Question

I’ve been learning Lisp to expand my horizons because I have heard that it is used in AI programming. After doing some exploring, I have yet to find AI examples or anything in the language that would make it more inclined towards it.

Was Lisp used in the past because it was available, or is there something that I’m just missing?

Answer 1

Lisp WAS used in AI until the end of the 1980s. In the 80s, though, Common Lisp was oversold to the business world as the ‘AI language’; the backlash forced most AI programmers to C++ for a few years. These days, prototypes usually are written in a younger dynamic language (Perl, Python, Ruby, etc) and implementations of successful research is usually in C or C++ (sometimes Java).

If you’re curious about the 70’s…well, I wasn’t there. But I think Lisp was successful in AI research for three reasons (in order of importance):

1. Lisp is an excellent prototyping tool. It was the best for a very long time. Lisp is still great at tackling a problem you don’t know how to solve yet. That description characterises AI perfectly.
2. Lisp supports symbolic programming well. Old AI was also symbolic. It was also unique in this regard for a long time.
3. Lisp is very powerful. The code/data distinction is weaker so it feels more extensible than other languages because your functions and macros look like the built-in stuff.

I do not have Peter Norvig’s old AI book, but it is supposed to be a good way to learn to program AI algorithms in Lisp.

Disclaimer: I am a grad student in computational linguistics. I know the subfield of natural language processing a lot better than the other fields. Maybe Lisp is used more in other subfields.