Talk:History of artificial intelligence/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Complete Rewrite

I have rewritten this article from scratch. Most of the information from the original article has been moved to Timeline of artificial intelligence. A tiny bit has been lost. (My apologies to the authors of the lost text.) I have also archived the talk page; since the comments referred to the old article, I thought it would be less confusing to make a clean start on the talk page as well.

I chose as my main source Daniel Crevier's AI: The Tumultuous Search for Artificial Intelligence. Hans Moravec calls this "the most complete and accurate history of AI thus far". Marvin Minsky and Roger Schank also endorse it.

I have tried to emphasize the major themes that affected the field in general. I tried to avoid just listing projects or people out of context -- if I mention something, I try to show how it affected the entire field of AI. This means that, in a short article, it is impossible to mention every interesting researcher, every institution, every success and every failure: I had to choose which ones were "most significant" or ones that illustrated a particular point. This means that a lot of important things had to be skipped. I hope that you won't feel compelled to add paragraphs about things that I chose to edit out ... perhaps they could go in the Timeline of artificial intelligence? The article is already too long.

Having said that, I encourage everyone to check my facts and tighten my prose. I am largely unaware of what happened in AI after 1993 or so and could use some help identifying the "major themes" of the last decades (but do use references, please). If anyone has access to any illustrations, that would be appreciated as well. Tell me where it could be shortened.

CharlesGillingham 08:07, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Two cents

In an encyclopedia full of too many dry, disjointed articles, "History of artificial intelligence" is a breath of fresh air — thorough and lucid, a pleasure to read. Keep up the good work. Omphaloscope talk 15:28, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

I second that. This article is excellent. (As well as the discussion page.) Kromsson (talk) 00:10, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

I cannot resist the urge to say ME TOO. Excellent structure, sufficient depth, efficient prose and abundant references make this article one of the best pieces I have read on wikipedia for a while. PLEASE continue contributing. Virtualsim (talk) 23:18, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

DARPA challenge no milestone

The section "AI in the 21st century" is currently very misleading. It claims: "On 11 May 1997, Deep Blue became the first computer system to beat a reigning world champion, Gary Kasparov. On October 8, 2005, the robot car "Stanley" drove unaided over 132 miles of desert roads to win the DARPA Grand Challenge. After almost fifty years of effort, these two milestones were finally achieved. These successes were not due to some revolutionary new paradigm..." But while the first event is worth mentioning, the heavily promoted DARPA race achieved no milestone at all. The milestones in autonomous driving were set 10 years earlier by the much more impressive car robots of Ernst Dickmanns. Compare Talk:DARPA_Grand_Challenge: In 1995 Dickmanns' VaMP car autonomously drove up to 158 km, nearly the same distance as the traffic-free 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, but much faster, and in traffic, and without a million GPS waypoints. And all of this with much slower computers. Willingandable 15:58, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

I think this is a good point and feel free to change it, if you like. The point the paragraph is supposed to make is that AI has come a long way and that it has been a slow, difficult process. It's not important exactly what recent achievements get highlighted or how they are presented. I thought DARPA GC was a good example since Shakey couldn't always make it across the room in 8 hours, and now these DARPA GC machines are crossing deserts. It's a striking improvement.

Maybe the title of the paragraph should change to accomodate your sense that DARPA GC doesn't represent a "milestone" --CharlesGillingham 19:30, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Is the DARPA challenge an example of an advance?

I improved your sentence by replacing your DARPA example by the earlier and better one:

In other areas, such as robotics, tremendous progress has been made, for example, in 1970 the robot Shakey could not reliably cross a room in 8 hours, but by 1995, the VaMP robot car of Mercedes-Benz and Ernst Dickmanns was driving on the Autobahn in traffic at up to 180 km/h.

