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Rodney A. Brooks (1990) "Elephants Don't Play Chess" Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6 (1990) 3-15
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While it is true that the use of AI is prospering in many large companies, it is primarily through the application. to novel domains of long developed techniques >>that have become passe in the research community.<<



Given that neither classical nor nouvelle AI seem close to >>revealing the secrets of the holy grail of AI<< , namely general purpose human level intelligence equivalence, there are a number of critical comparisons that can be made between the two approaches.


Are nouvellers romantically hoping for magic from nothing while classicists are willing to tell their systems almost anything and everything, in the hope of teasing out the shallowest of inferences?


It is instructive to reflect on the way in which earth-based biological evolution spent its time. Single cell entities arose out of the primordial soup roughly 3.5 billion years ago. A billion years passed before photosynthetic plants appeared. After almost another billion and a half years, around 550 million years ago, the first fish and vertebrates arrived, and then insects 450 million years ago. Then things started moving fast. Reptiles arrived 370 million years ago, followed by dinosaurs at 330 and mammals at 250 million years ago. The first primates appeared 120 million years ago and the immediate predecessors to the great apes a mere 18 million years ago. Man arrived in roughly his present form 2.5 million years ago. He invented agriculture a mere 19000 years ago, writing less than 5000 years ago and "expert" knowledge only over the last few hundred years.


Squirt then waits for a pattern of a sharp noise followed by a few minutes of silence. If this pattern is recognized, Squirt ventures out in the direction of the last heard noise, suppressing the desire to stay in the dark.


The notion of place maps developed for Toto bears striking similarities to what has been observed in the hippocampus of the rat [17].

   [17] H. Eichenbaum, S.I. Wiener, M.L. Shapiro, and N.J. Cohen (1989) "The organization of 
        spatial coding in the hippocampus: A study of neural ensemble activity."
        J. Neuroscience 9(8), pp. 2764-2775.

Critical to this enterprise is an easy way of controlling the robots, giving them intelligent behavior in unstructured and uncertain environments.


But this is a fallacious argument, even if only implicit. We do not usually complain that a medical expert system, or an analogy program cannot climb real mountains. It is clear that their domain of expertise is somewhat more limited, and that their designers were careful to pick a well circumscribed domain in which to work. 
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Likewise it is unfair to claim that an elephant has no intelligence worth studying just because it does not play chess.
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=> quote in icnnai-2010-2


At least if our strategy does not convince the arm chair philosophers, our engineering approach will have radically changed the world we live in.