ASK HN: AI was always a probability problem?
The article discusses the historical perspective on AI as a probability problem, particularly referencing the early medical diagnosis program MYCIN. It highlights the challenges of reasoning with uncertainty in both medical diagnosis and language understanding. The author notes that the lack of a robust method to integrate probabilities with logic contributed to the decline of symbolic AI.
- ▪MYCIN was an early medical diagnosis program that dealt with reasoning under uncertainty.
- ▪Language understanding also involves complex probability issues, as many sentences can be parsed in multiple ways.
- ▪The decline of symbolic AI was partly due to the absence of a useful approach to combine probabilities with logical reasoning.
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| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48240840 |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 20:01:35 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T20:12:02.931Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T20:12:02.931Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | xt7CeSp5cCA5 |
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| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
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| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
This was my opinion circa 2011 or so when I was recapping the old AI.Consider, for instance, the successful early medical diagnosis program MYCINhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycinwhich like any kind of diagnosis process is a problem of reasoning with probability. Language understanding has the same issue, like if you wrote a grammar for English you'd find that common sentences have 1000s of possible ways to parse and you will need to either make a guess or keep your options open.MYCIN had a half-baked approach to reasoning about uncertainty that worked, one of the reasons why symbolic AI fell out of favor was that nobody developed a generally useful approach to bolt probabilities onto logic.
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.