Onetofive 15:41, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

This is okay with me, but, to be honest I'm a little bothered that this research is now 12 years old. The history of AI is filled with stories of projects that began with great promise and high expectations, but then stalled because the technology could not be improved; there have been a lot of dead ends in the history of AI. We're now mentioning the VaMP in every place where we're trying to say AI is successful and doesn't always hit dead ends. I guess I'm a little worried about hyping Ernst Dickmanns' work when I'm not sure if it led anywhere. If the VaMP turns out to have been a dead end, then what does that say? The advantage of the DARPA Grand Challenge is that it happened this year. It's one "end" that definitely is not "dead" yet. ---- CharlesGillingham 02:22, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

I've just read the EUREKA Prometheus Project article again and noticed that the VaMP only drove an average of 9km at a time without human intervention. When human intervention is part of an AI project, the results can be can disastrously misleading. Consider the history of machine translation. The systems that were developed in the early 60s required "post-editing" (a kind of human intervention). The ALPAC report found that this "post editing" actually required more time than just translating the text from scratch. Basically, they showed that the system was worse than useless.This discredited the whole field is considered one of the worst disasters in the history of AI. The point is, if the VaMP had an alert human being behind the wheel, ready to intervene, many of the hard problems are being solved by the human. The machine may have been only handling aspects of the problem that were trivial, at least in terms of the aspects that still needed to be solved.

In contrast, the DARPA Grand Challenge machines are operating without any kind of safety net. This is much more difficult, because the system will fail when he hits the first unanticipated problem. And the history of AI teaches us that the unanticipated problems are often enormously more difficult than the anticipated ones.

So, on the whole, I'm becoming very suspicious of the VaMP's real capabilities and how these stack up against the DARPA machines. I wish we had a source that told the whole story on this.

Let me know what you think. ---- CharlesGillingham 02:54, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Let me cut and paste from the DARPA Grand Challenge:

Five cars finished the course: Stanley, Sandstorm, H1ghlander, TerraMax, and Kat-5. It is interesting to compare them to the earlier VaMP robot car of Mercedes-Benz and Ernst Dickmanns. The VaMP was built in the 1990's as a continuation of Dickmanns' earlier work at the Universität der Bundeswehr München in Munich; the project was funded in part by the $1 billion dollar EUREKA Prometheus Project. The VaMP was able to drive in traffic among moving obstacles, automatically passing slower vehicles; the DARPA cars were not (H1ghlander was standing still when Stanley passed it in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge) . The VaMP reached speeds up to 180 km/h (111 mph); the DARPA cars were limited to top speeds of 80 km/h (50 mph). In 1995, the VaMP drove up to 158 km without human intervention on a Danish highway where most drivers adhere to the 110km/h general speed limit and passing is rarely necessary; decisions made by the VaMP were checked for validity by a human safety pilot (the 158km represent the longest stretch of thousands of km of test runs, and the terrain was self-selected by the VaMP team). In 2005, the DARPA cars drove 212 km (132 miles) without human intervention on the Grand Challenge course selected by the race organizers. VaMP drove on the mostly straight Autobahn; the DARPA cars drove on a variety of graded dirt roads, including narrow and steep mountain passes. The VaMP drove mostly by vision with some input provided by radar but without GPS navigation; the DARPA cars heavily used GPS, always driving from one waypoint to the next (the DARPA course was unrehearsed by the teams but precisely given by almost 3000 waypoints, with several waypoints per curve). The DARPA cars combined other sensor data such as LIDAR, video cameras, and inertial guidance systems for better navigation in between waypoints, where road boundary identification was sometimes harder than on the Autobahn because of the unstructured terrain (Autobahn road boundaries are engineered to be easily visually observable but often partially hidden by trucks etc). The top speed of the VaMP's computer processors was 1000 times slower per dollar than those used in the DARPA vehicles.

Sure, the tasks are not fully comparable, and in traffic of course you do need a safety driver for legal reasons. But the VaMP did demonstrate sustained fully autonomous driving in fast traffic, and it's pretty obvious which car represents the real breakthrough in robot cars! The DARPA race was surrounded by much more hype though. Onetofive 14:13, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

The fact that it was a breakthrough is irrelevant. It was in the past and this paragraph is talking about where AI is now.

There have been many breakthroughs in the past, like SHRDLU for example, that didn't lead anywhere. There isn't a single concept from SHRDLU that wound up being useful to later work in natural language processing. And yet, SHRDLU, from 1970 or so, may be the most successful natural language processing system ever built. It's architecture, although brilliant, turned out to be a dead end. This is part of the reason the AI Winters happen.

