On Tuesday 27 February 2007 10:23, Richard Loosemore wrote: > Yup. As far as I can tell Sussman is coming a little late to the party.
There is an urban legend of AI that ca. 1970, Marvin Minsky thought so little of the "vision problem" that he assigned an undergraduate to do it as a summer project. The truth is that there was a project called the "copy demo," the idea being to have a robot arm stack up a pile of blocks to match an example pile -- far from the complete, nebulous "vision problem". Furthermore there were other people, graduate students, postdocs, what have you, working on it. But there was one undergrad who was both precocious and had something of an attitude, so Minsky put him on the project in the spirit of, "ok, if you're so smart, you make it work." The undergraduate, of course, was Sussman. BTW, although it took more than a summer, the "copy demo" project did, in fact, succeed. Josh (ps -- from the jargon file, an AI koan:) In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied. "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
