A Hypothesis on the Divergence of AI Research

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence has been conceived as the science of both programming computers to perform intelligent tasks and devising computational models of human reasoning. Originally, both aspects were considered to go hand in hand, but it soon became apparent that AI research was determined to split into an engineering branch and a cognitive branch corresponding to the objectives mentioned. Research in computer chess is a prominent and successful example of this development. We conjecture that the reason for the divergence is a non-linear interaction between the strict algorithmic processing requirements of computational models on the one hand and the associative human knowledge structures on the other hand.