This paragraph is supposed to make the point that AI has made "continuous advances in all areas." If the VaMP truly is the more advanced system than Stanley, then you've just made the opposite point: you've shown that AI is not making advances. You're showing that robot car work has been stalled since 1995. I think the VaMP is a bad example of AI making "continuous advances" right up to the present day.

I'll leave it because the point is fairly subtle, 1995 isn't that long ago, and you (and Willingandable) feel strongly about it, but please consider what I'm saying here. ---- CharlesGillingham 21:11, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Todo

1. A paragraph on Judea Pearl and the rise of mathematical methods in the 90s. How this dovetails with the Intelligent agent approach to building AI systems -- "divide and conquer". How focussing on isolated problems opened more interdisciplinary connections. How isolating problems made commerical application easier. How AI has gotten more rigorous. "Victory of the neats."  Done
2. Did "the money pour in" England? Or Japan? Or elsewhere? Need to mention Edinburgh as a center of research in the golden years. Need good sources on this.  Done ---- CharlesGillingham 03:58, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Lead of the history of AI

(I moved your comment here from my talk page as this is a better place to discuss)

I'm not sure I agree that artificial intelligence begins in antiquity. The term wasn't coined until 1956. Certainly there were precursors in myth and fiction, but these were usually either robots or artificial humans, not quite the same thing. I think an appropriate analogy here would be "space travel". Although the idea of "space travel" existed for centuries (and was worked out to high level of detail by the mid fifties), space travel begins in 1957, with sputnik, or at least by 1961, with Yuri Gagarin. Similarly, artificial intelligence research has a very definite "birthday". (Read the paragraph on the Dartmouth conference, especially the last line.) Before that date, the closest thing is cybernetics or automata theory (the subject of Claude Shannon and John McCarthy's collaboration before 1956). These are related to AI, but aren't AI: the goal of these fields aren't really the same. My point is this: before 1956, anything you can cite is either (1) merely closely related, or (2) merely speculation.

Also, the new opening line doesn't read well to me; it feels like a digression at the very top of the article. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 08:27, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment. I find it hard to agree that the field of AI began in 1956. To begin with, Turing's seminal 1950 paper predated it, and there are chess and checkers programs that date prior to 1956 (see Timeline of artificial intelligence). To say that these contributions are "merely speculation" or "merely closely related" is wrong. 1956 may have been the year of the first conference and when the term was coined, but it is not the beginning of AI. The lead is inaccurate when it lets the reader to believe it all started in 1956. As for my English, I'll have another look to improve readability, but feel free to improve. Pgr94 (talk) 11:14, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

I see what you mean about Turing's paper, and I think Shannon's paper about Chess was in 1950 too. Pitts and McCullough (1943) is also very close. I agree that they are doing what would later be called artificial intelligence research, and that they are part of the history of the idea of artificial intelligence, but I want to make a very precise point here. The old first line of this article identified it as the history of a field of study, "artificial intelligence research", which is a social construct and has a definite beginning in 1956. The new first line identifies this as the history of an idea, a "notion", which lots of individuals have had, on and off, since antiquity. This is why the new opening line seems like a digression to me. Is this article the history of a "notion" or of a "field of study"? As written, I think it is about the latter, and the first line should say so.

Any history of science has social and technical dimensions, and so this article bounces back and forth between technical history and social history, between the history of ideas and '"notions" and the history of people and institutions. But I don't like bouncing back and forth mid sentence in the opening line. The first line needs to identify precisely what the article is about. (There may be a way to bounce backwards to AI research's precursors in the second sentence or paragraph, and still tell a good story.) ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 18:21, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

One more thought on your first comment: with all due respect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence is speculation. Intelligent, influential speculation but speculation nonetheless. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 21:20, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't see this distinction being made in articles such as History of logic, History of mathematics, History of physics, History of chemistry, History of biology. I think the lead the should reflect the rest of the article, which is that there is a history of artificial intelligence prior to 1956. It's odd to say otherwise. Pgr94 (talk) 19:01, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

They're in a section called "precursors"! As far as logic, mathematics, and physics go, they are ancient. The history of chemistry article carefully makes the distinction between chemistry and alchemy and it's clear that the editors considered the issue. We should do the same. Also, the work of alchemists and metal smiths produced a lot of important information that is now part of chemistry. I don't think you can say that about the precursors of AI.

