The 1st A.I. winter was 1973 when Donald Michie's work was eviscerated by the Lighthill report. Edinburgh University, under Michie, was leading the world in A.

The 1st A.I. winter was 1973 when Donald Michie's work was eviscerated by the Lighthill report. Edinburgh University, under Michie, was leading the world in A.I. Michie, Ambler & Popplestone's 1969 Freddy Robot could assemble scattered bricks using A.I. vision & GOF symbolic AI. Michie (& Chambers) BOXES algorithm was succesfully learning to balance poles using reinforcement learning, from raw-sensor data outputting motor torques, real robotics trained end-to-end not simulated. Edinburgh had a rival LISP known as POPLOG (Popplestone & Burstal) used UK & Europe wide. BOXES was akin to todays Neural Nets. Geoff Hinton attended Edinburgh briefly in the aftermath. What might have been ? Edinburgh had both symbolic A.I. planning, a working vision system & pragmatic bottom up machine learning until '73 & Lighthill. Edinburgh's was a unique approach - with bigger budgets the American labs favoured simulation (until 1985 when Rod Brooks showed it was a dead end) and without BOXES, Freddy became RAPT, symbolic, programmed GOFAI & no learning. RAPT failed because top-down reasoning was a computational quagmire in the real world & it was too fragile to the slightest decalibration. Edinburgh's hybrid GOFAI & behavior-based approaches got round calibration issues with SOMASS, Eddie & Push-Slide. But programmed solutions lacked the crucial element of learning - Michie's BOXES. Concurrently, Michie, exiled to Glasgow & private industry, found great success helping the Japanese revolutionise the assembly line & in the US with automated factory control & satellite piloting for NASA. All reinforcement learnt using BOXES but he & AI were pariah in the UK as he laments in 1987: [Michie from 18:24] http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0306rt1/micro-live-series-3-28031987 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0306rt1/micro-live-ser... Michie's nascent hybrid of raw sensor machine learning & GOFAI embodied in robots is just being rediscovered in Abeel & Levines work today. http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00702 http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00702 An AI winter is a terrible thing. Progress lost decades. Tragically the 2002 fire may have destroyed Michie's undigitised archive.