[ExI] ai class at stanford

[spike]

>...But you had to love the unbridled optimism the early computer scientists
had about how soon they would be doing intelligent stuff...
:-)

We had plenty of unbridled optimism, that I can calmly assure you.  In
college, one of our favorite mental exercises was to try to determine what
tasks computers could never accomplish.  We couldn't think of much they
could never do.

>...So when did you encounter your first computer? I ran into something like
a PDP-11 as a boy scout in around 1979...

In 1979, I was programming something EXACTLY like a PDP-11, making tools to
help my mother's accounting business.  It was a DEC 11-750.

>> Callow youth!  Back when I took pattern recognition, patterns hadn't yet
been invented...

I asked my Pattern Recognition classmate, hey, do you see any pattern here?
He said, No of course not, thou silly person, the earth is without form and
void.

Nothing much happened in pattern recognition until that whole Let there be
light incident.  Within a few days, humans began to see patterns everywhere.
You can read about it here:

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1&version=KJV

spike