Norvig and co. are like drunk men searching for their lost key under a streetlight. It might not be where it lies, but that's the only place where they think th

Norvig and co. are like drunk men searching for their lost key under a streetlight. It might not be where it lies, but that's the only place where they think think could find something, or at least make some tangible progress. Hofstadter doesn't mind taking the long shot... feeling his way about in the dark, in the hope of inching forward and making progress towards artificial intelligence. This comparison between complementary approaches is an apt analogy for most fields, where the focus shifts every once in a while, when one of the approaches largely hits a wall and most people switch to the other one. A while later, the trends will almost inevitably reverse and draw inspiration from other approaches. The unfortunate thing is that there's no dialogue between the two camps, which makes it that much harder to port good ideas from one context to the other. I could provide examples from physics research, or for that matter, trends in static-vs-dynamic blogs :P Also, the more "applied" the field, the shorter these cycles are. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect