> In the end, I find a way to develop a solution that doesn’t need AI and often makes me realize that AI would not have been able to provide the required reliab

> In the end, I find a way to develop a solution that doesn’t need AI and often makes me realize that AI would not have been able to provide the required reliability. This was brought home to me back in the 1990s at a place where we were trying to popularise expert system technology (a positively prehistoric form of AI). It was one of my first jobs in industry after leaving academia. The goal was to create a system that could predict the speed at which a unit of military vehicles could move so that a contact report expert system could decide whether two groups of vehicles could have feasibly moved between two points in a given time. The system could use this to help decide whether two reports referred to two different enemy units or a single unit that had moved from point A to point B. After quite a lot of time cranking out and debugging rules to describe the movement behaviours, I realised that some simple convoy arithmetic would do just as good a job - units are often constrained by the speed of the slowest vehicle, and respect inter-vehicle distances. For most purposes this simple arithmetic was just as good (and orders of magnitude faster) than the complex rule engine.