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This book is very very very old. It basically belongs to an era when AI was mostly concerned with symbolic computation. AI nowadays has taken a whole different

This book is very very very old. It basically belongs to an era when AI was mostly concerned with symbolic computation. AI nowadays has taken a whole different path with neural networks.

lispm 9y ago
There is very little actual AI in neural networks. Most of the applications I have seen are in signal processing, pattern recognition, ... For example there is very little reasoning capability in neural network applications going on. Show a child two dogs and it will recognize most dogs from now on and you can ask it why it thinks something is a dog. Try that with neural networks after showing it a zillion dogs... Doing anything more AIish will need an old-fashioned symbolic system and that stuff is still hard. Take for example IBM's Watson. It's a big system with all kinds of different modules. The language frontend is written in old-fashioned Prolog.
- ghosthamlet 9y ago
  I agree with you partially. But we still don't know how exactly does human brain work and learn. Maybe Computer AI as silicon based life will go on a path different from human.
kgwgk 9y ago
I'm curious: does "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by Russell and Norvig also belong to a long-gone era?
- bhnmmhmd 9y ago
  That book is in Python. The argument here was about using Lisp for AI.
  - kgwgk 9y ago
    So you mean that had it been "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Python" it would not be a very old book, belonging to an era when AI was mostly concerned with symbolic computation? Ok.
  - kgwgk 9y ago
    By the way, what do you mean by "that book is in Python"? I don't have the latest edition, but from this appendix http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/newchapb.pdf http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/newchapb.pdf I understand it's in pseudocode. And there is a python implementation online, but it's not the only one. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815
mtreis86 9y ago
Still a great way to learn about AI (with lisp code samples). The follow-up book has no lisp in the book itself, but all examples from the book do have lisp code examples online http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/
kazinator 9y ago
That path cannot replace the other path. It's like "don't bother with differential equations; math is more into elliptic curves now". The symbolic computation and its representations of knowledge and pattern matching and so on do things that number-crunching networks over big data simply don't. Like for instance, get certain jobs done with little data: a compact encoding of specific knowledge.

This book is very very very old. It basically belongs to an era when AI was mostly concerned with symbolic computation. AI nowadays has taken a whole different path with neural networks.

lispm 9y ago

There is very little actual AI in neural networks. Most of the applications I have seen are in signal processing, pattern recognition, ... For example there is very little reasoning capability in neural network applications going on. Show a child two dogs and it will recognize most dogs from now on and you can ask it why it thinks something is a dog. Try that with neural networks after showing it a zillion dogs... Doing anything more AIish will need an old-fashioned symbolic system and that stuff is still hard. Take for example IBM's Watson. It's a big system with all kinds of different modules. The language frontend is written in old-fashioned Prolog.

ghosthamlet 9y ago
I agree with you partially. But we still don't know how exactly does human brain work and learn. Maybe Computer AI as silicon based life will go on a path different from human.

kgwgk 9y ago

I'm curious: does "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by Russell and Norvig also belong to a long-gone era?

bhnmmhmd 9y ago
That book is in Python. The argument here was about using Lisp for AI.
- kgwgk 9y ago
  So you mean that had it been "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Python" it would not be a very old book, belonging to an era when AI was mostly concerned with symbolic computation? Ok.
- kgwgk 9y ago
  By the way, what do you mean by "that book is in Python"? I don't have the latest edition, but from this appendix http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/newchapb.pdf http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/newchapb.pdf I understand it's in pseudocode. And there is a python implementation online, but it's not the only one. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815

mtreis86 9y ago

Still a great way to learn about AI (with lisp code samples). The follow-up book has no lisp in the book itself, but all examples from the book do have lisp code examples online http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/ http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

kazinator 9y ago

That path cannot replace the other path. It's like "don't bother with differential equations; math is more into elliptic curves now". The symbolic computation and its representations of knowledge and pattern matching and so on do things that number-crunching networks over big data simply don't. Like for instance, get certain jobs done with little data: a compact encoding of specific knowledge.