I think there's a way to weave things together in a way that reads well and tells a good story. I just want each paragraph to actually have some kind of topic. For now I just split the two. There's a way to make this work, we just need to actually say something about the precursors to AI. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 21:20, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I've written something I like now. Sorry if I was cranky about this. I guess you were right. I just couldn't see how to make it work at first. ---- CharlesGillingham 09:20, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

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Father of AI?

I removed the assertion that Alan Turing is known as "the Father of AI" since, a quick internet search will show, McCarthy, Newell and Simon are also often called "the father of AI." A rough count shows McCarthy the winner. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:27, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Are google counts a reliable source for making this kind of decision? Here is a source: the first artificial intelligence manifesto, Turing 1948 p.401 [1] Hope that helps. Pgr94 (talk) 09:59, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Here's a link to the original article [2] Pgr94 (talk) 10:01, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

My point was that there are several people who are called "the father of AI". Since the paternity of artificial intelligence is in some dispute ;) Wikipedia should remain neutral. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 06:00, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

---

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:History of artificial intelligence/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Hi, I'll be reviewing this article. I hope to post my review in the next couple of days and then pass the article or put it on hold for improvements. Wronkiew (talk) 18:08, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Overview

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

Prose

• "The history of artificial intelligence begins in antiquity with myths, stories and rumors of artificial beings endowed with intelligence and consciousness by master craftsman." Tense problems. The list of synonyms isn't needed.

  Should this be "began"? Doesn't seem quite right to me. Also, don't quite agree that these are synonyms. Hephaestus' Talos appears in myth, Frankenstein's monster appears in a story, Paracelsus' homunculous was a rumor. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 05:12, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

  It should be "began". Present tense should only be used when writing about fiction. Myths, stories, and rumors all describe a condition in which something probably doesn't exist, but people talk about it anyway. It's not a problem if there isn't a way to write this more concisely. Wronkiew (talk) 17:02, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

  Began it is.  Fixed[3] ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:37, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

• "In the Middle Ages, it was believed that there were secret mystical or alchemical means of placing mind into matter, such as Geber's Takwin, Paracelsus' homunculus and Rabbi Judah Loew's Golem." This is unnecessarily verbose because "it" doesn't refer to anything.  Fixed[4] Changed to 'rumors of secret mystical ...'.
• "In the 1940s and 50s, a number of scientist from many fields (mathematics, psychology, engineering, economics and political science) began to explore the possibility of creating an artificial brain." Verbose and number mismatch. Replace with "several scientists". This phrase also appears elsewhere in the article. Fixed[5] Rewritten as "a handful of scientist from a variety of fields", making the sentence more informative.
• "Robots that displayed rudimentary intelligence were built, including W. Grey Walter's turtles and the Johns Hopkins Beast." Awkward. Rewrite to use active voice. Fixed[6] Rewritten as "Robots built at this time, such as Grey Walter's Turtles and the Johns Hopkins Beast, ..."
• "This simplified version of the problem allowed Turing to argue convincingly that a 'thinking machine' was at least plausible and the paper answered all of the most common objections to the proposition." Verbose. Replace with "all the". Fixed|[7]
• "At the conference Newell and Simon debuted the 'Logic Theorist' and McCarthy convinced the majority of attendees to accept 'Artificial Intelligence' as the name of the field." Replace with "persuaded most". Fixed[8] Replaced with "persuaded the"
• "The principle difficulty was that, for many problems, the number of possible paths through the "maze" was simply astronomical (this is called a "combinatorial explosion")." Replace with "principal". Fixed[9]
• "Other "searching" programs were able to accomplish impressive tasks like solving problems in geometry and algebra: Herbert Gelernter's Geometry Theorem Prover (1958) and SAINT written by Minsky's student James Slagle (1961)." Needs a comma before "written". Fixed[10]
• "A semantic net represents concepts (e.g. "house","door") as nodes and relations between concepts (e.g. "has-a") as links between the nodes." Replace with "among". Fixed[11]
• "The money was proffered with few strings attached: J. C. R. Licklider, then the director of ARPA, felt that his organization should "fund people, not projects!" and allowed researchers to pursue whatever directions might interest them." This was not a feeling. Replace with "said" since this is a quote, or "thought". Fixed[12] Replaced with "believed".
• "This created a freewheeling atmosphere at MIT that gave birth to the hacker culture,[58] but this "hands off" approach would soon come to an end." Verbose, just "end" will do. Fixed[13] Replaced with "would not last"
• "Even the most impressive could only handle trivial versions of the problems they were supposed to solve; all of the programs were, in some sense, 'toys'." Replace with "all the". Fixed[14]
• "Hans Moravec blamed the crisis on the unrealistic predictions of his colleagues." This sentence is missing a space after the period. Fixed|[15]
• "A number of philosophers had strong objections to the claims being made by AI researchers." Replace with "several". Fixed[16]
• "Hubert Dreyfus ridiculed the broken promises of the 60s and critiqued the assumptions of AI, arguing that human reasoning actually involved very little 'symbol processing' and a great deal of embodied, instinctive, unconscious 'know how'." Should be "criticized". Also, the "know how" part is pompous and wordy and needs to be simplified.

