In this series of articles, researchers reflect on papers they found influential in their career. These articles have been contributed as part of the CP Newsletter. If you would like to contribute a story yourself, please email us at newsletter@a4cp.org.

Paper with Impact (M. Wallace)

In the 1970’s Artificial Intelligence was the new frontier. The research community divided into two camps: the “clean” ones, like me, who were wedded to logic, and the others for whom knowledge and inference was opaquely embedded in complex neural structures. For clean AI, the USA community used a language called Lisp, while the Europeans used Prolog: “Programmation en Logique”. Computer scientists were allowed to talk French in those days ;-)