3-May-84 10:15:32-PDT,11307;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 3-May-84 10:13:08 Date: Thu 3 May 1984 10:08-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #54 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Thursday, 3 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 54 Today's Topics: Literature Search - Applications of Expert Systems Proceedings, AI News - The End of British AI???, Linguistics - Metaphor and Riddles, AI Programming - Discussion, AI Jobs - Noncompetition Clauses, Seminars - Multiple Inheritance & Perceptual Organization ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 27 Apr 84 9:46:54-PST (Fri) From: decvax!linus!vaxine!chb @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Looking for Applications of Expert Sys. Proceedings Article-I.D.: vaxine.250 In Bruce Buchanan's Partial Bibliography on Expert Systems (Nov. 82) he cited the Proceedings for the Colloquium on Application of Knowledge Based (or Expert) Systems, London, 1982. Does anybody out in netland know who sponsored this colloquium or, more importantly, how I can get a hold of these proceedings? Thanks in advance, Charlie Berg Expert Systems Automatix, Inc. ...{allegra, linus}!vaxine!chb ------------------------------ Date: Mon 30 Apr 84 14:04:33-PDT From: PEREIRA@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: The End of British AI??? The ``New Scientist'' of April 12 quotes David Thomas, director for Information Technology at the Science and Engineering Research Council (British equivalent of NSF) and director of the Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems (British codeterm for AI) programme of the Department of Trade and Industry: ``If computer scientists want to do research they must do it in partnership with industry... WE DON'T WANT COMPUTER SCIENTISTS working alone with no common aim in sight, and PUBLISHING THEIR WORK IN AN ACADEMIC JOURNAL for the Japanese to pick up on ... It is difficult to think of anything in computer science which would not be useful to industry.'' (emphasis mine). Yours, at a loss for printable comments, -- Fernando Pereira ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 Apr 1984 14:14:30 EDT From: Another Memo from the Etherial Plane Subject: Metaphor & Riddles The new issue of the Journal of American Folklore contains an article on the riddling process and its relation to metaphor interpretation, written by Green & Peppicello. The article also contains an excellent bibliography. ------------------------------ Date: 26 Apr 84 6:06:00-PST (Thu) From: harpo!ulysses!gamma!pyuxww!pyuxss!aaw @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: RE: AI Programming Article-I.D.: pyuxss.319 I strongly agree that AI programming tends to be on several levels, but rather than seeing AI programs as a controller or generator and and a pragmatic level, I think many AI programs are three levels: 1. organizer, based on feedback from heuristic controller(2) 2. controller, based on results of algorithmic or applicative level(3) 3. worker, playing with real data The raison d' might be that most programs <5k statements are pure applications, programs getting much larger tend to need a single intelligent controller, while programs in the 20k-100k statement range (the AI programming thesis level) are in the three level range. All AI programs bigger than that tend to algorithmic refinements of previous work, with refiners in terror of changing the basic structure. {harpo,houxm,ihnp4}!pyuxss!aaw Aaron Werman ------------------------------ Date: 25 Apr 84 7:19:04-PST (Wed) From: harpo!ulysses!allegra!princeton!eosp1!robison @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Non-competition clauses - (nf) Article-I.D.: eosp1.812 I'm amazed at the naivete of people suggesting that an employer has no good reason to ask people to sign non-competition clauses. Most employers allow many, if not most of their employees to have access to sensitive and trade secret information. Employees leave a company with their heads full of such data, and they become a walking time bomb to their previous employer, should this info fall into the hands of a competitor. History shows that many ex-employees are unscrupulous in this regard. IBM has sued successfully in cases where ex-employees have formed, or joined, other companies to build hardware that is very similar to hardware the employees were building at IBM. In many of these cases IBM has won, presumably demonstrating that the employees were using more than their own skills to imitate IBM's projects. By the way, the classic example of this type of problem is a list of customers. A company's customer list is in many cases a critical secret, and companies oftem sue to prevent an ex-employee from taking the list to his next company, or using it himself. Perhaps many of the writers on this subject are from academic environments and have not worked in technologically competetive companies. Why don't you try the other end of this problem -- imagine yourself working for such a company, for which you don't sign a competetive agreement. Then agree also that you will not have access to the company's sensitive and trade secret data, so that the company will genuinely not need you to sign such an agreement. Then just try to get your work done without access to important meetings and specifications. Non-competetive agreements often specify very long periods of time, or no specific time frame at all. I believe that time periods over two years are unenforceable in general. By the way, when you join a company, you usually make personal data available to it, which the company undertakes to keep secret, and not to use after you have left the company. This is a 2-way street. - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison princeton!eosp1!robison ------------------------------ Date: 29 Apr 1984 21:02 EDT (Sun) From: "Daniel S. Weld" Subject: Seminar - Multiple Inheritance [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Multiple Inheritance: What, Why, and How? Dan Carnese AI Revolving Seminar Wednesday, May 2, 4:00pm, 8th Floor Playroom This talk is concerned with type definition by ``multiple inheritance''. Informally, multiple inheritance