"The other was on software development. The military up to that point believed in, and could only imagine, a structured-programming top-down world. You set up requirements, you get a contractor to break down the requirements into blocks, another contractor breaks them down into mini-blocks, and down at the bottom there are some people writing the code. It takes years to do. When it all comes back up to the top, (a) it’s not right, and (b) it’s not what you want anymore. They just didn’t know how to contract for cyclical development. Well, I think we were able to help them figure out how to do that."
Edward Albert Feigenbaum is an American computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, and with Raj Reddy he won the 1994 ACM Turing Award. He is often called the "father of expert systems".
"So at the beginning of 2000, I retired. Since then I have been leading a wonderful life doing whatever I please. Now that I have a lot more time than I had before, I’m getting geekier and geekier. It feels like I’m 10 years old again, getting back involved with details of computing."
Edward Feigenbaum"When I was younger, I was too busy for history and not cognizant of the importance of it. As I got older and began to see my own career unfolding, I began to realize the impact of the ideas of others on my ideas. I became more and more of a history buff."
Edward Feigenbaum"Our group, the Heuristic Programming Project, did path-breaking work in the large, unexplored wilderness of all the great scientific theories we could possibly have. But most of that beautiful wilderness today remains largely unexplored. Am I am happy with where we have gotten in induction research? Absolutely not, although I am proud of the few key steps we took that people will remember."
Edward Feigenbaum"I think the only way is the way human culture has gotten there. We transmit our knowledge via cultural artifacts called texts. It used to be manuscripts, then it was printed text, now it’s electronic text. We put our young people through a lot of reading to absorb the knowledge of our culture. You don’t go out and experience chemistry, you study chemistry."
Edward Feigenbaum"I don’t believe there is a general pattern recognition problem. I believe that pattern recognition, like most of human reasoning, is domain specific. Cognitive acts are surrounded by knowledge of the domain, and that includes acts of inductive behavior. So I don’t really put much hope in "general anything" for AI. In that sense I have been very much aligned with Marvin Minsky’s view of a "society of mind." I’m very much oriented toward a knowledge-based model of mind."
Edward Feigenbaum"My job was to be a window on science for the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. I was the first person to be asked to be Chief Scientist who was not an Aero-Astro person, a weapons person, or from the physical sciences. There had not been any computer scientists before me."
Edward Feigenbaum