"I had certain standards of mathematical precision for what a scientific paper ought to be like," he explained in an interview conducted by the writer Pamela McCorduck in 1974, adding that by "precision" he meant mathematical abstraction, formal definitions, powerful theorems, and rigorous proofs. "But finally it became clear that I wasn't going to solve the artificial intelligence problem in a mathematically rigorous way in reasonable time, so I simply decided to start publishing what I had."
