If I had to summarise the history of AI in one sentence, it’d be something like: a bunch of very smart people spent a long time trying to engineer sophisticated systems without using search, and it didn’t go very well until they started using very large-scale search.
Yeah this is not such a terrible one-sentence summary of AI over the past 20 years (maybe even over the whole history of AI). There are of course lots of exceptions, lots of systems that were built successfully using design. The autonomous cars being built today have algorithms that are highly design-oriented, with search used only for subcomponents in perception and parts of planning. But yes we have seen some really big breakthroughs by using search. I like Vaniver’s example of AlphaZero as a system built via a combination of design and search.
Search is clearly extremely powerful, and I see no fundamental problem with using it wherever it is safe to do so. But there seem to be some deep obstructions to using search safely in the end-to-end construction of sophisticated AI systems. If this is so—and as Paul points out, it’s not actually clear yet that there is no way around these obstructions—then we need to go beyond search.
Yeah this is not such a terrible one-sentence summary of AI over the past 20 years (maybe even over the whole history of AI). There are of course lots of exceptions, lots of systems that were built successfully using design. The autonomous cars being built today have algorithms that are highly design-oriented, with search used only for subcomponents in perception and parts of planning. But yes we have seen some really big breakthroughs by using search. I like Vaniver’s example of AlphaZero as a system built via a combination of design and search.
Search is clearly extremely powerful, and I see no fundamental problem with using it wherever it is safe to do so. But there seem to be some deep obstructions to using search safely in the end-to-end construction of sophisticated AI systems. If this is so—and as Paul points out, it’s not actually clear yet that there is no way around these obstructions—then we need to go beyond search.