AI and cognitive psychology rant (was Re: BIG successes of Lisp...)

[robert]

Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> wrote in message news:<EQNib.279793$R32.9174123 at news2.tin.it>...
> Stephen Horne wrote:
>    ...
> > I remember the context where I first encountered Bayes theorem. It was
> > in AI - expert systems, to be precise - along with my first encounter
> 
> OK, but Reverend Bayes developed it well before "AI" was even conceived,
> around the middle 18th century; considering Bayes' theorem to be part
> of AI makes just about as much sense as considering addition in the
> same light, if "expert systems" had been the first context in which
> you had ever seen numbers being summed.  In the '80s, when at IBM
> Research we developed the first large-vocabulary real-time dictation
> taking systems, I remember continuous attacks coming from the Artificial
> Intelligentsia due to the fact that we were using NO "AI" techniques --
> rather, stuff named after Bayes, Markov and Viterbi, all dead white
> mathematicians (it sure didn't help that our languages were PL/I, Rexx,
> Fortran, and the like -- no, particularly, that our system _worked_,
> the most unforgivable of sins:-).  I recall T-shirts boldly emblazoned
> with "P(A|B) = P(B|A) P(A) / P(B)" worn at computational linguistics
> conferences as a deliberately inflammatory gesture, too:-).
> 
> Personally, I first met Rev. Bayes in high school, together with the
> rest of the foundations of elementary probability theory, but then I
> did admittedly go to a particularly good high school; neither of my
> kids got decent probability theory in high school, though both of
> them met it in their first college year (in totally different fields,
> neither of them connected with "AI" -- financial economics for my
> son, telecom engineering for my daughter).
> 
> 
> > Funny how a current popular application of this approach (spam
> > filtering) is not considered to be an expert system, or even to be AI
> > at all. But AI was never meant to be in your face. Software acts more
> 
> I don't see how using Bayes' Theorem, or any other fundamental tool
> of probability and statistics, connects a program to "AI", any more
> than using fundamental techniques of arithmetic or geometry would.

i boldly disagree.  back when i first heard about AI (the '70s, i'd say),
the term had a very specific meaning:  probablistic decision making with
feedback.  a medical diagnosis system would be the archetypal example.
my recollection of why few ever got made was:  feedback collection was not
always easy (did the patient die because the diagnosis was wrong? and
what is the correct diagnosis? and did we get all the symtoms right?, etc),
and humans were unwilling to accept the notion of machine determined 
decision making.  the machine, like humans before it, would learn from its
mistakes.  this was socially unacceptable.

everything else is just rule processing.  whether done with declarative
typeless languages like Lisp or Prolog, or the more familiar imperative
typed languages like Java/C++ is a matter of preference.  i'm currently
working with a Prolog derivative, and don't find it a better way.  fact
is, i find typeless languages (declarative or imperative) a bad thing for
large system building.  

robert
 
> 
> 
> Alex