MINSKY@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU (10/31/87)
Hurrah for Ken Laws when he says that >An advisor who advocates duplicating prior work is cutting his >students' chances of fame and fortune from the discovery of the >one true path. AI is still in a great exploratory phase in which there is much to be discovered. I would say that replicating and evaluating an older experiment would be a suitable Master's degree topic. Replicating AM and discovering how to extend its range would be a good doctoral topic - but because of the latter rather than the former aspect. As for those complaints about AI's fuzziness - and AI's very name - those are still virtues at the moment. Many people who profess to be working on AI recognize that what they are doing is to try to make computers do things that we don't know yet how to make them do, so AI is in that sense, speculative computer research. Then, whenever something become better understood, it is moved into a field with a more specific type of name. No purpose would be served by trying to make more precise the name of the exploratory activity - either for the public consumers or for the explorers themselves. In fact, I have a feeling that most of those who don't like the name AI also feel uncomfortable when exploring domains that aren't yet clearly enough defined for their tastes - and are thus disinclined to work in those areas. If so, then maintaining the title which some of us like and others don't may actually serve a useful function. It is the same reason, I think, why the movement to retitle science fiction as "speculative fiction" failed. The people who preferred the seemingly more precise definition were not the ones who were best at making, and at appreciating, the kinds of speculations under discussion. Ken Laws went on to say that he would make an exception in his own field of computer vision. I couldn't tell how much of that was irony. But in fact I'm inclined to agree at the level of lower level vision processing - but it seems to me that progress in "high level" vision has been somewhat sluggish since the late 60s and that this may be because too many vision hackers tried to be too scientific - and have accordingly not explored enough high level organizational ideas in that domain. - marvin minsky