Patrick Winston taught my first AI course around 1974. Things have come a long way, but back then I was flabbergasted to see a program perform Calculus Integrat

Patrick Winston taught my first AI course around 1974. Things have come a long way, but back then I was flabbergasted to see a program perform Calculus Integration. It seemed to be a task that took a certain amount of insight and problem solving. Professor Winston then proceeded to break down the program for us and to my surprise it easy to understand and wasn't very complex. I'll always remember his comments at that point that AI is mostly simple algorithms working against some database of knowledge. I'm not sure I would still make that claim today, kernel based support vector machines aren't all that straight forward and many of the cutting edge machine learning and AI programs are far from easy to understand. Still, there is a feeling of disappointment when the curtain is pulled aside and the great Oz is revealed to be nothing that magical.