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Comment by sm001 | Hacker News Reader

In the 1990's, an AI Corp developer (a woman friend of mine) completely automated the management of a large IBM mainframe using old fashioned AI. The computer worked in complete darkness. She called it "lights out computing".

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What's "old fashioned AI"?

This (presumably) refers to "Good ol' Fashioned AI" aka Symbolic AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligen...) . It's a bit of an over-simplification to say it's a bunch of if statements, but it does involve encoding a bunch of rules/symbols by humans (as opposed to learning from data). It's a largely dead paradigm, though aspects of it are still found in various modern approaches (eg task and motion planning, knowledge bases, etc.) often in combination with learning approaches.

a bunch of "if" statements?

Having seen the code for a couple of "intelligent assistant" features: Yeah, basically a bunch of "if" statements. (The IA for the Apple Newton was a ton of special cases. It was clever, but certainly not 'intelligent').

Thus, the technology of AI has improved from a sea of spaghetti code that no human can understand, to a bunch of neural net weights that no human can understand. I love the march of progress. :-)

I believe this refers to decision trees that, at the time were referred to as “Expert systems”, which were considered a type of AI.

Maybe more like prolog?

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