[Somewhat Off Topic] AI Contest

[François Pinard]

> > With a broad enough perspective, FORTRAN is a good AI language! :-)

[Alex Martelli]

> We mostly used PL/I (and Rex for prototyping, way before it acquired
> that second 'x':-),

Did you ever use one of those lenient, forgiving, auto-correcting PL/I
compilers?  Whenever you made some error, the compiler wrote "Assuming
that ..." and moving on with compilation.  It amused us to think that you
could throw it random garbage and have the compiler some PL/I program out
of it! :-) That was surely an attempt at artificial intelligence! :-) :-)

> Fortran was better for some of our work (vectorializing & parallelizing
> some core parts of the computation [...]

Those vectorizing compilers were surprisingly good, indeed.

P.S. - The best approach to AI programming, in my opinion, is to never loose
ground.  Some people, when confronted to fuzzy logic, inference engines,
expert systems, continuations, provers, etc., become so excited that they
merely give up on their natural intelligence.  This does not yield AI.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard