Advertisement
Not a member of Pastebin yet?
Sign Up,
it unlocks many cool features!
- Relatus had a curious history. Sponsored by Hayward Alker, and taking advantage of the phenomenal social
- capital of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, it was probably the most sophisticated effort to come out of
- the AI/IR enterprise. However, it also had all of the weaknesses that eventually led to the “AI Winter” that followed
- the enthusiasm for AI in the mid-1980s. The system ran on specialized hardware—“LISP machines”—and while
- great promises were made for its potential—in particular, we were repeatedly reminded, it was going to work vastly
- better than anything that we lowly scum outside of MIT might even contemplate writing—it never got beyond the
- stage of a working prototype.
- Relatus quietly disappeared sometime in the early 1990s. The story told to me, albeit without a lot of detail, was
- that the system involved an incredibly complex data base that incorporated a lot of “self-modifying code,” a typical
- characteristic of LISP systems, where the program code was treated as just another form of data. A programming
- error apparently caused the system to completely destroy itself, and for reasons that aren’t clear, it could not be
- restored from backups. [A programmer failing to make regular back-ups?—nah...] The Cambridge-based “LISP
- machine” industry was collapsing at the same time because Moore’s Law quickly gave $5000 off-the-shelf personal
- computers the same power as dedicated $50,000 LISP workstations, and Relatus was never rebuilt in a portable form
- from http://eventdata.parusanalytics.com/utilities.dir/KEDS.History.0611.pdf
Advertisement
Add Comment
Please, Sign In to add comment
Advertisement