First off, as others have noted, the Perl AI mailing list is indeed functionning -- but it currently very low traffic. The following headers may help:
List-Post: <mailto:perl-ai@perl.org>
List-Help: <mailto:perl-ai-help@perl.org>
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:perl-ai-unsubscribe@perl.org>
List-Subscribe: <mailto:perl-ai-subscribe@perl.org>
As for using Perl for AI -- I have fooled around with the idea before. I found Perl's speed to be the only major limiting factor. I answered the question "why Perl?" with the following points:
- Because I know it, and am comfortable with it. At that point, I was unwilling to leard Scheme or Lisp just to do AI.
- Because I learn more writing my own system. There are innumerable more implementations out there, some more well-known than others. If I take it off the shelf and use it, I gain no deeper understanding of how it works.
- Because I can tailor it to my needs. I was planning on making some fairly strange tweaks to how basic GP worked -- and to jump right into someone else's code, which might not have been built with such extensibility in mind, is a scary thought.
- Because it's mostly cross-platform. Yes, so is Java and C, and lisp is mostly. But so is Perl -- why not?
- Because I want to be crazy. Nobody had ever written a complete GP system in Perl. I didn't want that to be a possible point of leverage against a language I liked so much. ;>
- Because I want to give something back. This goes along with writing my own, as well as being crazy. I was hoping to come out of the project with something that might be mildly useful to others. The chances of me doing that had I chosen another language were basically nil. I'm still trying to get myself to put it on CPAN, though. It'll get there Real Soon Now, I promise. I also got pings from the person who is writing a new genetic algorithms library. Unfortunatly, I've been lax in getting my implementation working with his system.
Anyways, just some pseudo-random thoughts.
perl -pe '"I lo*`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.*)%s;$_=$1;y^+*`^ ve^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'