is a technique for defining new types by combining the operation sets of a number of old ones. The literature concerning multiple inheritance has been heavily biased toward the description of the constructs involved in particular systems. But no satisfying account has been given of: - the rationale for using definition by multiple inheritance over simpler approaches to type definition, - the essential similarities of the various proposals, or - the key design decisions involved in these systems and the significance of choosing specific alternatives. The goal of this talk is to dissipate some of the ``general prevailing mysticism'' surrounding multiple inheritance. The fundamental contribution will be a simple framework for describing the design and implementation of single-inheritance and multiple-inheritance type systems. This framework will be used to describe the inheritance mechanisms of a number of contemporary languages. These include: - the Lisp Machine's flavor system - the classes of Smalltalk-80, ``Smalltalk-82'' (Borning and Ingalls), and Loops (Bobrow and Stefik) - the ``traits'' extension to Mesa (Curry et al.) Given the description of the ``what'' and ``how'' of these systems, we will then turn to the question of ``why.'' Some principles for evaluating inheritance mechanisms will be presented and applied to the above five designs. A few simple improvements to the Lisp Machine flavor system will be identified and motivated by the evaluation criteria. We will conclude by discussing the relationship between multiple inheritance in programming and multiple inheritance in knowledge representation, and the lessons from the former which can be applied to the latter. ------------------------------ Date: 30 Apr 1984 09:23 EDT (Mon) From: Cobb%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Perceptual Organization and Visual Recognition [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] The Use of Perceptual Organization for Visual Recognition DAVID LOWE May 7, 1984 4:00PM NE43 - 8th floor Playroom The human visual system has the capability to spontaneously derive groupings and structures from an image without higher-level knowledge of its contents. This capacity for perceptual organization is currently missing from most computer vision systems. It will be shown that perceptual groupings can play at least three important roles in visual recognition: 1) image segmentation, 2) direct inference of three-space relations, and 3) indexing world knowledge for subsequent matching. These functions are based upon the expectation that groupings reflect actual structure of the scene rather than accidental alignment of image elements. A number of principles of perceptual organization will be derived from this criterion of non-accidentalness and from the need to limit computational complexity. The use of perceptual groupings will be demonstrated for segmenting image curves and for the direct inference of three-space properties from the image. Much computer vision research has been based on the assumption that recognition will proceed bottom-up from the image to an intermediate 2-1/2D sketch or intrinsic image representation, and subsequently to model-based recognition. While perceptual groupings can contribute to this intermediate representation, they can also provide an alternate pathway to recognition for those cases in which there is insufficient information for deriving the 2-1/2D sketch. Methods will be presented for using perceptual groupings to index world knowledge and for subsequently matching three-dimensional models directly to the image for verification. Examples will be given in which this alternative pathway seems to be the only possible route to recognition. A functioning real-time vision system will be described that is based upon the direct search for the projections of 3D models in an image. Refreshments: 3:45PM Host: Professor Patrick H. Winston ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 4-May-84 20:07:46-PDT,18352;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 4-May-84 20:04:16 Date: Fri 4 May 1984 19:54-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #55 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Saturday, 5 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 55 Today's Topics: AI Support - The End of British AI?, Expert Systems - English Conference Reference, AI Jobs - Noncompetition Clauses, Review - HEURISTICS by Judea Pearl, Humor - Computers and Incomprehensibility, Consciousness - Reply to Phaedrus (long) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu 3 May 84 11:30:40-PDT From: Richard Treitel Subject: The End of British AI? The End of British AI? I think Mr. Pereira is being more than a little paranoid here (and he need not imagine that AI research is the only type for which industry sometimes shows little enthusiasm). That pronouncement sounds as if it was politically motivated, therefore not to be taken too literally anyway, and will be forgotten as soon as convenient. Not that I think my government's policy on computer science research is sound -- quite the reverse -- but I don't think it has suddenly become a lot worse. - Richard ------------------------------ Date: 30 Apr 84 8:07:16-PDT (Mon) From: decvax!decwrl!rhea!bartok!shubin @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Info on Expert Systems conference in England Article-I.D.: decwrl.7512 | In Bruce Buchanan's Partial Bibliography on Expert Systems (Nov. 82) | he cited the Proceedings for the Colloquium on Application of Knowledge | Based (or Expert) Systems, London, 1982. Does anybody out in netland | know who sponsored this colloquium or, more importantly, how I can get | a hold of these proceedings? | Charlie Berg | Expert Systems | Automatix, Inc. | ...