
PROGRAMS WITH COMMON SENSE (J. McCarthy, 1959, pdf) - MaysonL
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcc59.pdf
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tylerneylon
This paper is historically very interesting.

However, I think (and I'm not alone) that it set AI research off in a bad
direction. It's not that formal logic manipulation toward common sense is not
important, but rather that it is not the skeleton key to the artificial
intelligence dream. It's hard for me to _prove_ that statement, but we can see
the palpable disillusionment of researchers who've tread this path.

If I were personally doing AI research now, I would begin with emotions.
Humans act because they want something, and they only use logic as a means to
an end -- and certainly not perfectly at that. If our goal is to achieve a
thinking program, a rational approach would be to walk down the course
evolution has found -- simulate the mind of a fly, a toad, a dog, and a monkey
first. It may be tempting to design something top-down, but that presumes we
understand the top very well, and I don't think we do. (By "top-down" I mean
from behavior to code; I'm sidestepping the biochemistry of neural activity,
whose study implies we need to know the brain's hardware before we can emulate
its software.)

As a side note, some folks use AI and ML (machine learning) interchangeably,
but there are really two goals around. I see McCarthy as wanting to create a
program that could pass the Turing test (AI), while support vector machines
and other ML tools are designed to perform advanced statistical analysis of
data, along the lines of extrapolating a pattern. Related but different goals,
and this paper has been viewed historically as about AI.

