[Somewhat Off Topic] AI Contest

[François Pinard]

[Alex Martelli]

> The 'automatic' parallelizers needed so much hand-holding and source
> tweaking to work halfway-right that it was much less work to structure
> the parallel-computation aspects explicitly (well, on a FEW big CPU's,
> at least; I had no real experience with arrays of a LOT of middling CPU's).

My own experience was with Cray FORTRAN.  It is true that there were
many functions you could use to have better control over how things were
generated.  Your whole DO loops needed to be rather simple if you wanted
them to be turned automatically into a few vector instructions.

> > P.S. - Some people, when confronted to fuzzy logic,
> > inference engines, expert systems, continuations, provers, etc., become
> > so excited that [...]

> I'm not sure what continuations (such sweet little things they are!-)
> are doing on this list, actually:-).

Of course, continuations are interesting devices, like inference engines,
etc.  My point is that continuations, and the rest, easily gets abused
into gratuitous cleverness, which is often over-praised in AI programming.

Expert systems once had wide shoulders, and were an excuse for the disorderly
accumulation of knowledge.  People had the impression of doing AI with them,
because they could write expert systems with unpredictable behavior! :-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard