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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. Edinb

by 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.

by deepnet 10y ago

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.