I wasn't aware of this, but from wikip: "In 1973, professor Sir James Lighthill was asked by the UK Parliament to evaluate the state of AI research in the Unit

I wasn't aware of this, but from wikip: "In 1973, professor Sir James Lighthill was asked by the UK Parliament to evaluate the state of AI research in the United Kingdom. His report, now called the Lighthill report, criticized the utter failure of AI to achieve its "grandiose objectives". He concluded that nothing being done in AI could not be done in other sciences. He specifically mentioned the problem of "combinatorial explosion" or "intractability", which implied that many of AI's most successful algorithms would grind to a halt on real world problems and were only suitable for solving "toy" versions. The report was contested in a debate broadcast in the BBC "Controversy" series in 1973. The debate "The general purpose robot is a mirage" from the Royal Institution was Lighthill versus the team of Donald Michie, John McCarthy and Richard Gregory. McCarthy later wrote that "the combinatorial explosion problem has been recognized in AI from the beginning". The report led to the complete dismantling of AI research in the UK. AI research continued in only a few universities (Edinburgh, Essex and Sussex). Research would not revive on a large scale until 1983, when Alvey (a research project of the British Government) began to fund AI again from a war chest of £350 million in response to the Japanese Fifth Generation Project (see below). Alvey had a number of UK-only requirements which did not sit well internationally, especially with US partners, and lost Phase 2 funding." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter Seems this is the report if anyone is curious to read it: https://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/events/lighthill1973/lighthill.pdf https://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/events/lighthill1973/lighthill.pdf