GOFAI

GOFAI stands for "Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence". It is commonly used to denote a branch of Artificial Intelligence which mainly deals with symbolic problems. It is based on the assumption that thinking is nothing but symbol manipulation. Thus, it holds out the hope that computers will not merely simulate intelligence, but actually achieve it.

In Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea, John Haugeland coined the term GOFAI describing, loosely, symbolic approaches to Artificial Intelligence. In current AI research, the term is often extended to GOFAIR (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence and Robotics) to reflect the importance of symbolic reasoning in traditional robotics. Often, GOFAI(R) is used to distinguish systems that do not employ connectionist or statistical machine learning algorithms, which have come to play a major role in AI, robotics and computer vision since the late-1990s.

Rodney Brooks is one of the better known opponents of GOFAIR: he aims to produce autonomous robots without symbolic representation (or with only minimal representation).