{allegra, linus}!vaxine!chb We gave a paper at a conference called "Theory and Practice of Knowledge Based Systems", which was held 14-16 Sep 82 at Brunel University, which is *near* London. The chair of the conference was Dr. Tom Addis, also of Brunel University. The conference was sponsored (or approved or whatever) by ACM, IEEE and SPL International. I found two addresses. The first is where the conference was, and (I believe) the second is where the Computer Science department is: Brunel University Shoreditch Campus Coopers Hill, Englefield Green Egham, Surrey ENGLAND or Brunel University Department of Computer Science Uxbridge, Middlesex ENGLAND hal shubin UUCP: ...!decwrl!rhea!bartok!shubin ARPAnet: hshubin@DEC-MARLBORO ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 May 84 10:51 EDT From: MJackson.Wbst@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Re: Non-competition clauses You have constructed a very good argument for nondisclosure agreements. The issue, however, was non-competition clauses, for which your only justification seem to be that "[h]istory shows that many ex-employees are unscrupulous. . .". I find this less than compelling. The successful legal actions you cite demonstrate that recourse is available to the company damaged by such actions by ex-employees. The risk that *full* compensation for such damage may not be forthcoming is a risk of doing business, and must be managed as such. By the way, nondisclosure of personal data by the company is much more closely analogous to nondisclosure of proprietary information by the employee than it is to noncompetition by the employee. (Do you think I could talk Xerox into agreeing not to employ anyone in my present capacity for two years if I should leave?) Mark ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 May 84 15:32:32 PDT From: Anna Gibbons Subject: HEURISTICS/Dr. Judea Pearl FROM: Judea Pearl@UCLA-SECURITY. Those who have inquired about my new book "HEURISTICS", may be interested to know that it is finally out, and can be obtained from Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading Mass. 01867, Tel. (617) 944-8660. The title is "Heuristics: Intelligence Search Strategies for Computer Problem Solving", the ISBN number is 0-201-05594-5, and the price 38.95. For those unfamiliar with the book's content, the following are excerpts from the cover description. This book presents, characterizes, and analyzes problem solving strategies that are guided by heuristic information. It provides a bridge between heuristic methods developed in artificial intelligence, optimization techniques used in operations research, and complexity-analysis tools developed by computer theorists and mathematicians. The book is intended to serve both as a textbook for classes in AI Control Strategies and as a reference for the professional/researcher who seeks an in-depth understanding of the power of heuristics and their impact on various performance characteristics. In addition to a tutorial introduction of standard heuristic search methods and their properties, the book presents a large collection of new results which have not appeared in book form before. These include: * Algorithmic taxonomy of basic search strategies, such as backtracking, best-first, and hill-climbing, their variations and hybrid combinations. * Searching with distributions and with nonadditive evaluation functions. * The origin of heuristic information and the prospects for automatic discovery of heuristics. * Applications of branching processes to the analysis of path-seeking algorithms. * The effect of errors on the complexity of heuristic search. * The duality between games and mazes. * Recreational aspects of recursive minimaxing. * Average performance analysis of game-playing strategies. * The benefits and pitfalls of look-ahead. Each chapter contains annotated references to the literature and a set of nontrivial exercises chosen to enhance skill, insight, and curiosity. Enjoy your reading and, please, let me know if you have suggestions for improving the form or content. Judea Pearl @ UCLA-SECURITY. ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 1984 20:50:55-EDT From: walter at mit-htvax Subject: Seminar - Computers and Incomprehensibility [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] GRADUAL STUDENT LUNCH SEMINAR SERIES The G0001 Project: An Experiment in G0002 and Creative G0003 A G0004 is described, in which many G0003 involving strikingly different G0005 and levels of G0006 can be made. The question "What differentiates the good G0003 from the bad G0003?" is discussed, and the problem of how to G0008 a G0009 G0010 of the G0011 G0012 to come up with such G0003 (and to have a sense for their quality) is considered. A key part of the proposed system, now under development, is its dependence on G0013 G0014 G0015 of G0016 interacting "G0017" (selected at random to G0019 with G0020 proportional to G0021 assigned "G0022"). Another key G0023 is a G0024 of linked G0005 of varying levels of "G0025", in which G0026 spreads and G0027 controls the G0028 of new G0017. The shifting of (1) G0033 G0034 inside structures, (2) descriptive G0005 chosen to apply to G0030, and (3) G0043 perceived as "G0031" or not, is called "G0032". What can G0031, and how, are G0014 G0033 of the interaction of (1) the temporary ("G0034") structures involved in the G0003 with (2) the permanent ("G0035") G0005 and links in the G0036 network, or "G0037 network". The G0038 of this system is G0039 as a general G0038 suitable for dealing not only with fluid G0003, but also with other types of G0039 G0040 and G0041 tasks, such as musical G0040, G0041 G0042, Bongard problems and others. 12:00 NOON 8TH FLOOR PLAYROOM FRIDAY 5/5 Hosts: Harry Voorhees and Dave Siegel ------------------------------ Date: 27 Apr 84 20:51:58-PST (Fri) From: harpo!ulysses!burl!clyde!akgua!sdcsvax!davidson @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: New topic for discussion (long) Article-I.D.: sdcsvax.736 This is a response to the submission by Phaedrus at the University of Maryland concerning speculations about the nature of conscious beings. I would like to take some of the points in his/her submission and treat them very skeptically. My personal bias is that the nature of conscious experience is still obscure, and that current theoretical attempts to deal with the issue are far off the mark. I recommend reading the book ``The Mind's Eye'' (Hofstadter & Dennett, eds.) for some marvelous thought experiments which (for me) debunk most current theories, including the one referred to by Phaedrus. The quoted passages which I am criticizing are excerpted