ASK HN: AI was always a probability problem?

1 points | by 7e10 11 hours ago ago

3 comments

  • PaulHoule 11 hours ago ago

    This was my opinion circa 2011 or so when I was recapping the old AI.

    Consider, for instance, the successful early medical diagnosis program MYCIN

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin

    which like any kind of diagnosis process is a problem of reasoning with probability. Language understanding has the same issue, like if you wrote a grammar for English you'd find that common sentences have 1000s of possible ways to parse and you will need to either make a guess or keep your options open.

    MYCIN had a half-baked approach to reasoning about uncertainty that worked, one of the reasons why symbolic AI fell out of favor was that nobody developed a generally useful approach to bolt probabilities onto logic.

    • 7e10 9 hours ago ago

      [dead]

  • jqpabc123 11 hours ago ago