Comment by headhasthoughts

2 years ago

[flagged]

Didn't he:

- invent case based reasoning

- build Eurisko and AM

- write a discipline defining paper ("Why AM and Eurisko appear to work")

- undertake an ambitious but ultimately futile high risk research gamble with Cyc?

  • Case-based reasoning is VERY old. It shows up prominently in the Catholic tradition of practical ethics, drawing on Aristotelian thought. Of course in a more informal sense, people have been reasoning on a case-by-case basis since time immemorial.

    • That's not what is meant here by case-based reasoning; CBR instead is an AI method which was prominent in the eighties and nineties where knowledge was represented in a semi-formal text representation and similarity was established by multi-dimensional assiociative indexing. One of the leading figures of the method was Roger Schank.

  • While futile from a personal and business aspect, it’s certainly valuable and useful otherwise. Maybe that’s implied here as you’re listing contributions, but I wanted to emphasize that it wasn’t a waste outside of that narrow band of futility.

    • I agree, and the fact that someone walked that path has been extremely valuable as well. I think we learned a lot from the cyc effort.

Why do people have to have 'commercial value' to get black bars? Why do people have to pass the ideological police? Why isn't serving as a visible advocate of a certain logical model enough?

I think my bias comes from having started my career in AI on the inference side and having (perhaps not so much long term :) seen Cyc as a shining city on a hill. Lenat certainly established that logical model even if we've since gone onto other things.

  • I believe the parent poster claims that a black bar should meet either a commercial, hacker-cultural, or open-source contribution one.

I got a lot of value out of some of the papers he wrote, and what bits of Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems I managed to read.

he is the patron hacker of players who use computers to break board games or war games

I think you don't understand the meaning of the black bar if "commercial value" is one of the metrics.

  • Steve Jobs received one - by which criteria, if not commercial (to other people) value?

    It certainly wasn't for the warmth of his personality, his impeccable business ethics, or for his libre open-source contributions.

Not even Warnock got a black bar even when asked for one as a mark of respect: [0]

I guess the black bar really is an ideological thing. Rather than being supposedly a 'mark of respect'.

Regardless, RIP Doug.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197852