>> I suspect perhaps that the AI community were used to (for decades) solving _no_ problems.
Where's that coming from? There's certainly been some important advances recently, but to claim that no progress was made is strange.
Just to give one blatant example, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in 1997; Chinook had fully solved draughts (checkers) by 2007; TD-Gammon played backgrammon consistently at world champion level by 1995; two computer programs, JACK and WBRIDGE5 won five bridge championships between 2001-2007. All of those are 10 years older than AlphaGo/Zero and each has a very long history going back to the 1950's in the case of draughts AI [1].
You probably haven't hear dabout most of them because they were not advertised by a company with the media clout of Google or Facebook, but they were important successes that solved hard problems. There are many, many more results all over the AI bibliography.
And, just to settle this once and for all- this bibliography starts a lot earlier than 2012.
Where's that coming from? There's certainly been some important advances recently, but to claim that no progress was made is strange.
Just to give one blatant example, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in 1997; Chinook had fully solved draughts (checkers) by 2007; TD-Gammon played backgrammon consistently at world champion level by 1995; two computer programs, JACK and WBRIDGE5 won five bridge championships between 2001-2007. All of those are 10 years older than AlphaGo/Zero and each has a very long history going back to the 1950's in the case of draughts AI [1].
You probably haven't hear dabout most of them because they were not advertised by a company with the media clout of Google or Facebook, but they were important successes that solved hard problems. There are many, many more results all over the AI bibliography.
And, just to settle this once and for all- this bibliography starts a lot earlier than 2012.
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[1] All that's in "AI: A Modern Approach", 3d ed.