
Artificial Intelligence with Erlang: The Domain of Relatives (2007) - jxub
https://erlangcentral.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_with_Erlang:_the_Domain_of_Relatives
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rdtsc
Just to point out this is discussing 3rd party Erlang library:

[https://github.com/afiniate/seresye](https://github.com/afiniate/seresye)

This not some built-in language feature or a bundled library from the
distribution. It's still pretty cool, I remember playing around with it a few
years back.

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phoe-krk
It's somewhat interesting to see Erlang go back to its roots, at least the
syntactical ones. Erlang borrowed most of its syntax from Prolog, after all.
[1]

[1] [http://erlang.org/faq/academic.html](http://erlang.org/faq/academic.html)

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Abekkus
The first Erlang platform was even written in Prolog.

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jessep
Isn't this logic programming (ala prolog), not machine learning? I don't think
this article reflects what people usually mean when they say AI, or am I
missing something? I haven't really done any machine learning or logic
programming, so could be totally off, but glancing at this was confusing based
on the title.

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seanmcdirmid
AI and ML were separated for a long time, where AI essentially meant rule-
driven behavior like logic programming (e.g. during the fifth generation
computing project). Then in the last 10 years ML became really successful, and
AI came to mean just that.

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munificent
_> where AI essentially meant rule-driven behavior like logic programming_

I think the full history is a little more complex.

In the early days, there were two camps: the "connectionists" who worked on
neural-net type stuff, and the symbolic reasoners who worked on hand-authored
rule-based systems. Both fell under the "AI" umbrella, believed their approach
was the one true one, and squabbled over funding and public perception.
(Because public perception affects funding.) Remember that at the time, much
AI research was government or defense funded, so politics was heavily
involved.

The connectionists invented neural networks. The symbolic folks gave us Lisp,
Prolog, and a lot of compiler and parser theory stuff.

The connectionists hit a wall in the sixties, and shortly after "Perceptrons"
was published. That book deliberately pointed out the current limitations of
neural networks and effectively shut down research into them for decades. It
was one of the causes of the "AI winter" of the 80s.

After that, "AI" became roughly synonymous with symbolic reasoning and rule-
based expert systems because that camp had won.

Then, in the 80s, backpropagation and other learning techniques for neural
nets were finally figured out and those researchers started making progress
again. Two AI winters had happened by then, so "AI" didn't have all of the
positive connotations it used to (at least when it comes to funding) and the
term almost solely referred to symbolic reasoning at this point, so they
started using "machine learning" to refer to neural-network-based AI.

In the early 2000s, big tech companies found themselves with lots of cheap
computational power and tons of data on their hands, the two key ingredients
to make machine learning useful. Meanwhile, symbolic reasoning and expert
systems had petered out.

So "machine learning" got bigger and bigger until eventually it became the
main computer intelligence approach in town. On top of that, it's gotten
smarter and smarter until the public has started associating it with the old
image of what "AI" means. So now you see "AI" coming back to refer to what is,
essentially, the same connectionist approach it used to include in the 60s.

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fjsolwmv
Connectionism didn't falter because people couldn't figure it out, it faltered
because people figured out they needed 1000x more powerful computers, which
took a few decades to build.

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tom_mellior
Should be marked (2007). The bulk of the content is from then, with
inconsequential formatting changes in 2013:
[https://erlangcentral.org/w/index.php?title=Artificial_Intel...](https://erlangcentral.org/w/index.php?title=Artificial_Intelligence_with_Erlang%3A_the_Domain_of_Relatives&type=revision&diff=1551&oldid=1548)

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dang
Ok. Thanks!

