sas@BFLY-VAX.BBN.COM (10/30/87)
[Authors note: The following message has a bit more vituperation than I had planned for, however I agree with the basic points.] While I agree that AI is in a very early stage and it is still possible to just jump in and get right to the frontier, an incredible number of people seem to jump in and instead of getting to the frontier, spend an awful lot of time tromping around the campfire. It seems like the journals are replete with wheels being reinvented - it's as if the physics journals were full of papers realizing that the same force that makes apples fall to ground also moves the planets about the sun. I'm not saying that there is no good research or that the universal theory of gravitation is a bad idea, but as Newton himself pointed out, he stood on the shoulders of giants. He read other people's published results. He didn't spend his time trying to figure out how a pendulum's period is related to its length - he read Galileo. Personally, I think everyone is entitled to come up with round things that roll down hills every so often. As a matter of fact, I think that this can form a very sound basis for learning just how things work. Physicists realize this and force undergraduates to spend countless tedious hours trying to fudge their results so it comes out just the way Faraday or Fermi said it would. This is an excellent form of education - but it shouldn't be confused with research. With education, the individual learns something; with research, the scientific community learns something. All too much of what passes as research nowadays is nothing more than education. The current lack of reproducibility is appalling. We have a generation of language researchers who have never had a chance to play with the Blocks World or and examine the limitiations of TAILSPIN. It's as if Elias Howe had to invent the sewing machine without access to steel or gearing. There's a good chance he would have reinvented the bone needle and the backstitch given the same access to the fruits of the industrial revolution that most AI researchers have to the fruits (lemons) of AI research. Anecdotal evidence, which is really what this field seems to be based on, just doesn't make for good science. Wow, did I write that? Seth