patapata-discuss

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

By the way, my decision to write a critique of PataPata was inspired in 
part by this paper by Drew McDermott, "Artificial Intelligence meets 
Natural Stupidity".

   http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1045340 [fee based link]

The core of the paper is here:

   http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1406540

 From there:

"McDermott explains how all research should be based on actual 
implementations, and be a thorough report on them. What is needed is a 
very clear picture of what was tried, what worked, what didn't, why didn't 
that work. And there must be a working program that later researchers can 
play with. Later research can build on these partial solutions, and report 
the exact improvements made since the previous version, the improvement in 
performance, etc. As McDermott states:

     The standard for such research should be a partial success, but AI as 
a field is starving for a few carefully documented failures. Anyone can 
think of several theses that could be improved stylistically and 
substantively by being rephrased as reports on failures. I can learn more 
by just being told why a technique won't work than by being made to read 
between the lines."

--Paul Fernhout