   Fixed "criticized"

  I disagree here about the pomposity (sp?), since each of these four terms ("embodied", "instinctive", "unconscious" and "know how"=Heidegger's ready-to-hand) is an important aspect of the kind of knowledge that Dreyfus is interested in. The hard thing about a sentence like this one is that we're summarizing the contents of several dense books of philosophy into a single line. I think this about the best we can do here. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:54, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

  That's fine. Wronkiew (talk) 17:02, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

• "These critiques were not taken seriously by AI researchers, often because they seemed so far off the point: problems like intractability and commonsense knowledge seemed much more immediate and serious; it wasn't clear what difference 'know how' or 'intensionality' made to an actual program." Expand the contraction. Also, don't follow a colon with a semicolon unless it's separating the elements of a list.  Fixed the semi colon.[17]

  I disagree about the contraction, since it places to much emphasis on the negation and ruins the flow.---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:54, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

  I maintain that contractions are inappropriate here. How about "it was unclear"? Wronkiew (talk) 17:02, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

  Fine  Fixed[18] ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:37, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

• "However, straight forward implementations, like those attempted by McCarthy and his students in the late 60s, were especially intractable: the programs required astronomical numbers of steps to prove simple theorems." Replace with "straightforward". Fixed[19]
• "McCarthy responded that what people do is irrelevant and pointed out that we don't need machines that think as people do, we need machines that can solve problems that people normally solve by thinking." Expand the contraction.

  As before, I disagree about the contraction, since it places to much emphasis on the negation and ruins the flow.---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:54, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

  "McCarthy responded that what people do is irrelevant. He pointed out that we need machines that can solve problems that people normally solve by thinking, rather than machines that think as people do." Wronkiew (talk) 17:02, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

   Fixed [20] as "McCarthy responded that what people do is irrelevant. He argued that what is really needed are machines that can solve problems—not machines that think as people do." (Although, to be honest, I would prefer a longer sentence, i.e. "...irrelevent, arguing that...") ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:37, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

• "Many years later object-oriented programming would adopt the essential of idea 'inheritance' from AI research on frames." Maybe "essence of" or "essential idea of". Fixed[21]
• "The 1980s also saw the birth of Cyc, the first attempt attack the most commonsense knowledge problem directly, by creating a massive database that would contain all the mundane facts that the average person knows." I think there's a missing "to". Fixed[22]
• "Douglas Lenat, who initiated and led the project, argued that there is no shortcut ― the only way for machines to know the meaning of human concepts is to teach them, one concept at a time, by hand." You can use the shorter word "started" here. Fixed[23]
• "In the late 80s, a number of researchers advocated a completely new approach to artificial intelligence, based on robotics." Several. Fixed[24]
• "An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success." Number disagreement. Replace with "actions which maximize" or "actions to maximize". Fixed[25]
• "Minsky believes that the answer is that the central problems, like commonsense reasoning, were being neglected, while the majority of researchers pursued things like commercial applications of neural nets or genetic algorithms." Most. Fixed[26]
• "Artificial intelligence problems that had begun to seem impossible in 1970 have been solved and are now successful commercial products." The problems are now products? Fixed[27]
• The "AI winter" needs to be combined into three or four paragraphs.

