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For all the screaming of the symbolic researchers we have yet to see much from their approaches. All the recent very impressive advances in AI have been connectionist approaches.

Also a lot of the things that symbolic researchers have been claiming connectionism can’t achieve turned out to be emergent properties of connectionist approaches

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Yes, I agree! I mean, it sure seems as if critics from the "symbolic" camp keep moving the goal posts, doesn't it?

The "constant moving of goal posts" is one of the reasons why I think the two sides may converge: Engineers and scientists on the "connectionist" side could very well find ways to build AI systems that rely on "dumb" computation at massive scales to reason about symbols representing entities in the external world, simultaneously silencing and satisfying the critics -- who, as always and as ever, will say they were right all along.

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