2010 AnInterviewWithEdFeigenbaum

• (Shustek, 2010) ⇒ Len Shustek. (2010). “An Interview with Ed Feigenbaum.” In: Communications of the ACM, 53(6). doi:10.1145/1743546.1743564

Subject Headings: Interview, Expert Systems Field, Ed Feigenbaum.

Quotes

Abstract

• ACM Fellow and A.M. Turing Award recipient Edward A. Feigenbaum, a pioneer in the field of expert systems, reflects on his career.

Interview

• LS: What are some of your life heuristics?
• EF:
  • Pay a lot of attention to empirical data, because in empirical data one can discover regularities about the world.
  • Meet a wonderful collaborator — for me it was Joshua Lederberg — and work with that collaborator on meaningful problems.
  • It takes a while to become really, really good at something. Stick with it. Focus. Persistence, not just on problems but on a whole research track, is really worth it. Switching in the middle, flitting around from problem to problem, isn't such a great idea.
  • Life includes of a lot of stuff you have to do that isn't all that much fun, but you just have to do it.
  • You have to have a global vision of where you're going and what you're doing, so that life doesn't appear to be just Brownian motion where you are being bumped around from one little thing to another thing.
• …
• LS: How should we give computers knowledge?
• EF:
  • I think the only way is the way human culture has gotten there. We transmit our knowledge via cultural artifacts called texts. It used to be manuscripts, then it was printed text, now it's electronic text. We put our young people through a lot of reading to absorb the knowledge of our culture. You don't go out and experience chemistry, you study chemistry.
  • We need to have a way for computers to read books on chemistry and learn chemistry. Or read books on physics and learn physics. Or biology. Or whatever. We just don't do that today. Our AI programs are handcrafted and knowledge engineered. We will be forever doing that unless we can find out how to build programs that read text, understand text, and learn from text.
  • Reading from text in general is a hard problem, because it involves all of common sense knowledge. But reading from text in structured domans I don't think is as hard. It is a critical problem that needs to be solved.
• …
• LS: Why is AI important?
• EF: There are certain major mysteries that are magnificent open questions of the greatest import. … Why does intelligence even bother to exist? … We should keep our "eye on the prize."

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