What the winters left behind

The winters did not erase logic, search, or expert systems. Each remained useful for particular kinds of work.

What changed was confidence in one recipe for intelligence. Search struggled when the possibilities multiplied. Written rulebooks struggled when important knowledge or exceptions were missing.

Learning from examples offered another path. It did not arrive as a complete answer. It gave researchers a way to build abilities whose rules were difficult to write down.

In plain words, the field had more tools than before, but no universal one.