GOFAI is vital. Where are the automated theorem provers? The planning algorithms? The expert systems, the optimizers, the constraint solvers? All those problem domains still exist, but they've been totally forsaken by new AI. Prolog is still state of the art for expert systems. Planning hasn't changed since the early '00s. Automated provers still don't scale.
Somehow, we've hit the point where AIs can write sonnets and play jazz, but proving simple theorems is still science fiction.
I just want my computer to solve logic puzzles without waiting for the heat death of the universe as I scale them up. I'm sure language models would make for fantastic heuristics, it just seems like nobody cares and the whole field is just rotting away.
>Somehow, we've hit the point where AIs can write sonnets and play jazz, but proving simple theorems is still science fiction.
It's interesting that this seems to be a return to conventional ideas of what is difficult. I remember that people used to comfort themselves with statements like "yes, computers are very good at things like chess and mathematics, but they will never be able to compose music or write a poem" implying that those things were the real hard things and that math and chess were comparatively easy.
People have this weird idea that if an AI uses an external tool like a search engine or python to do something, that it is somehow cheating, but try doing advanced math as a _human_ just off the top of your head. No pencil and paper, no calculator, no looking up how to do things.
Math and logic is not a _natural_ thing that humans can do. It's something they have to be trained to do, and most humans throughout history did not know how to do it.
People need to stop thinking of an AI system is only a neural network. In reality any usable AI system is going to be a collection of specialized components, some of which might be GOFAI, along with more general components (like generative ai).
all these things depend crucially on search, which gets faster according to some large exponent on the quality of your search heuristic. probably neural networks will provide much better heuristics and therefore speed for such search-based approaches
Somehow, we've hit the point where AIs can write sonnets and play jazz, but proving simple theorems is still science fiction.
I just want my computer to solve logic puzzles without waiting for the heat death of the universe as I scale them up. I'm sure language models would make for fantastic heuristics, it just seems like nobody cares and the whole field is just rotting away.