The SRC discussed the report in September, and decided to publish it, together with some alternative points of view by Stuart Sutherland, Roger Needham, Christopher Longuet-Higgins, and Donald Michie.
[1]: preface The SRC's decision to invite the report was partly a reaction to high levels of discord within the University of Edinburgh's Department of Artificial Intelligence, one of the earliest and biggest centres for AI research in the UK.
[3] On May 9, 1973, Lighthill debated several leading AI researchers (Donald Michie, John McCarthy, Richard Gregory) at the Royal Institution in London concerning the report.
[1] The report stated that AI researchers had failed to address the issue of combinatorial explosion when solving problems within real-world domains.
One important project, that of "programming and building a robot that would mimic human ability in a combination of eye-hand co-ordination and common-sense problem solving", was considered entirely disappointing.