p_nathan

What is it like? Can you give some kind of vibe as to what its like just walking down the street for a normal person?

A lot of the research in symbolic AI disappeared in the mid-80s it seems like. One of the books I ran into written in that time period was Winograd's - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Understanding-Computers-Cognition-Foundation-Design/dp/0201112973 - and he seemed to be entirely against his former research program in that manuscript.

I might not have my facts and dates clear, but it seems that generally symbolic reasoning was dropped, hard, by '95 in favor of stochastic approaches leading to today's aggressive focus on machine learning research.

Why is that? What, precisely, were the theoretical limitations that led to ML being the top dog here?

Interesting reading. Thanks for the link.