What? Why? 😅😅

Well, if you want to build an artificial intelligence, you better figure out how our “natural” intelligence works first

What rules do we actually use to solve problems? Play chess? Do math? Solve puzzles? Have dinner at a restaurant? What script do we follow?

OK, it does seems like a good idea to figure that out first 😁😁

If intelligence is the ability to solve problems, in general, then we can just look at how humans solve problems, and put that in an algorithm

I’m guessing this is where icebergs make a sudden appearance…

Absolutely: even in the case of chess or math, humans are far from perfectly rational. We make mistakes, have to backtrack, react differently in similar situations, etc

… and that is without taking into account that the world is not a chessboard

So again … …  if they knew all that early on: where did the optimism come from?

They had enough convincing successes to keep the program funded: they thought that problem solving in humans and machines could be described by the same algorithm

Humans and computers get input, apply an algorithm, and yield the desired output. Both do the same thing: information processing

If that were true, then indeed AGI sounds like something right around the corner!

Yeah, it was a very convincing paradigm: thinking, problems solving, etc. is just symbol manipulation. And that’s something a computer can do too 😅🤣

But a computer isn’t automatically a “general intelligence”, so why was this so convincing? And especially at the time … 😆

It was enough that it could in principle do the same things a human could, even if we didn’t have the algorithm yet

If you could boil down intelligent human behaviour to rules, and then translate those to a computer, you’d be done!

So how successful were they in the end?

The paradigm was alive and well at least until the ‘80s

Wow! And nobody opposed this approach? 😕

Obviously. Some accused them of being far too optimistic, other proposed competing paradigms

So what was the main criticism?

Well, some of the proponent made really outlandish claims, so Herbert Simon already in 1957 claimed that there were “machines that think, that learn and that create.” 

That would seem a bit premature …

Yep, so they got accused of selling hype, but ultimately this approach was superseded by something completely different

OK! Now I’m curious … what happened?  😲😲😲