from an article by J. R. Lucas entitled ``Minds, Machines, and Goedel'' which was excerpted in Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach and found there by Phaedrus. the concept of a conscious being is, implicitly, realized to be different from that of an unconscious object This statement begs the question. No rule is given to distinguish conscious and unconscious objects, nothing is said about the nature of either, and nothing indicates that consciousness is or is not a property of all or no objects. In saying that a conscious being knows something we are saying not only does he know it, but he knows that he knows it, and that he knows that he knows that he knows it, and so on .... First, I don't accept the claim that people possess this meta-knowlege more than a (small) finite number of levels deep at any time, nor do I accept that human beings frequently engage in such meta-awareness; just because human beings can pursue this abstraction process arbitrarily deeply (but they get lost fairly quickly, in practice), does not mean that there is any process or structure of infinite extent present. Second, such a recursive process is straightforward to simulate on a computer, or imbue an AI system with. I don't see any reason to regard such systems as being conscious, even though they do it better than we do (they don't have our short term memory limitations). we insist that a conscious being is a unity, and though we talk about parts of our mind, we do so only as a metaphor, and will not allow it to be taken literally. Well, this is hardly in accord with my experience. I often become aware of having been persuing parallel thought trains, but until they merge back together again, neither was particularly aware of the other. Marvin Minsky once said the same thing after a talk claiming that the conscious mind is inherently serial. Superficially, introspection may seem to show a unitary process, but more careful introspection dissolves this notion. The paradoxes of consciousness arise because a conscious being can be aware of itself, as well as of other things, and yet cannot really be construed as being divisible into parts. The word ``aware'' is an implicit reference to the unknown mechanism of consciousness. This is part of the apparent paradox. Again, there's nothing mysterious about a system having a model of itself and being able to do reasoning on that model the same way it does reasoning on other models. Also again, nothing here supports the claim that the conscious mind is not divisible. It means that a conscious being can deal with Godelian questions in a way in which a machine cannot, because a conscious being can consider itself and its performance and yet not be other than that which did the performance. Whatever the conscious mind is, it appears to be housed in a physical information processing system, to wit, the human brain. If our current understanding about the kind of information processing brains are capable of is correct, brains fall into the class of automata and cannot ultimately do any processing task that cannot be done with a computer. The conscious mind can scrutinize its internal workings to an extent, but so can computer programs. Presumably the Goedelian & (more to the point) Turing limitations apply in principle to both. no extra part is required to do this: it is already complete, and has no Achilles' heel. This is an unsupported statement. The whole line of reasoning is rather loose; perhaps the author simply finds it psychologically difficult to suppose that he has any fundamental limitations. When we increase the complexity of our machines, there may, perhaps, be surprises in store for us.... Below a certain ``critical'' size, nothing much happens.... Turing is suggesting that it is only a matter of complexity [before?] a qualitative difference appears. Well, its very easy to build machines that are infeasible to predict. Such machines do not even have to be very complex in construction to be highly complex in behavior. Las Vegas is full of many examples of such machines. The idea that complexity in itself can result in a system able to escape Goedelian and Turing limitations is directly contradicted by the mathematical induction used in their proofs: The limitations apply to <> automata, not just to automata simple enough for us to inspect. Charlatans can claim any properties they want for mechanisms too complex for direct disproofs, but one need not work hard before dismissing them with indirect disproofs. This is why the patent office rejects claimed perpetual motion machines which supposedly operate merely by the complexities of their mechanical or electromagnetic design. It is also why journals of mathematics reject ridiculously long proofs which claim to supply methods of squaring the circle, etc. No one examines such proofs to find the flaw, it would be a thankless task, and is not necessary. It is essential for the mechanist thesis that the mechanical model of the mind shall operate according to ``mechanical principles,'' that is, we can understand the operation of the whole in terms of the operation of its parts.... Certainly one expects that the behavior of physical objects can be explained at any level of reduction. However, consciousness is not necessarily a behavior, it is an ``experience'', whatever that is. Claims of consciousness, as in ``I assert that I am conscious'' are behavior, and can reasonably be subjected to a reductionist analysis. But whether this will shed any light on the nature of consciousness is unclear. A useful analogy is whether attacking a computer with a voltmeter will teach you anything about the abstractions ``program'', ``data structure'', ``operating system'', etc., which we use to describe the nature of what is going on there. These abstractions, which we claim are part of the nature of the machine at the level we usually address it, are not useful when examining the machine below a certain level of reduction. But that is no paradox, because these abstractions are not physical structure or behavior, they are our conceptualizations of its structure and behavior. This is as mystical as I'm willing to get in my analysis, but look at what Lucas does