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I remember reading the famous book by McCorduck and Feigenbaum about the Japanese fifth generation project in the early 1980s. That book had a strong influence

by 2sk21 10y ago

I remember reading the famous book by McCorduck and Feigenbaum about the Japanese fifth generation project in the early 1980s. That book had a strong influence on my career and I recall that I resolved to become an AI expert. As it happened, it turned out that the Japanese fifth generation project achieved pretty much nothing.

mcguire 10y ago
I think it was Bruce Porter in an AI class at UT Austin who described the fifth generation project as "we need to do machine translation and planning and...so therefore we will build a Prolog machine."
- DonaldFisk 10y ago
  Some of the decisions made were considered strange even at the time: the choice of Prolog instead of Lisp seemed to be largely down to it not being American. The main hardware they wanted to develop was dataflow, for which Prolog isn't a particularly good match.
studentrob 10y ago
Well, some projects fail entirely, and their people go on to do other great things based on what they learned. Some people from Thinking Machines Corporation (founded 1983) [1] went on to build a cool parallelizable programming paradigm that even those without programming experience could utilize with relative ease. It's called Ab Initio (founded 1995) and is largely used as a Data Warehousing / ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool for getting data from databases, running a lot of the same operations on it, then sending it to another database. > Thinking Machines alumni ("thunkos") helped create several parallel computing software start-ups, including Ab Initio Software, independent to this day; and Applied Parallel Technologies, which was later renamed Torrent Systems and acquired by Ascential Software, which was in turn acquired by IBM. [1] Ab Initio has a GUI front end for code that looks like a data flow diagram. The "graphs" are converted to k-shell scripts that grab the data from various sources. I guess the k-shell implementation made it easy to parallelize. I always thought this was cool because this company had found a way to allow inexperienced programmers, and even some other STEM graduates with no programming experience, to write software that operated on data in parallel, which is generally considered to be a hard thing to do, even today in some cases, let alone in early 2000s. They're very secretive, so many people don't know them, but I believe they are very successful. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, they had clients like AOL and double click, which is basically where all the advertising revenue was going. All that processing and recalculating was handled by this software. I know because my first job out of college was to use this software on Fannie Mae's loans database. That system was SUPER complicated but working with Ab Initio on it made it a cake walk compared to using, say, Java, which a previous contractor had tried and failed to do. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_Initio_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_Initio_Software

by 2sk21 10y ago

mcguire 10y ago

I think it was Bruce Porter in an AI class at UT Austin who described the fifth generation project as "we need to do machine translation and planning and...so therefore we will build a Prolog machine."

DonaldFisk 10y ago
Some of the decisions made were considered strange even at the time: the choice of Prolog instead of Lisp seemed to be largely down to it not being American. The main hardware they wanted to develop was dataflow, for which Prolog isn't a particularly good match.

studentrob 10y ago

Well, some projects fail entirely, and their people go on to do other great things based on what they learned. Some people from Thinking Machines Corporation (founded 1983) [1] went on to build a cool parallelizable programming paradigm that even those without programming experience could utilize with relative ease. It's called Ab Initio (founded 1995) and is largely used as a Data Warehousing / ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool for getting data from databases, running a lot of the same operations on it, then sending it to another database. > Thinking Machines alumni ("thunkos") helped create several parallel computing software start-ups, including Ab Initio Software, independent to this day; and Applied Parallel Technologies, which was later renamed Torrent Systems and acquired by Ascential Software, which was in turn acquired by IBM. [1] Ab Initio has a GUI front end for code that looks like a data flow diagram. The "graphs" are converted to k-shell scripts that grab the data from various sources. I guess the k-shell implementation made it easy to parallelize. I always thought this was cool because this company had found a way to allow inexperienced programmers, and even some other STEM graduates with no programming experience, to write software that operated on data in parallel, which is generally considered to be a hard thing to do, even today in some cases, let alone in early 2000s. They're very secretive, so many people don't know them, but I believe they are very successful. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, they had clients like AOL and double click, which is basically where all the advertising revenue was going. All that processing and recalculating was handled by this software. I know because my first job out of college was to use this software on Fannie Mae's loans database. That system was SUPER complicated but working with Ab Initio on it made it a cake walk compared to using, say, Java, which a previous contractor had tried and failed to do. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_Initio_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_Initio_Software