[Somewhat Off Topic] AI Contest

[Alex Martelli]

"François Pinard" <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote in message
news:mailman.997037168.27615.python-list at python.org...
    ...
> I worked in AI fields for some while, before doing Operation Research,
later.
> I was rather surprised to find out that AI and OR were sometimes
addressing
> similar problems deep down, yet formulated quite differently.  The OR
> side was much more humble, and often reached better and faster results.

I had similar experiences, except that for me the counterpart to AI was
plain good old statistics.  For a while we went around with T-shirts that
were emblazoned with P(A|B)=P(B|A)P(A)/P(B) just to tweak the AI'ers
noses at meetings (as the debates turned into flamewars anyway we
might as well have some fun:-)...

> With a broad enough perspective, FORTRAN is a good AI language! :-)

We mostly used PL/I (and Rex for prototyping, way before it acquired
that second 'x':-), but, yes, Fortran was better for some of our work
(vectorializing & parallelizing some core parts of the computation, mostly;
PL/I didn't, while some Fotran compilers helped a lot).


Alex