Very informative, but Minsky was not at the debate, it was Michie, Gregory, & McCarthy.
The Lighthill report destroyed the UK's lead in AI at Edinburgh.
Edinburgh's AI lab, founded by Donald Michie, a wartime colleague of Turings & Richard Gregory a vision & theory of mind expert.
Edinburgh had a Robot Arm that could assemble various wooden toys from randomly scattered blocks using vision & planning.
Edinburgh had produced POPLOG, a widely used European LISP (with less brackets :) )
Michie was a proponent of Machine Intelligence, his "trial and error" BOXES algorithm could learn to balance a pole - everywhere else used hand engineered Symbolic GOFAI.
Michie BOXES enabled learning robots that anticipated neural nets & SGD using reinforcement learning.
Edinburgh's unique vision was world leading at the time. Sadly European industry followed Lighthill's lead - the 1st AI winter.
Lighthill was a pure mathematician and not well qualified to vet AI, his criticisms proved wrong in hindsight - Edinburgh had automation, vision & learning on a PDP-11.
POPLOG was more than a LISP! It was an IDE for POP-11, Common Lisp, Prolog, and Standard ML. All other languages were incrementally compiled to POP-11. Lisp was the least used of these in my experience at Sussex.
\sidebar:
POP-11 has Lisp-y list support with a Pascal-like syntax. It was pretty nice. It had assignment the right way around (if you have the stack as a mental model):
5 -> x
Grad students and undergrad keeners were advised to learn enough LISP to read papers from the MIT AI Lab :)
It was pretty well done, but not exactly fast on a 1990 Sun minicomputer shared by a hundred students.
Almost all of our undergrad assignments were set and submitted via the POPLOG system, including lecture notes and tutorials: 'teach texts' with hypertext links. You could highlight code snippets with the cursor and run them in the REPL. All pre-web on a VT-100. Great stuff.
I took Boden's mandatory first-year class Intro to CogSci in 1990. She was head of department, so I saw her around but I didn't know her well. I enjoyed the class very much.
She was a very respected figure in philosophy of cogsci and AI, but I don't recall her doing any practical robotics, which was barely present at Sussex at that time.
The Lighthill report destroyed the UK's lead in AI at Edinburgh.
Edinburgh's AI lab, founded by Donald Michie, a wartime colleague of Turings & Richard Gregory a vision & theory of mind expert.
Edinburgh had a Robot Arm that could assemble various wooden toys from randomly scattered blocks using vision & planning.
Edinburgh had produced POPLOG, a widely used European LISP (with less brackets :) )
Michie was a proponent of Machine Intelligence, his "trial and error" BOXES algorithm could learn to balance a pole - everywhere else used hand engineered Symbolic GOFAI.
Michie BOXES enabled learning robots that anticipated neural nets & SGD using reinforcement learning.
Edinburgh's unique vision was world leading at the time. Sadly European industry followed Lighthill's lead - the 1st AI winter.
Lighthill was a pure mathematician and not well qualified to vet AI, his criticisms proved wrong in hindsight - Edinburgh had automation, vision & learning on a PDP-11.
Pariah in Europe, Donald Michie went on to help develop Japanese robotic assembly lines and use BOXES for factory & satellite control. Here he laments : [18:24] http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0306rt1/micro-live-ser...