MI-8-Intro.pdf

The eighth volume completes a ten-year span of the Machine Intelligence series. It is appropriate, therefore, to take stock of the main events, and to note certain solid steps and occasional forward leaps. Leaps are normally preceded by some preparatory back-tracking. The uniform procedures of heuristic search and resolution theorem-proving which dominated the scene in 1965 cannot of themselves, as we now see, be developed into "the answer" to automatic problem-solving. This realisation has paved the way for machine-aided forays into non-trivial mathematics, as indicated in Bledsoe and Tyson's contribution to this volume.