Hi Steve, on the Ignatius article it wasn't actually a typo to say "reconverted". The Middle East was Christian before Mohammed's followers invaded the area in the 7th century. In the mind of Ignatius, as a Spaniard (see Reconquista), he desired to win back Jerusalem for Christianity and reconvert the local people there. Thanks. - Yorkshirian ( talk) 14:41, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
"The Middle East was Christian" is obviously untrue. "The Middle East was largely under Christian Byzantine rule" is more correct. There undoubtedly was a Christian majority in Spain before the Islamic conquest (and, not coincidentally, after the reconquest), but the majority in what is now Palestine, Israel, Syria and so on practiced ancient tribal religions, like those of the prophet Mohammed and his people before his "divine revelation". Clearly the Jews would have had a substantial presence, and there would have been many Christians, but they were still a minority.
Of course, the idea that Ignatius imagined it as a reconquest is not at variance with historical fact. Steve Graham ( talk) 18:16, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
I disagree with your recent edits to the History of AI section of the article on artificial intelligence. Before we go back and forth once more, I'd like to discuss it with you a bit.
First, I don't think it is true that Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy (computer scientist), Alan Newell and Herbert Simon were somehow less influential in the U.K. than they were in the U.S.. On the contrary, I think the research program they began (i.e. "artificial intelligence by means of high-level symbolic processing") was adopted world wide, and their publications and pronouncements determined the general direction of research in AI throughout the world until 1980 or so. (See {{ McCorduck 2004}}, p. 129-130, where other researchers complain about the "hegemony" of the Dartmouth attendees.) So I think it's correct to say simply that "they were the leaders of AI research" and misleading to say that "they were the leaders of American AI research".
Second, I don't think it is correct to call Donald Michie's work in the middle 1960s "other research." This implies that it is somehow not a part of the research program that was started at Dartmouth; that it was somehow a different research program with a separate genesis. This seems wrong to me -- I think his work (and related projects at the University of Edinburgh) were very closely related to similar projects in the U.S.. I.e. Freddy the Robot and Shakey the Robot clearly had a lot in common. They both came from the same root. Like Newell & Simon's (1956) Logic theorist, they were coded in list-processing languages, they used means-ends analysis for planning and they created high level symbolic representations of the world. This is clearly the same research program. The fact that Michie worked in the U.K. does not somehow imply he was not working in the same field. I don't think there is a meaningful distinction between "U.S. AI" and "U.K. AI".
(And I apologize that my earlier version suggested that Edinburgh is in England. I was careless and hasty.) ---- CharlesGillingham ( talk) 07:10, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Hi Steve, on the Ignatius article it wasn't actually a typo to say "reconverted". The Middle East was Christian before Mohammed's followers invaded the area in the 7th century. In the mind of Ignatius, as a Spaniard (see Reconquista), he desired to win back Jerusalem for Christianity and reconvert the local people there. Thanks. - Yorkshirian ( talk) 14:41, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
"The Middle East was Christian" is obviously untrue. "The Middle East was largely under Christian Byzantine rule" is more correct. There undoubtedly was a Christian majority in Spain before the Islamic conquest (and, not coincidentally, after the reconquest), but the majority in what is now Palestine, Israel, Syria and so on practiced ancient tribal religions, like those of the prophet Mohammed and his people before his "divine revelation". Clearly the Jews would have had a substantial presence, and there would have been many Christians, but they were still a minority.
Of course, the idea that Ignatius imagined it as a reconquest is not at variance with historical fact. Steve Graham ( talk) 18:16, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
I disagree with your recent edits to the History of AI section of the article on artificial intelligence. Before we go back and forth once more, I'd like to discuss it with you a bit.
First, I don't think it is true that Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy (computer scientist), Alan Newell and Herbert Simon were somehow less influential in the U.K. than they were in the U.S.. On the contrary, I think the research program they began (i.e. "artificial intelligence by means of high-level symbolic processing") was adopted world wide, and their publications and pronouncements determined the general direction of research in AI throughout the world until 1980 or so. (See {{ McCorduck 2004}}, p. 129-130, where other researchers complain about the "hegemony" of the Dartmouth attendees.) So I think it's correct to say simply that "they were the leaders of AI research" and misleading to say that "they were the leaders of American AI research".
Second, I don't think it is correct to call Donald Michie's work in the middle 1960s "other research." This implies that it is somehow not a part of the research program that was started at Dartmouth; that it was somehow a different research program with a separate genesis. This seems wrong to me -- I think his work (and related projects at the University of Edinburgh) were very closely related to similar projects in the U.S.. I.e. Freddy the Robot and Shakey the Robot clearly had a lot in common. They both came from the same root. Like Newell & Simon's (1956) Logic theorist, they were coded in list-processing languages, they used means-ends analysis for planning and they created high level symbolic representations of the world. This is clearly the same research program. The fact that Michie worked in the U.K. does not somehow imply he was not working in the same field. I don't think there is a meaningful distinction between "U.S. AI" and "U.K. AI".
(And I apologize that my earlier version suggested that Edinburgh is in England. I was careless and hasty.) ---- CharlesGillingham ( talk) 07:10, 5 September 2009 (UTC)