
Glimpse of A.I. with John McCarthy, Nils Nilsson, Edward Feigenbaum (1984) - fogus
http://www.archive.org/details/CC1024_artificial_intelligence
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dennisgorelik
What they demonstrated as AI in 1984 today is considered business rules
engine. There are plenty of them and they are not really considered
"intelligent" (because they cannot learn by themselves). On the other hand
today we have really intelligent tools such as spam filters, spam bots, search
engines, fraud detection tools, language translators, rating engines and many
other that are important part of our lives.

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_delirium
I think it depends on who you ask, since it's somewhat of a subjective,
philosophical question. There are definitely sub-areas of AI working on rule-
engine type stuff, especially if it gets more complex, e.g. various stuff
derived from Datalog or Prolog.

On the contrary side, there are actually people who consider a lot of spam-
filtering and other statistical-ML tools to be more applied statistics than
AI, though most people probably have more mixed views on it. To some extent
they're just straightforwardly applying algorithms to get outputs with known
mathematical properties from inputs. Sort of the way a sort algorithm takes in
data and always gives you an output with specific properties, statistical
algorithms take in data and always give you an output with specific pre-
determined properties, which just happen to be more complex ones. But they
never modify their own processes, for example, or change goals, or realize
that they're making the same mistake over and over, or decide that this
algorithm is obsolete and needs to be improved--- that only happens when the
intelligence in the loop (the human statistician) updates the algorithm.

On the other hand, both approaches (rules-ish or statistics-ish) often produce
results that 50 years ago would definitely have been considered to "require
intelligence".

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danbmil99
perhaps intelligence is just "applied statistics"!

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tkahn6
Why don't we have programs like this today? This is awesome.

Make sure you keep watching after main show is over.

