The Lighthill Debate (1973) - part 1 of 6
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a historical look at the AI winter debate and a demolition of the expert systems hype.
What it is
First part of a six-part recording of the 1973 Lighthill debate on AI, where Sir James Lighthill's critical report on AI research was contested by figures including McCarthy and Michie.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2016 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Recommends AndrewOMartin · 2016-08 · on “Computing machinery and intelligence (1950)”
Haha, this is arguably the article in AI. Other landmark events in the field include the Dartmouth Conference, when John McCarthy named the field "Artificial Intelligence", defined the goals, and set out to achieve them, unfortunately it's not easy to point to a single paper on the subject, though do read the conference proposal, posted on HN recently [ [LINK] ]; then you have the Lighthill report where the UK Government essentially lost interest in the project, the conclusions are debatable, but clearly and entertainingly argued, a video of the presentation of the report, with McCarthy present and responding, is available online also [ [this video] ]. Finally I'd cite the 1970s era book What Com
Recommends sgt101 · 2017-08 · on “A rising sentiment that IBM’s Watson can’t deliver on its promises”
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
Cites YeGoblynQueenne · 2021-07 · on “Deep reinforcement learning is a waste of time (2019)”
Why do you have to start your comment by accusing me of moving the goal posts? I don't even like ball games. Why is it so hard to have a decent conversation on the internet? It's a serious concern and I stand by it. It's perfectly possible -it's even easy- to make algorithms, systems, programs, what have you, that can solve one problem, perform one task, and do nothing else. Hell, you can train a dog to perform one task. Sit boy! Boy sits. And that's all it knows to do. 80% of AI research output, ever since Dartmouth, has been like that. 99% of AI research output in the last ten years is like that. My entire phylum of AI research (I'm a PhD student studying Inductive Logic Programming and ev