  Not feeling this one, since each paragraph here is on a different topic. Could be a bullet list, if you like. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:54, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

  Single sentence paragraphs should be avoided and this section has two of them. Find a way to tie them together or expand them. Wronkiew (talk) 17:02, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

   Fixed[28] Added a sentence to the short paragraphs. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:37, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

• Split long sentences to improve readability:
  • "In the middle of the 20th century, a handful of scientists began to explore a new approach to this ancient idea based on their discoveries in neurology, a new mathematical theory of information, an understanding of control and stability called cybernetics, and above all, by the invention of the digital computer, a machine based on the abstract essence of mathematical reasoning."
  • "But, despite the rise and fall of AI in the perceptions of venture capitalists and government bureaucrats, AI has made continuous advances in all areas regardless of the climate, overcoming unexpected obstacles, reorienting priorities in light of new discoveries and riding the crest of the wave of increasing computer power." In addition to the excessive length and multiple lists, there is a missing comma, and the "reorienting priorities" part doesn't make any sense. Also, don't start sentences with a conjunction.
  • "Seven years later, the Japanese Government and American industry would provide AI with billions of dollars, but again the investors would be disappointed and by the late 80s the funding would dry up again."
  • "In the 1940s, a number of scientist became interested in the relationship between the human brain (which had recently been shown to be an electrical network of neurons that fired in all-or-nothing pulses) and Norbert Weiner's cybernetics (which described electrical networks) and Claude Shannon's information theory (which described all-or-nothing signals) and Alan Turing's theory of computation." Rewrite to break out the parenthesized statements. The sentence is essentially a list with every element separated by an "and". Fixed[29]. Rewritten to break this up.
  • "Hans Moravec argued in 1976 that computers were still millions of times too weak to exhibit intelligence and suggested an analogy: artificial intelligence requires computer power in the same way that aircraft require horsepower; below a certain threshold, it's impossible, but, as power increases, eventually it could become easy." Fixed[30] Broke this up as recommended.
  • "It would eventually dawn on many AI researchers working with vision and robotics that tasks like proving theorems or solving geometry problems were easy for computers to carry out, but supposedly 'simple' tasks like recognizing a face or crossing a room without bumping into anything were extremely difficult."
  • "Many AI programs used the same basic algorithm in the early years of AI research: to achieve some goal (like winning a game or proving a theorem) and they proceeded step by step towards it (by making a move or a deduction) as if searching through a maze, backtracking whenever they reached a dead end."
  • "AI had solved a lot of very difficult problems and their solutions proved to be useful throughout the technology industry, such as data mining, industrial robotics, logistics, speech recognition, banking software, medical diagnosis and Google's search engine to name a few." Also, "to name a few" is redundant. Fixed "to name a few" [31].

  Length doesn't bother me here. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 00:54, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

  That's fine, although you should consider whether these sentences are readable by a general audience, especially those in the lead section. Are you planning to break up any of the other sentences in this list? Wronkiew (talk) 17:02, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

  • "Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert and Roger Schank were trying to solve problems like 'story understanding' and 'object recognition' that required a machine to think like a person--in order to use ordinary concepts like 'chair' or 'restaurant' they had to make all the same illogical assumptions that people normally made."  Fixed[32] as recommended.

MoS

• Lead section
  • "Progress has been slower than predicted but has continued nonetheless." This is redundant.

Merged those two sentences. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 20:55, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

• Layout
  • The portal link and the "History of computing" navbox belong at the end of the article, not next to the table of contents.

