Dick Gabriel on Lisp

A.I. has been the pinnacle of computer science ever since the Turing’s machine, and the first premise to supporting that is “with a machine with infinite resources is possible to transcend Turing’s computability” (V. Müller, 2014).

According to Dick Gabriel in the podcast Lisp was a programming language that was developed around 60’s and it was mainly oriented to the study and development of artificial intelligence. For the time, the structure of lisp was more common for those that studied Turing’s machine given by the fact that its structure was strongly related since its main data structure was the List which remind me to the tape used for Alan’s machine. The basic use case for the List as a data structure was to use a defined language or dialect that they were meant to process via a macro.

Gabriel also said that the Lisp paradigm was “made” the way it was with the unclear intention of making A.I. developers the only ones that can make A.I. research, but that is something that still happening today even with the vast adoption of Open Source for the main languages that are most commonly used for anything (internet helped a lot for that).

When someone thinks about A.I. nowadays, the first thing that comes into mind is a very complex and sophisticated machine that is kind of magically aware of itself, and all sort of things given by imagination. More ironically, in movies and tv shows even when they do remark this stereotype, and they also remark the fact that it is actually a powerful machine that runs a code that makes it look, sound or feel like a person, and that began before a term like “machine learning” was properly conceived.

The idea of using lisp nowadays can be inconceivable for most programmers, because the actual field of study for machine learning and A.I. is now more populated with some other languages.

Reference:

V. M. (2016). Computing and philosophy: selected papers from IACAP 2014. Cham: Springer.