On Tuesday 24 April 2007 13:28, Mike Tintner wrote:

> I'd be interested to know, JSH, why your early teleological AI efforts
> failed.

Actually, it succeeded about as well as most of the AI projects of the day 
did, in the sense that we built a big LISP program, produced results on a 
handful of carefully prepared input cases, published lots of papers (all 
thankfully forgotten by now), and got several grant renewals. 

It shared with virtually all AI of the day the drawback of avoiding the hard 
problems of interpretation by being given predigested, pre-formalized, 
inputs. On top of that there was a fair amount of ad hoc mechanism in the 
system. 

walks-to(Jack,cupboard)
opens(Jack,cupboard)
takes(Jack,coffeecup)

At this point the system could predict that Jack was tring to get a cup of 
coffee because pouring a cup of coffee was the only goal in the database with 
a precondition of holding a coffeecup. We found that its performance thus 
matched that of psychology students tested on the same sequence of 
sentences :-)

Josh

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