[ih] History of AI and Internet

[Brian E Carpenter]

> Anybody else know more about the history of the use of AI *within* (not 
> just on top of) The Internet?   For example, when there are problems in 
> today's Internet, are AI techniques and tools used to diagnose and 
> repair them?   What's the History of such things?

1) For anyone interested in the history of AI, as well as how AI actually
works, I recommend Anil Ananthaswamy's "Why Machines Learn" [1]. It's quite
hard going if you want to follow all the maths, but it recapitualates the
history of AI very well.

2) In answer to Jack's question, I think very little AI has been applied
to networking in the past, but this is changing *very* fast. When we designed
the GRASP protocol for autonomic networking, it was aimed at "intelligent"
agents but we didn't have any - and that was only 5 years ago. Now the IETF
is littered with drafts about intelligent agents. Big changes are coming.

I have no doubt that 'expert systems' techniques have been applied, especially
to network design, but expert systems were not real AI; they did incorporate
heuristics, and anything using heuristics could be called AI at one stage.
Not any more.

A year ago I gave a talk about AI for network management [2] (aimed at
final year students). I haven't checked recently, but I assume it's way out
of date.

[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446849/why-machines-learn-by-ananthaswamy-anil/9781802060867

[2] https://cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/CS389-BC-AI-netwk2025.pdf

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter

On 23-Jun-26 07:50, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> With AI now in the news all the time, I've been wondering about the
> history of AI in The Internet, i.e., how AI technology has been used
> within the Internet over the years, rather than just a service which
> people can access over The Internet.   Personally I only know of a few
> such uses of AI in a communications role, quite a while ago.  But maybe
> others remember more...?
> 
> In the mid-1970s, I was involved in an AI project at MIT in Licklider's
> group, sponsored by ARPA.   It wasn't really part of the ARPANET but it
> did relate to communications.   The project involved using AI techniques
> of that era, then called "expert systems", to have computers decode
> hand-sent Morse radio transmissions.   The Intelligence Community was
> apparently quite interested in this problem at that time, and the
> project ran for several years and was deemed a success.
> 
> FYI, see chapter 22 of https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA239925 for
> info on that AI project.  Personally, I think of that 1990 report as an
> enumeration of "ARPA's Greatest Hits".   There are six projects listed
> from the Information Processing Techniques Office of ARPA (IPTO, where
> all the networking and computer projects happened).  Another project of
> those six IPTO successes is The ARPANET, described in Chapter 20.   The
> Internet was probably still too immature to be included at the time .
> 
> Similarly, while I was at BBN in the 1980s there were tools developed to
> visualize activity in the ARPANET, and do tasks involved in network
> design - figuring out where new lines were needed, reconfiguring the
> topology of the ARPANET to address changes in traffic patterns, and
> other such analyses.  I'm not sure those projects would be recognized as
> "AI" today, but they were widely used to manage a variety of networks
> such as the ARPANET and DDN. The idea was to use computers to augment
> people skills, as it is in today's AI as well.
> 
> Bob Kahn and I had a discussion at some point in late 1982 about AI and
> networks in ARPA's world.   Bob was aware of the ARPA-sponsored project
> done at MIT in the mid 1970s which used AI "expert system" techniques to
> decode Morse code.   We mused that a similar expert system approach
> could be used to manage networks, especially the emerging Internet which
> was much more complex than the ARPANET and had few tools available for
> operations and management.
> 
> The concept was to use the plentiful supply of BBN engineers who had
> been debugging Internet crises for several years as the "experts",
> observing how they worked, and translating what they did into software
> to do tasks "automatically".   That started the "Automated Network
> Management" (ANM) project as a new research task at BBN.   I wrote the
> proposal to ARPA and waited for the contract to be signed.  But when BBN
> reorganized in July 1983 the ANM contract and I went separate ways so I
> never got to work on ANM and I don't think there was enough detail in
> the proposal to convey the concept onwards to the new project team.
> 
> It strikes me that the real driver of AI today has evolved only partly
> from advances in algorithms such as LLMs.  I think another major factor
> has been the massive drop in computing costs over the last
> half-century.  AI systems, such as that Morse Code project, were
> affordable only by well-funded parts of government in the 1970s,
> requiring millions of dollars/pounds/rubles/yen/lira to field a system
> that provided minimal capability.  Today, the system that cost millions
> in the 1970s now costs pennies by comparison.
> 
> Anybody else know more about the history of the use of AI *within* (not
> just on top of) The Internet?   For example, when there are problems in
> today's Internet, are AI techniques and tools used to diagnose and
> repair them?   What's the History of such things?
> 
> /Jack Haverty
> 
>