Where Semantics and Machine Learning Converge

Artificial Intelligence has a long history of oscillating between two somewhat contradictory poles. On one side, exemplified by Noam Chomsky, Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, and many others, is the idea that cognitive intelligence was algorithmic in nature - that there were a set of fundamental precepts that formed the foundation of language, and by extension, intelligence. On the other side were people like Donald Hebb, Frank Rosenblatt, Wesley Clarke, Henry Kelly, Arthur Bryson, Jr., and others, most not even as remotely well known, who developed over time gradient descent, genetic algorithms, back propagation and other pieces of what would become known as neural networks. The rivalry between the two camps was fierce, and for a while, after Minsky and Papert's fairly damning analysis of Rosenblatt's Perceptron, one of the first neural model, it looked like the debate had been largely settled in the direction of the algorithmic approach. In hindsight, the central obstacle that both sides faced (and one that would put artificial intelligence research into a deep winter for more than a decade) was that both underestimated how much computing power would be needed for either one of the models to actually bear fruit, and it would take another fifty years (and an increase of computing factor by twenty-one orders of magnitude, around 1 quadrillion times) before computers and networks reached a point where either of these technologies was feasible. As it turns out, both sides were actually right in some areas and wrong in others.