with it: if the mechanist produces a machine which is so complicated that this [process of reductionist analysis] ceases to hold good of it, then it is no longer a machine for the purpose of our discussion, no matter how it was constructed. We should say, rather, that he had created a mind, in the same sort of sense as we procreate people at prsent. If someone produces a machine which which exhibits behavior that is infeasible to predict through reductionist methods, there is nothing fundamentally different about it. It is still obeying the laws of physics at all levels of its structure, and we can still in principle apply to it any desired reductionist analysis. We should certainly not claim to have produced anything special (such as a mind) just because we can't easily disprove the notion. When talking of [human beings and these specially complex machines] we should take care to stress that although what was created looked like a machine, it was not one really, because it was not just the total of its parts: one could not even tell the limits of what it could do, for even when presented with the Goedel type question, it got the answer right. There is simply no reason to believe that people can answer Goedelian questions any better than machines can. This bizarre notion that conscious objects can do such things is unproven and dubious. I assert that people cannot do these things, and neither can machines, and that the ability to escape from Goedel or Turing restrictions is irrelevant to questions of consciousness, since we are (experientially) conscious but cannot do such things. I find that most current analyses of consciousness are either mystical like the one I've addressed here, or simply miss the phenonmenon by attacking the system at a level of reduction beneath the level where the concept seems to apply. It is tempting to thing we can make scientific statements about consciousness just because we can experience consciousness ourselves. This idea runs aground when we find that this notion is dependent on capturing scientifically the phenomena of ``experience'', ``consciousness'' or ``self'', which I have not yet seen adequately done. Whether consciousness is a phenomenon with scientific existence, or whether it is an abstract creation of our conceptualizations with no external or reductionist existence is still undetermined. -Greg Davidson (davidson@sdcsvax.UUCP or davidson@nosc.ARPA) ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 6-May-84 18:44:21-PDT,12024;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 6-May-84 18:39:21 Date: Sun 6 May 1984 18:32-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #56 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Monday, 7 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 56 Today's Topics: AI Software - Request for AI Demos, Seminars - Object-Oriented Programming in Prolog & SIGNUM & Learning in Production Systems & Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Conference - 12th POPL Call for Papers ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 30 Apr 84 19:14:00-PDT (Mon) From: ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!wickart @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Needed: AI demos Article-I.D.: iuvax.3600001 I need some simplistic AI demo programs to help convert the infidels. EMYCIN, ELIZA/DOCTOR, PARANOID, SHRDLU, and REVERSE would be greatly appreciated. I can handle LISP, PASCAL, FORTRAN(in AI?), BAL(perish the thought), C, or PL/I. Can anyone out there help out? USENET is the only thing that maintains our existence in the USA. Thanks in advance, T.F. Prune (aka Bill Wickart, ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!wickart) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 May 84 17:32:06 edt From: jan@harvard (Jan Komorowski) Subject: Seminar - Object-Oriented Programming in Prolog [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] "Object-Oriented Programming in Prolog" Carlo Zaniolo Bell Laboratories Monday, May 7, 1984 at 4 PM Aiken Lecture Hall, Harvard University (tea in Pierce 213 at 3:30) Object-oriented programming has proved very useful in a number of important applications, because of its ability to unify and simplify the description of entities and their protocols. Here, we propose a similar approach for providing this programming paradigm in Prolog. We introduce primitives to support the notions of (1) an object with its associated set of methods, (2) an inheritance network whereby an object inherits the methods of its ancestors, and (3) message passing between objects. Objects and methods are specified by a declaration object with method_list, where object is a Prolog predicate and each method is an arbitrary Prolog clause. Then, a message O:M can be specified as a goal, to request the application of method M to object O. The inheritance network, specified by the isa operator as follows sub_object isa object, is most useful in handling default information. Thus it is possible to specify a method that holds by default for a general class, and then specify special subcases for which the general rule is overridden. This new functionality is added on top of existing Prolog systems, with no modification to its interpreter or compiler. Host: H.J. Komorowski ------------------------------ Date: 28 Apr 84 5:13:41-PST (Sat) From: decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!whuxle!floyd!cmcl2!lanl-a!unm-cvax!unmva x!stanly @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Seminar - SIGNUM meeting and introduction Article-I.D.: unmvax.312 SIGNUM is the Special Interest Group in Numerical Mathematics of the ACM ( American Computing Machinery). The group meets monthly for the academic year. At each meeting there is a talk on some subject related to computing or applied mathematics. The talks are not restricted to numerical stuff. If you would like to be on the mailing list please send a note to John. A correct address from unmvax is: WISNIEWSKI@SANDIA.ARPA@lanl-a.UUCP Stan Steinberg stanly@unmvax ******************************************************************* Rio Grande Chapter SIGNUM Meeting Year end meeting and election of officers Date: Tuesday, May 8, 1984 Speakers: