Editing Symbolic artificial intelligence (section)

=== The first AI winter: crushed dreams, 1967–1977 ===

The first AI winter was a shock:

{{Blockquote
|text=During the first AI summer, many people thought that machine intelligence could be achieved in just a few years. The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched programs to support AI research to use AI to solve problems of national security; in particular, to automate the translation of Russian to English for intelligence operations and to create autonomous tanks for the battlefield. Researchers had begun to realize that achieving AI was going to be much harder than was supposed a decade earlier, but a combination of hubris and disingenuousness led many university and think-tank researchers to accept funding with promises of deliverables that they should have known they could not fulfill. By the mid-1960s neither useful natural language translation systems nor autonomous tanks had been created, and a dramatic backlash set in. New DARPA leadership canceled existing AI funding programs.

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Outside of the United States, the most fertile ground for AI research was the United Kingdom. The AI winter in the United Kingdom was spurred on not so much by disappointed military leaders as by rival academics who viewed AI researchers as charlatans and a drain on research funding. A professor of applied mathematics, [[Lighthill report|Sir James Lighthill, was commissioned by Parliament to evaluate the state of AI research in the nation]]. The report stated that all of the problems being worked on in AI would be better handled by researchers from other disciplines—such as applied mathematics. The report also claimed that AI successes on toy problems could never scale to real-world applications due to combinatorial explosion.{{sfn|Kautz|2022|p=109}}
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