The
above prevalent wisdom has not always been as popular as it is today.
One of the main reasons
for the status quo is the
forgotten part of our history, due
to the emergence during the last 15-20
years of two “new” popular
areas, neural networks and machine learning.
Both of them are dealing
with the same subject matter as pattern recognition however starting, basically, all over again, and eventually
rediscovering the importance
of symbolic representations.
(In contrast to pattern recognition, the professional milieu is
not any more engineering,
but psychological and computational/statistical, respectively, although both of them attracted many young
physicists.)