Editing Symbolic artificial intelligence (section)

=== The second AI winter, 1988–1993 ===

At the height of the AI boom, companies such as [[Symbolics]], [[Lisp Machines|LMI]], and [[Texas Instruments]] were selling [[LISP machine]]s specifically targeted to accelerate the development of AI applications and research. In addition, several artificial intelligence companies, such as Teknowledge and [[Inference Corporation]], were selling expert system shells, training, and consulting to corporations.

Unfortunately, the AI boom did not last and Kautz best describes the second AI winter that followed:
{{Blockquote
|text=Many reasons can be offered for the arrival of the second AI winter. The hardware companies failed when much more cost-effective general Unix workstations from Sun together with good compilers for LISP and Prolog came onto the market. Many commercial deployments of expert systems were discontinued when they proved too costly to maintain. Medical expert systems never caught on for several reasons: the difficulty in keeping them up to date; the challenge for medical professionals to learn how to use a bewildering variety of different expert systems for different medical conditions; and perhaps most crucially, the reluctance of doctors to trust a computer-made diagnosis over their gut instinct, even for specific domains where the expert systems could outperform an average doctor. Venture capital money deserted AI practically overnight. The world AI conference IJCAI hosted an enormous and lavish trade show and thousands of nonacademic attendees in 1987 in Vancouver; the main AI conference the following year, AAAI 1988 in St. Paul, was a small and strictly academic affair.
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