Lighthill report

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Lighthill report is the name commonly used for the paper "Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey" by Professor Sir James Lighthill, published in "Artificial Intelligence: a paper symposium" in 1973[1].

It was compiled by Lighthill for the British Science Research Council, and published 1973, evaluating academic research in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and gave a very pessimistic prognosis for many core aspects of research in this field, stating that "in no part of the field have discoveries made so far produced the major impact that was then promised".

It "formed the basis for the decision by the British government to end support for AI research in all but three universities" [2] -- Edinburgh, Sussex and Essex. While the report was supportive of research into the simulation of neurophysiological and psychological processes, it was "highly critical of basic research in foundational areas such as robotics and language processing"[3]. The report stated that AI researchers had failed to address the issue of combinatorial explosion when solving problems within real world domains. That is, the report states that AI techniques may work within the scope of small problem domains, but the techniques would not scale up well to solve more realistic problems. The report represents a pessimistic view of AI that began after early excitement in the field.

It has been argued that the Science Research Council's decision to invite the report was partly a reaction to high levels of discord within the University of Edinburgh's Department of Artificial Intelligence, one of the earliest and biggest centres for AI research in the UK [4].

The effects of the report are still felt in the UK, where 'AI' is not often mentioned. Instead, AI researchers operate by stealth under various guises including 'machine learning', 'pattern recognition', 'inference' and 'informatics'.

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