sentience@pobox.com ("Eliezer S. Yudkowsky") writes:
>The history of AI seems to me to consist of a few big wins in a vast wasteland
>of useless failures. HEARSAY II, Marr's 2.5D vision, neural nets, Copycat,
>EURISKO. Sometimes you have a slow improvement in a particular field when the
>principles are right but there just isn't enough computing power - voice
>recognition, for example. Otherwise: Breakthroughs and bottlenecks.
Neural net research started in the 1940s. It's still pretty hard to prove
that they have helped progress towards AI.
Marr's vision ideas have certainly caused an important paradigm shift in
researcher's thinking, but I haven't seen many signs that they had a sudden
effect on the vision software that people used, or that they have had much
influence on AI research.
The three programs you mention don't bear enough resemblence to big wins
to be worth serious consideration.
If the singularity is generated by advances that behave like these, it will
take a century or so for before the average person notices.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | Critmail (http://crit.org/critmail.html): http://www.rahul.net/pcm | Accept nothing less to archive your mailing list