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pinewurst

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Didn't he:

- invent case based reasoning

- build Eurisko and AM

- write a discipline defining paper ("Why AM and Eurisko appear to work")

- undertake an ambitious but ultimately futile high risk research gamble with Cyc?

Case-based reasoning is VERY old. It shows up prominently in the Catholic tradition of practical ethics, drawing on Aristotelian thought. Of course in a more informal sense, people have been reasoning on a case-by-case basis since time immemorial.

That's not what is meant here by case-based reasoning; CBR instead is an AI method which was prominent in the eighties and nineties where knowledge was represented in a semi-formal text representation and similarity was established by multi-dimensional assiociative indexing. One of the leading figures of the method was Roger Schank.

While futile from a personal and business aspect, it’s certainly valuable and useful otherwise. Maybe that’s implied here as you’re listing contributions, but I wanted to emphasize that it wasn’t a waste outside of that narrow band of futility.

I agree, and the fact that someone walked that path has been extremely valuable as well. I think we learned a lot from the cyc effort.

Consider giving more grace. Life is short, and kindness is free.

Why do people have to have 'commercial value' to get black bars? Why do people have to pass the ideological police? Why isn't serving as a visible advocate of a certain logical model enough?

I think my bias comes from having started my career in AI on the inference side and having (perhaps not so much long term :) seen Cyc as a shining city on a hill. Lenat certainly established that logical model even if we've since gone onto other things.

I believe the parent poster claims that a black bar should meet either a commercial, hacker-cultural, or open-source contribution one.

I got a lot of value out of some of the papers he wrote, and what bits of Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems I managed to read.

he is the patron hacker of players who use computers to break board games or war games

I think you don't understand the meaning of the black bar if "commercial value" is one of the metrics.

Steve Jobs received one - by which criteria, if not commercial (to other people) value?

It certainly wasn't for the warmth of his personality, his impeccable business ethics, or for his libre open-source contributions.

> by which criteria

Historic value.

And which category of important-enough-to-be-historic contributions has he made?

Take a moment to reflect on what you're doing right now.

You're turning a celebration of life for a _very_ recently departed figure into a pissing contest.

Extremely distasteful.

I think you're misunderstanding the direction and intent of this subthread.

You're right that talking about Jobs is off-topic, though.

«Contributions», debatable; «value», debatable; "impact", cannot be ignored.

It is probably best if we stick to Doug Lenat and postpone the meta to a more neutral occasion: Doug Lenat has just died.

Not even Warnock got a black bar even when asked for one as a mark of respect: [0]

I guess the black bar really is an ideological thing. Rather than being supposedly a 'mark of respect'.

Regardless, RIP Doug.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197852

Wouldn't it also be a mark of respect to check, before saying something that mean, whether it's true or not?

https://web.archive.org/web/20230821003655/https://news.ycom...

Wow, that is really mean!

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