First sentence of chapter 1: "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is that branch of computer science dealing with symbolic, nonalgorithmic methods of problem solving. "
Interesting how it's almost opposite of what the field is now.
Interesting how it's almost opposite of what the field is now.
That's exactly what makes this stuff interesting. People sometime seem to be struck by something you might call "path dependence blindness" where they see the path taken as the only path that might have been taken, and assume that anything which is off that precise path is useless. However, it it sometimes useful to look back and ponder those forks in the path which were not chosen, or which were abandoned (perhaps prematurely).
Can you take an old idea from something like MYCIN and apply it in a new way, combined with other, newer ideas? Or maybe find something that was a good idea in principle, but was "ahead of its time" in regards to computing power or some other constraint? Maybe, maybe not. But it's exploring those kinds of things that always leads me back to stuff like this.
That's exactly what makes this stuff interesting. People sometime seem to be struck by something you might call "path dependence blindness" where they see the path taken as the only path that might have been taken, and assume that anything which is off that precise path is useless. However, it it sometimes useful to look back and ponder those forks in the path which were not chosen, or which were abandoned (perhaps prematurely).
Can you take an old idea from something like MYCIN and apply it in a new way, combined with other, newer ideas? Or maybe find something that was a good idea in principle, but was "ahead of its time" in regards to computing power or some other constraint? Maybe, maybe not. But it's exploring those kinds of things that always leads me back to stuff like this.