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C00002 00002	%drosop[s89,jmc]		The drosophilae of AI
C00005 00003	\section{Introduction}
C00006 00004	\smallskip\centerline{Copyright \copyright\ 1989\ by John McCarthy}
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%drosop[s89,jmc]		The drosophilae of AI
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\title{Some Drosophilae of Artificial Intelligence}

\noindent Abstract: Although elephants are more useful than fruit
flies, geneticists do experiments with the latter, even though
they aren't interested in breeding better fruit flies.  AI researchers,
however, are often advised to concentrate their attention on
problems of industrial or military or social importance.  For the
geneticists the ability to keep 1,000 fruit flies in a bottle and
to breed a generation in two weeks somewhat outweighs the greater
usefulness of elephants.  Artificial intelligence still has a lot
of science to do, and many of the engineering applications that
some people have promised depend on the solution of scientific
problems that haven't even been properly formulated yet.  The object
of this paper is to describe some of the ``toy problems'' that
can serve as the {\it Drosophilae} of AI.  We include some problems
from the domain of chess, dedicating the paper to the memory of
A. S. Kronrod, who proposed chess as the {\it Drosophila} of AI
already in the 1960s.  Unfortunately, chess programming has rarely
pursued scientific objectives, taking more of the characteristics
of a sport and of a business.
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\section{Introduction}

	Chess has exhibited both the successes and the
limitations of the state of artificial intelligence.  This year,
a machine, Deep Thought, beat its first grandmaster.  However, it
did it with millions of times the amount of computation the
grandmaster did.

excessive attention to my own work

alpha-beta
killer
anti-killer
combining observation and logical reasoning
approximating a discrete process by a continuous process

ysp

\smallskip\centerline{Copyright \copyright\ 1989\ by John McCarthy}
\smallskip\noindent{This draft of DROSOP[S89,JMC]\ TEXed on \jmcdate\ at \theTime}
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