AMSLER@SRI-AI.ARPA@sri-unix.UUCP (08/08/83)
From: Robert Amsler <AMSLER@SRI-AI.ARPA> It seems to me that the 5th generation effort differs from most efforts we are familiar with in being strictly top-down. That is to say, the Japanese are willing to start work not only without knowing how to solve the nitty-gritty problems at the bottom--but without knowing what those nitty-gritty problems actually are. Although dangerous, this is a very powerful research strategy. Until it gets bogged down due to an almost insurmountable number of unsolvable technical problems one can expect very rapid progress indeed. When it does get bogged down, their understanding of the problems will be as great as that of anyone else in the world. The best way to learn is by doing.
mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (08/18/83)
There seems to be an analogy between the 5th generation project and the ARPA-SUR project on automatic speech understanding of a decade ago. Both are top-down, initiated with a great deal of hope, and dependent on solving some "nitty-gritty problems" at the bottom. The result of the ARPA-SUR project was at first to slow down research in ASR (automatic speech recognition) because a lot of people got scared off by finding how hard the problem really is. But it did, as Robert Amsler suggests the 5th generation project will, show just what "nitty-gritty problems" are important. It provided a great step forward in speech recognition, not only for those who continued to work on projects initiated by ARPA-SUR, but also for those who have come afterward. I doubt we would now be where we are in ASR if it had not been for that apparently failed project ten years ago. (Parenthetically, notice that a lot of the subsequent advances in ASR have been due to the Japanese, and that European/American researchers freely use those advances.) Martin Taylor