My point is that there IS no serious "pure" AI research these days. Your image of lots of pure AI researchers wasting their time is a fantasy-- those people don't exist. People work on applications.
Re:The end of AI winter?
by yummyfajitas on Thursday October 01, 2009 @09:50PM
(#856268)
"Those people don't exist" is a bit of an exaggeration. Eliezer Yudkowsky exists, for example.
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=eyudkowsky
His research is in making AGI (artificial general intelligence) not go skynet by building in morals. That seems fairly pure to me.
Yes, "Those people don't exist" isn't technically correct; perhaps it should have been "Those people don't exist in significant numbers."
The point is that people who call themselves AI researches, the vast majority of the time are not working on AGI but on weak AI.
And yet there are numerous people who work on pure math and theoretical physics.
The DARPA car racing thing seems to be a breakthrough. Granted, 30 years ago people would have expected more. But it is more than just a chess algorithm.
DARPA Grand Challenge? How's that a breakthrough in AI? Sure, it's uses a lot of results of "AI" research, but there's nothing revolutionary about that.
My understanding is that they made a big leap during the challenge - from catastrophic performance in the first run, to several successful drivers in the second run.
Revolutionary or not, I don't think it was trivial to make an autonomous vehicle.
We have cars that drive themselves!
>>if you'd have asked anyone (anyone!), in any AI related field in 1980, where AI would be in thirty years what would they have said?
Uhm, Hans Moravec isn't exactly "anyone". :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
Edit: To be clear, Moravec shows that you misrepresent the AI field of that time. But sure, he wasn't the mainstream.
Surely not "Well, for instance one of the greatest achievements might be that we will work on chess algorithms, and we will see some incremental improvements resulting from tweaking certain heuristics and more intelligent pruning through more specialized algorithms and hardcoded chess knowledge. The programs still won't be able to learn in any interesting sense, but with the help of several orders of magnitude of hardware speed, they will be 200 ELO stronger than the best human!"