25 - Controversies and Alternative Paradigms

Summary

Difficulties such as those i have just written about rekindled A number of controversies among AI researchers themselves. Frustrated with AI's slowdown, people with different approaches to AI eagerly stepped forward to claim that what AI needed was more of this or that alternative to AI's reigning paradigm – the paradigm John Haugeland called “good-old-fashioned AI” or GOFAI. GOFAI, of course, had as its primary rationale Newell and Simon's belief that a “physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for intelligent action.” But GOFAI seemed to be running out of steam during the 1980s, making it vulnerable to challenges by AI researchers themselves – challenges that had to be taken more seriously than those of Searle, Dreyfus, Penrose, and others outside of the field. In this chapter, I'll describe some of these internal controversies and mention a few of the new paradigms that emerged.

About Logic

Among the pursuers of the GOFAI approach were those who used logical representations and logical reasoning methods – ideas pioneered by John McCarthy. These people were sometimes called “logicists.” (I was among them, having coauthored a 1987 book titled The Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence.) Drew McDermott, a professor at Yale University (who received his Ph.D. from MIT), was one of those who began to have doubts about the role of logic in AI. This fact was significant because McDermott himself had been a prominent logicist, but in an influential 1987 paper he concluded that the premise that “… a lot of reasoning can be analyzed as deductive or approximately deductive, is erroneous.”