rolandi@gollum.Columbia.NCR.COM (rolandi) (04/18/88)
In response to Ehud Reiter's: >I was recently asked (by a psychology graduate student) if there was >any work being done in AI which was widely thought to be exciting and >pointing the way to further progress. Specifically, I was asked for work >which: > 1) Was highly thought of by at least 50% of the researchers in >the field. > 2) Was a positive contribution, not an analysis showing problems >in previous work. > 3) Was in AI as narrowly defined (i.e. not in robotics or vision) >I must admit that I was (somewhat embarassingly) unable to think of >any such work. All the things I could think of which have people excited >(ranging from non-monotonic logic to connectionism) seemed controversial >enough so that they could not be said to have the support of half of all >active AI researchers. Psychology itself would look pretty bad if asked the same sort of questions. No discipline is more factionalized than psychology. Its representatives range from scientific materialists to existential philosophers I don't think you could get 50% of psychologists to even agree as to the proper subject matter of their discipline. Walter Rolandi rolandi@gollum.UUCP NCR Advanced Systems Development, Columbia, SC University of South Carolina Departments of Psychology and Linguistics