But enough of this. The Turing Institute was an attempt to say "we are right, look", but in fact it failed. Don was clear why, when you hit 40k rules knowledge bases became completely intractable. It was impossible to make improvements or changes. This was christened the Knowledge Acquisition bottleneck, and Don and others turned to Machine Learning (he liked to call it Behavioral Cloning) to solve it. So : 1. It was done to death by peer review. 2. It died commercially. 3. It's main protagonists decided to do something diffferent. |
Wow, what a rollercoaster of a paragraph! Thanks for the story. :)