Created a See also section and moved the portal link there per WP:Layout. For the navbox ... I don't know. I'm not up on all the infobox issues, but there are a lot of FACs with infoboxes that look similar to the one here that are going in the first section. It looks okay to me. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 20:51, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

• • Dump the external link in "Timeline of artificial intelligence" and eliminate the section. Fixed[33]
• Words to avoid
  • "Simon claimed that they had 'solved the venerable mind/body problem, explaining how a system composed of matter can have the properties of mind.'" Not an acceptable use of "claimed". Fixed[34]
  • "Like most AI researchers, he made optimistic claims about their power, predicting that 'perceptron may eventually be able to learn, make decisions, and translate languages.'" You can just say "he predicted". Fixed[35]
  • "They showed that there were severe limitations to what perceptrons could do and that Frank Rosenblatt's claims had been grossly exaggerated." He was wrong. You don't have to rub it in. Fixed[36]

Scope

• Speculations about the future course of AI research do not belong in this article.

  Can't find this. Are you talking about Kurzweil? ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 05:43, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

  Took out the "2011" thing in AI winter, in case that was what you were talking about. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 06:05, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

  A few sentences remain that are off-topic:

  • "It remains to be seen when or if an AI system will be built with a human level of intelligence."
  • "Alan Turing's quote from 1950 still applies in the 21st century: 'We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see that there is much to be done.'"

  Feel free to remove this paragraph, but I think you should note that these statements are not speculation, but rather are refusals to speculate. ----CharlesGillingham (talk) 07:55, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

I support Charles on these two. You can't write a comprehensive article on the history of AI without saying that there's much to be done and that the question of approximating or attaining human intelligence is an open question. That's a statement about the current state of the field, not a speculation. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 20:43, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

P.S. On the other hand, I did make a tweak to the wording to make it clear we're not dealing with WP:CRYSTAL here. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:15, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

References

• Citations like "The alchemical creation of life" belong in the "References" section, not the "Notes" section.  Fixed All citations in footnotes have been turned into shortened notes. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 07:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
• External links should be moved to the references section, and web citations need authors. Fixed All embedded links have been turned into shortened notes. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 07:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
• The Hobbes reference links to a disambiguation page for Leviathan.  Fixed ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 07:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
• Book citations could use some more detail, like publishers, place of publication, and ISBN.  Fixed All books have ISBNs (and all links have access dates, etc.) ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 07:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
• Combine links to McCarthy's presentation.  Fixed Now uses a shortened note ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 07:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
• Eliminate repetitive internal links from the references section.

  Not sure what you mean. Specific example would help here. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 07:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Done I think. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 20:38, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Attribution

• "Indeed, some of them, like "carry on a casual conversation" had not been met in 2001, and may not be met by 2011." Needs a reference.

 Fixed Reference was in a footnote at the end of the following sentence. Moved the footnote to the end of this sentence. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 05:55, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Removed the mention of 2011. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 06:06, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Image captions

• "The ENIAC, at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. (U.S. Army Photo)" Move the image source to the image description page.  Fixed[37]

Comments

Well written article. There are a lot of issues because it's big, but most of them are minor. I'm putting the review on hold so the article can be improved. Let me know if you have any questions, otherwise I hope to promote it to GA status when I come back. Wronkiew (talk) 07:12, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I responded to the questions. Do you think you can resolve the remaining issues in the next couple of days? Wronkiew (talk) 17:13, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I did something with every unresolved comment I found; I'll keep this watchlisted for a while to see if you guys have feedback. I enjoyed the article, Charles. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 21:47, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Looks good, as in GA good. Thanks to Dan and Charles for your excellent work on the article. I appreciate your patience. Wronkiew (talk) 22:24, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Missing material? Mathematical logic and statistics

I haven't re-read the article recently, but a cursory glance suggests there are a couple of elements missing from the article, notably mathematical logic and statistics. See Randall Davis' presidential address to AAAI in 1996, page 92.

Perhaps we could mention mathematical logic explicitly in the formal reasoning section. I can't yet see where statistics would fit in, but I think it would be hard to argue it isn't an pillar of AI. pgr94 (talk) 09:32, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Added a bit a about mathematical logic and formalisation of reasoning. pgr94 (talk) 10:25, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Filled in the gaps in this thread: ancient formal reasoning->(logic)->AI, using some material I had cut a long time ago. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 08:45, 14 December 2008 (UTC)