>> GOFAI had several defects, but… the main thing is, nearly all of it was false.
It would be nice to see some kind of substantial examples of how "(nearly all of) GOFAI was false", accompanying statements like the one above. The problem of course is - those are very hard to come by.
That is so because logic-based AI was abandoned. And it was abandoned because funding was cut repeatedly, not because of its failure to prove this theory or achieve that aim, but because the ones holding the purse strings were administrators and military pencil-pushers, who had no way to know a successful, or failed, program if one came up and bit them in the boogies.
And just to substantiate my comment- what, exactly, was "false" about logic programming, one of the major research subjects in GOFAI? It worked just fine back then, it works just fine right now. In very practical, down to earth terms, you can prove a proposition, or a predicate, true or false by automatic means, sure as you can answer "2 + 2 = ?".
So, really- more substance, less assertiveness, would do a world of good to those for whom "AI" means everything that they read online after 2012 and who may end up missing a hell of a lot of the history of the field if they take that sort of "GOFAI failed" statements at face value.
I've always thought GOFAI was the most progress we made in the field. If some extraterrestrial beings were to come upon earth, and issue the challenge: Show us what you've got
We'd scramble to find the source code of Logic Theorist (Simon, Newell, Shaw) and SHRDLU(Winograd), and we'd hold them aloft, and cry: "Behold! Thinking machines!"
As a general matter, you can't prove a predicate true or false by automatic means. Logic programming is just as "artful" as imperative or functional programming, because they all run into the same problem: it's impossible to tell the difference between long-running and infinite computation. The question of algorithms for general logic was explicitly addressed as the Entscheidungsproblem, meaning decision problem, which was independently proven undecidable by both Turing and Church:
>> As a general matter, you can't prove a predicate true or false by automatic means.
Not in the general case, sure, yet in practice I'm sure we've all written plenty of code that terminates just fine. [Edit: I'm talking about imperative as well as logic or functional programming code].
The question then is- what does it mean when a program terminates? In the case of principled approaches like logic or functional programming, you have a pretty good idea what that means (e.g. a logic program proves a theory true or false). When an imperative program terminates, it's a very hairy affair to say what, exactly, termination means.
[Edit 2: Actually, if you think about it, there's nothing we can really achieve in the general case (including machine learning; see language learning in the limit). In practice, on the other hand, we're doing things, alright - by continuously relaxing principles and fudging limits as necessary (see PAC learning)].
It would be nice to see some kind of substantial examples of how "(nearly all of) GOFAI was false", accompanying statements like the one above. The problem of course is - those are very hard to come by.
That is so because logic-based AI was abandoned. And it was abandoned because funding was cut repeatedly, not because of its failure to prove this theory or achieve that aim, but because the ones holding the purse strings were administrators and military pencil-pushers, who had no way to know a successful, or failed, program if one came up and bit them in the boogies.
And just to substantiate my comment- what, exactly, was "false" about logic programming, one of the major research subjects in GOFAI? It worked just fine back then, it works just fine right now. In very practical, down to earth terms, you can prove a proposition, or a predicate, true or false by automatic means, sure as you can answer "2 + 2 = ?".
So, really- more substance, less assertiveness, would do a world of good to those for whom "AI" means everything that they read online after 2012 and who may end up missing a hell of a lot of the history of the field if they take that sort of "GOFAI failed" statements at face value.