Lighthill report

The Lighthill report, officially called Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey, was written by James Lighthill and published in 1973. James Lighthill wrote this report for the British Science Research Council to see how well academic research in artificial intelligence was going.

In the report, Lighthill said he worried that many parts of AI research were not improving as much as people hoped. He thought the discoveries so far had not brought the big changes that were expected.

Because of this report, the British government chose to stop supporting AI research in most British universities. This led to a time called an AI winter in the United Kingdom, when interest and funding for AI research dropped a lot.

Publication history

In 1972, the British Science Research Council asked James Lighthill to review artificial intelligence. Lighthill finished his report in July. In September, the Council talked about the report and decided to publish it. Other experts, like Stuart Sutherland, Roger Needham, Christopher Longuet-Higgins, and Donald Michie, shared their opinions. This decision happened partly because of disagreements at the University of Edinburgh, an important place for AI research in the UK.

On May 9, 1973, Lighthill talked about the report with experts, including Donald Michie, John McCarthy, and Richard Gregory, at the Royal Institution in London.

Content

The report talked about studying how the brain and mind work with computers. But it was not happy with basic research in areas like robotics and language processing. It said that AI researchers did not handle big and complicated problems well when trying to solve real tasks. The report had a more negative view of AI after the early excitement.

The report split AI research into three groups:

Advanced Automation ("A"): uses of AI, like reading written words by machine, designing machine parts, and guiding missiles.
Computer-based Central Nervous System research ("C"): building computer models of how human brains and behavior work.
Bridge, or Building Robots ("B"): research mixing the first two groups. This group was kept vague on purpose.

Projects in group A had some success but only in small areas where lots of detailed information was used to design the program. This was not what researchers hoped for.

Projects in group C had some success. Artificial neural networks were used to model how the brain works. SHRDLU showed that how people use language depends on understanding meaning, not just the rules of words. This was important for psycholinguistics.

Projects in group B were seen as failures. An important project to make a robot that could copy human skills was very disappointing. Also, chess programs were about as good as amateur human players.

The report said that in the next 25 years, group A would become regular engineering technology, group C would join with psychology and brain science, and group B would be stopped.

Lighthill report