Okay, fair enough, neural nets (often called "connectionist AI") might have been the one kind of AI that involved enough number crunching that the CM was a favo

Okay, fair enough, neural nets (often called "connectionist AI") might have been the one kind of AI that involved enough number crunching that the CM was a favorable choice for running it. But if you wanted to do, say, genetic evolution of your neural net topology -- not sure that had been thought of then, but people do it now -- the CM wouldn't have worked very well. Anyway, if my rather faint recollection is accurate, the hot application I heard TMC people talking about the most back then was ray tracing.