[bradknowles]

I did a senior reading/research class in AI back in 1989, as my final class I needed to graduate with a BSCS. The idea originally was to do a survey of the methods known at the time and determine which was the best. This included things like e-mycin, the first generalized expert system toolkit.

I ended up with the premise that each of them had their relative strengths and weaknesses, and it would actually be best to use all of them, but only in their own areas of strength. Then have them use something akin to a shared blackboard where they could all read the results from the other systems and write their results as well. That the sum of all the available algorithms working together, each in the areas in which they were best, would result in better outcomes than any one algorithm could achieve on its own.

My professor was not impressed. I only got a C.

Now, the story of how my dad had to work his ass off to finally get the College of Engineering to force the professor to actually give me a grade that he owed me, when all the professor really wanted to do was focus on his new job at one of the big airlines -- well, that's a story for another time.