Lighthill report
In plain wordsA 1973 review written for a British government research council that judged AI research to have fallen far short of its promises. It led to deep cuts in AI funding in the United Kingdom.
'Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey', an assessment of AI research written by the applied mathematician Sir James Lighthill for the UK Science Research Council in 1972 and published in 1973. Lighthill divided the field into advanced automation (category A), computer-based studies of the central nervous system (category C), and a 'bridge' category B, essentially robot building and general-purpose AI, meant to connect them; he judged that category B had failed to deliver. His central argument was that methods that worked on toy problems would be swamped by combinatorial explosion on real ones. The report led the Council to withdraw support from most British AI research outside a few centers such as Edinburgh, and it is counted among the causes of the first AI winterAI winter, n.: A slump in which disappointment over AI's unmet promises leads governments and companies to pull back money and attention. Historians count two big ones: one in the 1970s and one starting in the late 1980s..
Edinburgh's robotics researchers felt the effects of the Lighthill report for a decade.
Origin
Commissioned by the Science Research Council in 1972 and published in 1973 in Artificial Intelligence: A Paper Symposium, together with dissenting responses. Later in 1973 Lighthill debated Donald Michie, John McCarthyJohn McCarthy, prop. n.: The American computer scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence', invented the Lisp programming language and championed formal logic as the route to machine common sense. and Richard Gregory at the Royal Institution in London, in a debate televised by the BBC.
Usage note
Lighthill was a distinguished fluid dynamicist with no background in AI, a point his critics emphasized.
Related
- AI winterAI winter, n.: A slump in which disappointment over AI's unmet promises leads governments and companies to pull back money and attention. Historians count two big ones: one in the 1970s and one starting in the late 1980s.
- ALPAC reportALPAC report, prop. n.: A 1966 US government report that concluded machine translation was slower, worse and costlier than human translators. It ended most American funding for the field for many years.
- Strategic Computing InitiativeStrategic Computing Initiative, prop. n.: A billion-dollar US defense research program, run from 1983 to 1993, that tried to build machine intelligence for military uses such as self-driving vehicles and assistants for fighter pilots.
- AI hypeAI hype, n.: Exaggerated claims about what AI can do or will soon do, made to attract money, attention or customers, which can mislead the public and policymakers.
- symbolic AIsymbolic AI, n.: An approach to AI that writes knowledge down as human-readable symbols and rules, such as 'every bird has wings', and reasons by manipulating them step by step instead of learning patterns from data.
Sources
- Lighthill, J. (1973). Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey. In Artificial Intelligence: A Paper Symposium. London: Science Research Council.
Mentioned in
AI winterAI winter, n.: A slump in which disappointment over AI's unmet promises leads governments and companies to pull back money and attention. Historians count two big ones: one in the 1970s and one starting in the late 1980s., combinatorial explosioncombinatorial explosion, n.: The way the number of possible combinations — moves, routes, schedules — grows so quickly as a problem gets bigger that checking them all becomes impossible, even for the fastest computers., ALPAC reportALPAC report, prop. n.: A 1966 US government report that concluded machine translation was slower, worse and costlier than human translators. It ended most American funding for the field for many years., Donald MichieDonald Michie, prop. n.: A British codebreaker turned AI pioneer who built a game-playing learning machine out of matchboxes and founded Edinburgh's influential machine-intelligence research group.