Magazine

Coming Out of the Closedt World, by John Horberg

Decent if Sparse Overview

For example, Edwards notes two trends of the (mostly failed) goals of artificial intelligence:

1. to build well-bounded microworlds in which every variable is carefully controlled and accounted for;

2. to build expert systems that act in limited ways in the real world.

Edwards reveals the different philosophies of the two approaches:

Where the microworlds approach tried to build up to reality by gradually expanding a simulated world within the machine, expert systems workers carved reality up into a series of tiny "domains," capturing each one separately and worrying about recombining them later. Expert systems differed from microworlds in their focus on real-world problems, but they still reflected the closed-world belief in the reducibility of knowledge to a machine-like automatic system.