The Lighthill Report Is Published

This infamous report is blamed for essentially single-handedly beginning the first AI winter, especially in the UK. It's the best-known example of a direct link to funding drying up (the early robot FREDDY) due to outside skepticism.

By this time in parts of the UK AI funding was growing and fast. But was it really worthwhile? Did any of this computer alchemy even work? There were levels of concern about AI from a very fundamental base at this time.

In early 1973, Britain’s Science Research Council published James Lighthill’s “Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey,” dated July 1972. The council had asked Lighthill, Cambridge’s Lucasian Professor of Applied Mathematics, for a personal review due to his outsider and supposedly unbiased status. He divided the field into advanced automation, computer-based studies of the central nervous system and robot building.

His influential report backed the first two fields, but rejected general robotics. His reasons were issues of scale (sound familiar?) He blamed a failure to recognize the “combinatorial explosion” that swamps search as problems grow. In June 1973 he debated it on BBC television with AI proponents Donald Michie, John McCarthy and Richard Gregory. But the researchers lost the public's and funder's imaginations, as the report spread beyond the UK to places like DARPA, causing a world-wide AI winter (the first AI winter).