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This is a very odd post. It claims, for example, that Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFIA) was over before the digital computer was invented. It doesn't correspond to

This is a very odd post. It claims, for example, that Good Old-Fashioned AI (GOFIA) was over before the digital computer was invented. It doesn't correspond to either my understanding of what is meant by the term GOFAI or the history of the field. It ignores all current work (e.g. proof assistants, Lean), the role of computational power, and the interplay between GOFAI techniques and other techniques (e.g. Monte-carlo tree search).

qsort 3y ago
I'm honestly wondering if it's some sort of parody? The part about games is also very weird. The machine that beat Kasparov was Deep Blue, not Big Blue (a nickname for IBM itself), and it was almost entirely brute force search IIRC. Modern chess engines do incorporate statistical methods in the form of NNUE nets, but they would be completely worthless without traditional tree search straight out of the Russel-Norvig. Exactly the same goes for Go, Shogi, etc. I'm also confused about why the whole issue of undecidability is relevant. Surely this is a limitation for anything running on a computer, including statistical approaches, why would that favor an approach over the other?
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  Deep blue(and basically no chess engines since the mid 50s) wasn't really doing brute-force search. It was using alpha-beta conspiracy search, a version of alpha-beta which was a novel idea at the time. And even alpha-beta itself is only brute-force under the worst possible move-ordering, which due to iterative deepening is basically never the case. It does give the same result as a truly brute-force minimax search, but by looking at roughly the square root of the number of positions naïve minimax would(under optimal move-ordering). As for Russell-Norvig, it has maybe 2 or 3 pages on alpha-beta, and nothing on the almost 70 years of developments that have actually made it fast, able to use multiple threads, etc.
  - bunderbunder 3y ago
    And, for what it's worth, I started college a couple years after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, and at the time this family of search algorithms were still being taught (and consumed a significant amount of classroom time) in the Artificial Intelligence class, not the algorithms class.
deleted 3y ago
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qsort 3y ago

I'm honestly wondering if it's some sort of parody? The part about games is also very weird. The machine that beat Kasparov was Deep Blue, not Big Blue (a nickname for IBM itself), and it was almost entirely brute force search IIRC. Modern chess engines do incorporate statistical methods in the form of NNUE nets, but they would be completely worthless without traditional tree search straight out of the Russel-Norvig. Exactly the same goes for Go, Shogi, etc. I'm also confused about why the whole issue of undecidability is relevant. Surely this is a limitation for anything running on a computer, including statistical approaches, why would that favor an approach over the other?

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
Deep blue(and basically no chess engines since the mid 50s) wasn't really doing brute-force search. It was using alpha-beta conspiracy search, a version of alpha-beta which was a novel idea at the time. And even alpha-beta itself is only brute-force under the worst possible move-ordering, which due to iterative deepening is basically never the case. It does give the same result as a truly brute-force minimax search, but by looking at roughly the square root of the number of positions naïve minimax would(under optimal move-ordering). As for Russell-Norvig, it has maybe 2 or 3 pages on alpha-beta, and nothing on the almost 70 years of developments that have actually made it fast, able to use multiple threads, etc.
- bunderbunder 3y ago
  And, for what it's worth, I started college a couple years after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, and at the time this family of search algorithms were still being taught (and consumed a significant amount of classroom time) in the Artificial Intelligence class, not the algorithms class.

deleted 3y ago

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