There are; like most GOFAI projects, they tend not to be sexy, but their publications contain some, and they have a few marketing speak writeups of industry users. Minsky proved that perceptrons couldn't learn XOR and some other functions, but Perceptrons wasn't a polemic, it just ended up being received as one. I don't think connectionist and symbolic AI are different in kind; try to classify statistical relational learning as one or the other if you disagree. Somewhere in Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (I think in the chapter on Eliza) there's a tangent about how AI applications that look magical can be disappointing when you learn the magic trick and there isn't much magic to it. I think it's harder to see the "trick" in connectionist algorithms, because you have a giant matrix and out of your giant matrix comes more or less reasonable responses, and you can't point to how it happened as directly as you can with a proof tree. And, of course, Douglas Hofstadler argues for a similar conclusion from a symbolic AI perspective.After more than 25 years, Cyc now contains 5 million assertions. Lenat has said that 100 million would be required before Cyc would be able to reason like a human does. No significant applications of its knowledge base currently exist
In 1969, Rosenblatt was met with a scathing attack by symbolic artificial intelligence advocate Marvin Minsky.
This is a very refreshing article. It drives me crazy that people still entertain that the brain contains information that maps to our symbolic representation of the environment when there is not logical basis for it. I don't have a file in my brain with all of the words I know. That doesn't even make sense. Why should AI be different? I do think this is the path to AI, and now that it is bearing fruit, we are going to make surprising headway.While the successes behind subsymbolic artificial intelligence are impressive, there is a catch that is very nearly Faustian: The terms of success may prohibit any insight into how thinking “works,” but instead will confirm that there is no secret to be had—at least not in the way that we’ve historically conceived of it.