Previously in series:  The Nature of Logic

People who don't work in AI, who hear that I work in AI, often ask me:  "Do you build neural networks or expert systems?"  This is said in much the same tones as "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?"

Now that's what I call successful marketing.

Yesterday I covered what I see when I look at "logic" as an AI technique.  I see something with a particular shape, a particular power, and a well-defined domain of useful application where cognition is concerned.  Logic is good for leaping from crisp real-world events to compact general laws, and then verifying that a given manipulation of the laws preserves truth.  It isn't even remotely close to the whole, or the center, of a mathematical outlook on cognition.

But for a long time, years and years, there was a tremendous focus in Artificial Intelligence on what I call "suggestively named LISP tokens" - a misuse of logic to try to handle cases like "Socrates is human, all humans are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal".  For many researchers, this one small element of math was indeed their universe.

And then along came the amazing revolution, the new AI, namely connectionism.