AI WINTERS

AI winters

The history of Turing Test and Expert systems all showed that people greatly overestimated AI's progress since early days. Before long the hype far exceeded AI's accomplishments. In 1970s, the AI industry entered a period of time described as “AI Winter”. According to the AI Newsletter, the phrase was borrowed from “Nuclear winter”, a cold-war theory that “mass use of nuclear weapons would blot out the sun with smoke and dust, causing plunging global temperatures, a frozen Earth, and the extinction of humanity”[ Merritt05]. Indeed, during the AI winter, commercial and scientific activities in AI declined dramatically. Arguably AI is still recovering from the winter that lasted nearly two decades.

The onset of the AI winter could be traced to the government’s decision to pull back on AI research. The decisions were often attributed to a couple of infamous reports, specifically the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) report by U.S. Government in 1966, and the Lighthill report for the British government in 1973.

During AI winter, AI research program had to disguise themselves under different names in order to continue receiving funding. Many somewhat ambiguous names came up during this time that carried strong hint of AI, such as “Machine Learning”, “Informatics”, “Knowledge-based system” and “Pattern recognition”. The re-branding of these disciplines allowed AI to continue to progress in the winter. However, there was less and less perceived advancements under the name of AI which further aggravated the decline in the overall support.

There were two major winters in 1974–80 and 1987–93 and several smaller episodes including:

• 1966: the failure of machine translation.

• 1970: the abandonment of connectionism.

• 1971–75: DARPA's frustration with the Speech Understanding Research program at Carnegie Mellon University.

• 1973: the large decrease in AI research in the United Kingdom in response to the Lighthill report.

• 1973–74: DARPA's cutbacks to academic AI research in general.

• 1987: the collapse of the Lisp machine market.

• 1988: the cancellation of new spending on AI by the Strategic Computing Initiative.

• 1993: expert systems slowly reaching the bottom.

• 1990s: the quiet disappearance of the fifth-generation computer project's original goals.

http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590a/06au/projects/history-ai.pdf

http://www.snipview.com/q/AI%20winter

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