What do you think is the likelihood that second generation coins like NXT and NEM will succeed and become an ubiquitous part of everyday life vs. the likelihood that such second generation systems and their features like asset exchanges will fail to take hold?
Interesting analogy, a bit of a stretch to match up the firepower of the 5th. gen programme with the (relatively) miniscule research effort being devoted to cryptocurrency gen 2.
I was in the audience for one of the “5th gen” presentations, our group at HP Labs being deep into Prolog and all that logic programming stuff, we'd rocked up to find out what all the fuss was about. I recall that the talk was memorable for an initial stir of anticipation in the audience when the (Japanese) presenter apparently promised a discussion of “the three virgins”, a promise almost immediately cruelly dispelled by the words, “In virgin one, we started off with ...”.
Although, frankly, it wouldn't really have mattered if they'd been able to kick off with version 1000, the epistemological foundation was fatally flawed. By slide 4-ish they were presenting the architecture, I turned to my PM and indicated we could all go home at that point, safe in the knowledge that the MITI programme presented no real competition as it was doomed from the start.
According to the architecture diagram, the core was vested in the implementation of a pair of concepts that I'd never before seen referenced in an AI talk, “assimilation” and “accommodation”. Both are central concepts of Piagetian developmental psychology and were enormously controversial in a cognitive science context because of their long-standing and stubborn resistance to formalisation. (Not wrong
per se, just a hugely brave undertaking, or a foolhardy one, depending on how familiar you are with the foundations of developmental psychology.)
And, inevitably, the historical view is continuously being revised:
“In spite of the possibility of considering the project a failure, many of the approaches envisioned in the Fifth-Generation project, such as logic programming distributed over massive knowledge-bases, are now being re-interpreted in current technologies. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) employs several layers of logic-based knowledge representation systems.”
Slides of the architecture of the semantic web make no mention of concepts drawn from developmental psychology (well, it is only virgin one, after all).
Cheers
Graham
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