[ih] History of AI and Internet

[James J Dempsey]

Jack Haverty <jack at 3kitty.org> wrote:

> 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.

Hi Jack.  I think you are talking about "Designer" or what was
commercialized as "DESIGNet", an expert system built in Lisp than ran on
Symbolics machines.  As you say, we used it for ARPANET, MILNET, other
government networks as well as many commercial X.25 networks that we built
using the same ARPANET technology.

There is a pretty good description of DESIGNet in this article from Data Communications:
https://columbia.edu/~agb6/papers/DesigNet.pdf

A funny DESIGNet AI-related story.  We had a new VP who was being given a
demo of DESIGNet by Jeff Mayersohn, who was head of the Network Analysis
group at BBN. As it was promoted as an AI system, this VP, not understanding
rule-based expert systems, was skeptical and wanted to what part of it was
"AI".  He kept asking during the demo "Where's the AI?"

One of the tools in DESIGnet was to check to ensure whether the proposed
topology was 2-connected -- i.e. could two links in the network go
down and the network would remain connected, not bifurcated.  Jeff was
demonstrating this tool and the system printed out a message saying
something like "Yes, your design is 2-connected.  Strangely enough, it is
also 3-connected."  The VP asked "How did it know to say 'strangely
enough'?" And without pausing, Jeff said "That's AI!"

--Jim Dempsey--