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My opinion is that you can't talk about the Dartmouth Project without eventually mentioning the Lighthill Report [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthill_report

My opinion is that you can't talk about the Dartmouth Project without eventually mentioning the Lighthill Report [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthill_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthill_report], an investigation from a British mathematician as to whether the UK Government should put all its egg in the AI basket. It's a highly recommended read [http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/events/lighthill1973/lighthill.pdf http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/events/lighthill1973/lighthill.pdf], or you could watch his presentation of the report (to Minsky amongst others) [http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/events/lighthill1973/ http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/events/lighthill1973/] it's also on YouTube. He was astute in identifying that AI has succeeded in A) Automation of well defined tasks, C) Investigation of problem solving processes, but failed to product much in the way of B) the combination of A and C, an independently intelligent artifact. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember the video being entertaining, especially the exchanges between the Lighthill and the Minsky, and the analysis being relevent even to today's state of AI.

deepnet 10y ago
Very informative, but Minsky was not at the debate, it was Michie, Gregory, & McCarthy. The Lighthill report destroyed the UK's lead in AI at Edinburgh. Edinburgh's AI lab, founded by Donald Michie, a wartime colleague of Turings & Richard Gregory a vision & theory of mind expert. Edinburgh had a Robot Arm that could assemble various wooden toys from randomly scattered blocks using vision & planning. Edinburgh had produced POPLOG, a widely used European LISP (with less brackets :) ) Michie was a proponent of Machine Intelligence, his "trial and error" BOXES algorithm could learn to balance a pole - everywhere else used hand engineered Symbolic GOFAI. Michie BOXES enabled learning robots that anticipated neural nets & SGD using reinforcement learning. Edinburgh's unique vision was world leading at the time. Sadly European industry followed Lighthill's lead - the 1st AI winter. Lighthill was a pure mathematician and not well qualified to vet AI, his criticisms proved wrong in hindsight - Edinburgh had automation, vision & learning on a PDP-11. Pariah in Europe, Donald Michie went on to help develop Japanese robotic assembly lines and use BOXES for factory & satellite control. Here he laments : [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...
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  POPLOG was more than a LISP! It was an IDE for POP-11, Common Lisp, Prolog, and Standard ML. All other languages were incrementally compiled to POP-11. Lisp was the least used of these in my experience at Sussex. \sidebar: POP-11 has Lisp-y list support with a Pascal-like syntax. It was pretty nice. It had assignment the right way around (if you have the stack as a mental model): 5 -> x Grad students and undergrad keeners were advised to learn enough LISP to read papers from the MIT AI Lab :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplog It was pretty well done, but not exactly fast on a 1990 Sun minicomputer shared by a hundred students. Almost all of our undergrad assignments were set and submitted via the POPLOG system, including lecture notes and tutorials: 'teach texts' with hypertext links. You could highlight code snippets with the cursor and run them in the REPL. All pre-web on a VT-100. Great stuff.
  - deepnet 10y ago
    Ah yes, many thanks, I was thinking of Popplestone & Burstall's functional language POP-II from Edinburgh. POPLOG was developed at Sussex. Did you work with Margret Bowden's robotics group ?
    - robotresearcher 10y ago
      I took Boden's mandatory first-year class Intro to CogSci in 1990. She was head of department, so I saw her around but I didn't know her well. I enjoyed the class very much. She was a very respected figure in philosophy of cogsci and AI, but I don't recall her doing any practical robotics, which was barely present at Sussex at that time.
mturmon 10y ago
I agree that his breakdown into A/B/C is instructive. From the outside, one sometimes fails to appreciate that the "B" role (basically, building a robot that will encounter novel problems) is really critical. This "shower thought" within the report also caught my eye: Incidentally, it has sometimes been argued that part of the stimulus to laborious male activity in creative fields of work, including pure science, is the urge to compensate for lack of the female capability of giving birth to children. If this were true, then Building Robots might indeed be seen as the ideal compensation. There is one piece of evidence supporting that highly uncertain hypothesis: most robots are designed from the outset to operate in a world as like as possible to the conventional child's world as seen by a man: they play games, they do puzzles, they build towers of bricks, they recognise pictures in drawing books (bear on rug with ball) -- although the rich emotional character of the child's world is totally absent. It's somewhere in the Venn diagram between deeply perceptive and reductively essentialist, and I can't decide where.

