Textbook of AI

1924–1998, Applied mathematician

Also known as: Sir Michael James Lighthill FRS

Sir Michael James Lighthill was a British applied mathematician of the first rank, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1969 to 1979, succeeding Paul Dirac and preceding Stephen Hawking, whose contributions to fluid dynamics include the Lighthill–Whitham–Richards traffic-flow model and the acoustic analogy that founded modern aero-acoustics.

His relevance to AI comes from a single document: the 1973 Lighthill report Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey, commissioned by the UK Science Research Council. Lighthill divided AI research into three categories, A (advanced automation), B (bridge activities towards C), and C (computer-based central nervous system research), and concluded that progress in Category B was disappointing because of the combinatorial explosion of search spaces and that no significant progress was likely. The report recommended cuts in funding for general-purpose AI research; the recommendations were largely accepted, and AI funding in the UK was cut sharply. The Lighthill debate with Donald Michie, John McCarthy and others, broadcast on BBC television in 1973, is one of the most famous public airings of the field's controversies.

Lighthill himself was not anti-computational; his criticism was aimed at over-claiming, not at the underlying research. The report's effects, magnified by the contemporaneous ALPAC report's similar effect on US machine-translation funding, brought about what is generally called the first AI winter.