deepnet 10y ago

Very informative, but Minsky was not at the debate, it was Michie, Gregory, & McCarthy. The Lighthill report destroyed the UK's lead in AI at Edinburgh. Edinburgh's AI lab, founded by Donald Michie, a wartime colleague of Turings & Richard Gregory a vision & theory of mind expert. Edinburgh had a Robot Arm that could assemble various wooden toys from randomly scattered blocks using vision & planning. Edinburgh had produced POPLOG, a widely used European LISP (with less brackets :) ) Michie was a proponent of Machine Intelligence, his "trial and error" BOXES algorithm could learn to balance a pole - everywhere else used hand engineered Symbolic GOFAI. Michie BOXES enabled learning robots that anticipated neural nets & SGD using reinforcement learning. Edinburgh's unique vision was world leading at the time. Sadly European industry followed Lighthill's lead - the 1st AI winter. Lighthill was a pure mathematician and not well qualified to vet AI, his criticisms proved wrong in hindsight - Edinburgh had automation, vision & learning on a PDP-11. Pariah in Europe, Donald Michie went on to help develop Japanese robotic assembly lines and use BOXES for factory & satellite control. Here he laments : [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...

robotresearcher 10y ago
POPLOG was more than a LISP! It was an IDE for POP-11, Common Lisp, Prolog, and Standard ML. All other languages were incrementally compiled to POP-11. Lisp was the least used of these in my experience at Sussex. \sidebar: POP-11 has Lisp-y list support with a Pascal-like syntax. It was pretty nice. It had assignment the right way around (if you have the stack as a mental model): 5 -> x Grad students and undergrad keeners were advised to learn enough LISP to read papers from the MIT AI Lab :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplog It was pretty well done, but not exactly fast on a 1990 Sun minicomputer shared by a hundred students. Almost all of our undergrad assignments were set and submitted via the POPLOG system, including lecture notes and tutorials: 'teach texts' with hypertext links. You could highlight code snippets with the cursor and run them in the REPL. All pre-web on a VT-100. Great stuff.
- deepnet 10y ago
  Ah yes, many thanks, I was thinking of Popplestone & Burstall's functional language POP-II from Edinburgh. POPLOG was developed at Sussex. Did you work with Margret Bowden's robotics group ?
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    I took Boden's mandatory first-year class Intro to CogSci in 1990. She was head of department, so I saw her around but I didn't know her well. I enjoyed the class very much. She was a very respected figure in philosophy of cogsci and AI, but I don't recall her doing any practical robotics, which was barely present at Sussex at that time.

mturmon 10y ago

I agree that his breakdown into A/B/C is instructive. From the outside, one sometimes fails to appreciate that the "B" role (basically, building a robot that will encounter novel problems) is really critical. This "shower thought" within the report also caught my eye: Incidentally, it has sometimes been argued that part of the stimulus to laborious male activity in creative fields of work, including pure science, is the urge to compensate for lack of the female capability of giving birth to children. If this were true, then Building Robots might indeed be seen as the ideal compensation. There is one piece of evidence supporting that highly uncertain hypothesis: most robots are designed from the outset to operate in a world as like as possible to the conventional child's world as seen by a man: they play games, they do puzzles, they build towers of bricks, they recognise pictures in drawing books (bear on rug with ball) -- although the rich emotional character of the child's world is totally absent. It's somewhere in the Venn diagram between deeply perceptive and reductively essentialist, and I can't decide where.