Kathie Hiebert Dodd and Barry Marder - Sandia Applied AI - "Brave New World" or "Catastrophe Theory Revisited"? Barry Marder Last year an effort was initiated at Sandia to develop a core of expertise in the field of artificial intelligence. One area of investigation has been expert system technology, which has been largely responsible for the present explosive growth of interest in AI. An expert system is a program that catalogs and makes readily available expert knowledge in a field. Such a system has been built and implemented at Sandia to aid in the design of electrical cables and connectors. The speaker will describe this system and offer some observations on artificial intelligence in general. VEHICLE IDENTIFICATION -- A FRAME BASED SYSTEM Kathie Hiebert Dodd Software has been developed that, when given certain characteristics from a scene such as the location of wheels, can identify vehicles. The image processing, ie extracting the characteristics from the scene is still done primarily on a VAX. Given the features a frame based code using "flavors" in the Zetalisp language on a Symbolics 3600 does the vehicle identification. The main emphasis of the talk will be on the aspects of a frame based expert system, in particular the use of "flavors" and "deamons". Location: The Establishment - Albuquerque Dukes Sports Stadium Price: 10.50 per person - serving Prime Rib (I think) Social Hour : 5:30 P.M., Dinner: 6:00 P.M., Talks: 7:00 P.M. PLEASE LET JOHN WISNIEWSKI KNOW BY NOON MONDAY THE 7TH IF YOU ARE COMING TO DINNER. If no answer leave a message with EVA 844-7747. ------------------------------ Date: 4 May 1984 1316-EDT From: Geoff Hinton Subject: Seminar - Learning in Production Systems [Forwarded from the CMU-AI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The AI seminar on May 8 will be given by John Holland of the University of Michigan. Title: Learning Algorithms for Production Systems Learning, broadly interpreted to include processes such as induction, offers attractive possibilities for increasing the flexibility of rule-based systems. However, this potential is likely to be realized only when the rule-based systems are designed ab initio with learning in mind. In particular, there are substantial advantages to be gained when the rules are organized in terms of building blocks suitable for manipulation by the learning algorithms (taking advantage of the principles expounded by Newell & Simon). This seminar will concentrate on: 1. Ways of inducing useful building blocks and rules from experience, and 2. Learning algorithms that can exploit these possibilities through "apportionment of credit" and "recombination" of building blocks. ------------------------------ Date: Sat 5 May 84 18:45:28-PDT From: Benjamin Grosof Subject: Seminars - Nonmonotonic Reasoning [Forwarded from the CSLI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Our regular meeting time and place is Wednesdays 1-2pm (with some runover to be expected), in Redwood Hall Room G-19. [...] Wednesday, May 16: Drawing A Line Around Circumscription David Etherington University of British Columbia, Vancouver The Artificial Intelligence community has been very interested in the study of reasoning in situations where only incomplete information is available. Predicate Circumscription and Domain Circumscription provide tools for nonmonotonic reasoning in such situations. However, not all of the problems which might be expected to yield to circumscriptive inference are actually addressed by the techniques which have been developed thus far. We outline some unexpected areas where existing techniques are insufficient. Wednesday, May 23 DEFAULT REASONING AS CIRCUMSCRIPTION A Translation of Default Logic into Circumscription OR Maximizing Defaults Is Minimizing Predicates Benjamin Grosof of Stanford Much default reasoning can be formulated as circumscriptive. Using a revised version [McCarthy 84] of circumscription [McCarthy 80], we propose a translation scheme from default logic [Reiter 80] into circumscription. An arbitrary "normal" default theory is translated into a corresponding circumscription of a first-order theory. The method is extended to translating "seminormal" default theories effectively, but is less satisfactorily concise and elegant. Providing a translation of seminormal default logic into circumscription unifies two of the leading formal approaches to nonmonotonic reasoning, and enables an integration of their demonstrated applications. The naturalness of default logic provides a specification tool for representing default reasoning within the framework of circumscription. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 May 84 15:52 PDT From: Brian Reid Subject: 12th POPL Call for Papers Call for Papers: 12th POPL The twelfth annual ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on PRINCIPLES OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES New Orleans, Louisiana, January 13-16, 1985 The POPL symposium is devoted to the principles of programming languages. In recent years there have been many papers on specific principles and specific programming languages embodying those principles, which might lead one to believe that the symposium is limited to papers on those topics. We are eager for papers on important new topics, and therefore this year we shall not attempt to prescribe particular topics. We solicit papers that describe important new research results having to do with the principles of programming languages. We not only solicit, but seek and encourage, papers describing work in which an implemented system embodies an important principle in such a way that the usefulness of that principle can be better understood. All submitted papers will be read by the program committee. Brian Reid, Stanford University (Program Chairman) Douglas Comer, Purdue University Stuart Feldman, Bell Communications Research Joseph Halpern, IBM Research David MacQueen, AT&T Bell Laboratories Michael O'Donnell, Johns Hopkins University Vaughan Pratt, Sun Microsystems and Stanford Univ. Guy Steele, Tartan Laboratories David Wall, DEC Western Research Laboratory Please submit nine copies of a 6- to 10-page summary of your paper to the program chairman. Summaries must be typed double spaced, or typeset 10 on 16. It is important to include specific results, and specific comparisons with other work. The committee will consider the relevance, clarity, originality, significance, and overall quality of each summary. Mail to: Brian K. Reid Computer Systems Laboratory, ERL 444 Department of Electrical Engineering Stanford University Stanford, California, 94305 U.S.A. (Persons submitting papers from countries in which access to copying machines is difficult or impossible are welcome to submit a single copy.) Summaries must be received by the program chairman by August 3, 1984. Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by September 25, 1984. The accepted papers must be received in camera-ready form by the program chairman at the above address by November 9, 1984. Authors of accepted papers will be expected to sign a copyright release form. Proceedings will be distributed at the symposium and will be subsequently available for purchase from ACM. The local arrangements chairman is Bill Greene, University of New Orleans, Computer Science Department, New Orleans, Louisiana 70148 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 8-May-84 21:24:22-PDT,14422;000000000001 Mail-From: LAWS created at 8-May-84 21:20:57 Date: Tue 8 May 1984 21:05-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #57 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Wednesday, 9 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 57 Today's Topics: AI Tools - Structure Editor Request, Bindings - Judea Pearl, AI Software - LISP on a Data General, Linguistics - Metaphors & Puns & Use of "and", AI Funding - The End of British AI?, AI Literature - Touretzky LISP Book Review, Consciousness - Discussion, Conference - IEEE Workstation Conference ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 3 May 84 18:17:03-PDT (Thu) From: hplabs!hao!cires!boulder!marty @ Ucb-Vax Subject: wanted: display-oriented interlisp structure editor Article-I.D.: boulder.175 I've been using Interlisp-VAX under VMS for a while now and am getting a bit tired of the rather antiquated TTY editor. I know Dave Barstow had a sort of semi-display interlisp structure editor known as DED, but this seems to have fallen into a black hole. Does anyone out there have a screen-oriented residential structure editor for interlisp? (Yes, I know the real solution is to get an 1108, it's on order ... But I've got too many interlisp users to point them all at one Dandelion ...) thanks much, Marty Kent csnet: {ucbvax!hplabs | allegra!nbires | decvax!kpno | harpo!seismo | ihnp4!kpno} !hao!boulder!marty arpanet: polson @ sumex-aim ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 7 May 84 07:54:13 PDT From: Anna Gibbons Subject: Bindings - Judea Pearl Address FROM JUDEA PEARL: Please disregard the old address "UCLA-SECURITY", any messages should be sent to "judea@UCLA-CS.ARPA". Sorry for the inconvenience and confusion. ------------------------------ Date: 19 Apr 84 14:30:21-PST (Thu) From: decvax!mcnc!ecsvax!bet @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: LISP on a Data General? (sri-arpa.122209) Article-I.D.: ecsvax.2347 Here at Duke, someone ported a public domain implementation of an extremely simple subset of LISP (xlisp) to our MV-8000. It suffices for some robotics programming. I learned LISP on it. Sources in C. Send me a note if you are interested; it is probably rather big to mail, though I believe it was originally acquired from net.sources. We can work out some way to transfer it. Bennett Todd ...{decvax,ihnp4,akgua}!mcnc!ecsvax!bet ------------------------------ Date: 2 May 84 8:35:51-PDT (Wed) From: hplabs!tektronix!ogcvax!sequent!merlyn @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: metaphors Article-I.D.: sequent.478 > "Telephones are like grapefruits" is a SIMILE, not a metaphor. To be > a metaphor, it would be "Telephones are grapefruits", and would be harder > to interpret... > > Will Ahh, but "Telephones are lemons" is fairly easy to interpret. It just depends on the type of fruit. :-} Randal L. ("life is like a banana") Schwartz, esq. (merlyn@sequent.UUCP) (Official legendary sorcerer of the 1984 Summer Olympics) Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. (503)626-5700 (sequent = 1/quosine) UUCP: ...!XXX!sequent!merlyn where XXX is one of: decwrl nsc ogcvax pur-ee rocks34 shell teneron unisoft vax135 verdix P.S. I never metaphor I didn't like. (on a zero to four scale) ------------------------------ Date: 11 Apr 84 14:25:47-PST (Wed) From: harpo!eagle!mhuxl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!ecsvax!hes @ Ucb-Vax Subject: what you see ain't what you get Article-I.D.: ecsvax.2291 At the end of Bentley's column in the April CACM, he mentions the AI seminar titled: How to Wreck a Nice Beach and I thought of that today when I saw a poster describing "Cole's Law". For those unfamiliar with the concept it refers to "niht decils egabbac" reversed. --henry (almost ashamed to sign this) schaffer ncsu genetics ------------------------------ Date: 11 Apr 84 8:46:33-PST (Wed) From: harpo!ulysses!burl!clyde!watmath!watrose!japlaice @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Use of "and" Article-I.D.: watrose.6717 [For some reason this took almost a month to show up in the AIList mailbox. Other messages may have been similarly delayed. -- KIL] There are several philosophical problems with treating `Indiana and Ohio' as a single entity. The first is that the Fregean idea that the sense of a sentence is based on the sense of its parts, which is thought valid by most philosophers, no longer holds true. The second is that if we use that idea in this situation, then it would probably seem reasonable to use Quine's ideas for adjectives, namely that `unicorn', `hairy unicorn', `small, hairy unicorn' (or other similar examples) are all separate entities, and I think that it is obvious that trying to derive a reasonable semantic/syntactic theory for any reasonable fragment of English would become virtually imposible. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 7 May 84 17:31:17-PDT From: PEREIRA@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Re: The End of British AI? Having learned recently of yet another attempt by the SERC to foist upon unwilling AI researchers totally unsuitable equipment chosen for narrow political reasons, and seeing those researchers wasting their time fighting off the attempt or reimplementing AI software which they could get with little effort if they had the right equipment, I am maybe feeling a bit paranoid. Knowing of the contortions British researchers are going through to get Alvey money doesn't make me very optimistic either. Astronomers and high-energy physicists don't seem to have the same problems. While I was a graduate student and then a research fellow in the UK, I had to waste my time fighting off two such attempts, again based on narrow political considerations. That in the two cases the side I was on ended up (partly) winning is small consolation when I think of the time I and others could have used for more productive work. As to bureaucratic statements of that kind being forgotten, do you remember the Lighthill report, a ``statement'' that sent British AI into internal exile for at least five years causing the drain of US of British AI talent we all know about? - Fernando ------------------------------ Date: 7 May 84 0255 EDT From: Dave.Touretzky@CMU-CS-A.ARPA Subject: book announcement Since people have begun using AIList to announce their latest books (an excellent idea), I thought I'd briefly describe my new Lisp book. "Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation", by David S. Touretzky, Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, 1984. Softcover, 384 pages, $18.95 list. I originally wrote the book because I wanted to teach an introductory programming course to humanities students using Lisp. Although most readers of this mailing list are interested in the advanced applications of Lisp, the language is an excellent one for beginners. It turned out to be a heck of a lot better for them than Pascal, which is what we teach most beginners here at CMU. And Stanford University's freshman programming course is now a combination of Lisp and Pascal, with my book used for the Lisp component. Trinity College, in Hartford, CT, uses it in a freshman AI seminar taught by the Psych dept. At CMU it was used for several semesters by the English department (!) for the programming component of a computer literacy course for grad students. Of course, the question you're all dying to ask is: how does this book differ from Winston & Horn, and from Wilensky's new book. My book is the only GENTLE introduction to Lisp. As such, its pace is too slow for a graduate level or advanced undergrad CS course, which is where I feel Winston & Horn is most appropriate. On the other hand, I know lots of grad students in other departments, such as Psych, who found Winston & Horn too advanced; they were more comfortable with my book. Wilensky's book is a wonderful reference for Franz Lisp, which is covered in its entirety, while my book is based on MacLisp and Common Lisp (although there is an appendix which mentions Franz) and covers only the basics of those dialects. If you are an experienced programmer and want to know all about Franz Lisp, Wilensky is the obvious choice. On the other hand, if you're new to Lisp, my book offers the easiest route to becoming fluent in the language. In addition to the gentle, easy-to-read style, it contains 75 pages of answers to exercises. (Winston & Horn has 60 pages of answers; Wilensky has none.) -- Dave Touretzky ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 84 16:55:34-PDT (Thu) From: ihnp4!ihuxr!pem1a @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: New topic for discussion Article-I.D.: ihuxr.1064 Phaedrus' article made me think of a story in the book "The Mind's Eye", by Hofstadter and Dennett, in which the relationship between subjective experience and physical substance is explored. Can't remember the story's name but good reading. Some other thoughts: One aspect of experience and substance is how to determine when a piece of substance is experiencing something. This is good to know because then you can fiddle with the substance until it stops experiencing and thereby get an idea of what it was about the substance which allowed it to experience. The first reasonable choice for the piece of substance might be yourself, since most people presume that they can tell when they are having a conscious experience. Unfortunately, being both the measuree and measurer could have its drawbacks, since some experiments could simulaneously zap both experience and the ability to know or not know if an experience exists. All sorts of problems here. Could you just THINK you were experiencing something, but not really? What this calls for, it seems to me, is two people. One to measure and one to experience. Of course this would all be based on the assumption that it is even possible to measure such an elusive thing as experience. Some people might even object to the notion that subjective experiences are possible at all. The next thing is to choose an experience. This is tricky. If you chose self-awareness as the experience, then you would have to decide if being self-aware in one state is the same as being self-aware in a different state. Can the experience be the same even if the object of the experience is not? Then, a measuring criterion would have to be established whereby someone could measure if an experience was happening or not. This could range from body and facial expressions to neurological readings. Another would be a Turing test-like setup: put the subject into a box with certain I/O channels, and have protocols made up for measuring things. This would allow you to REALLY get in there and fiddle with things, like replacing body parts, etc. These are some of the thoughts that ran through my head after reading the Phaedrus article. I think I thought them, and if I didn't, how did this article get here? Tom Portegys, Bell Labs, ihlpg!portegys (ihlpg currently does not have netnews, that's why this is coming from ihuxr). ------------------------------ Date: Sun 6 May 84 11:15:48-PDT From: Dennis Allison Subject: IEEE Workstation Conference: Call for Papers ----------------------------------------------------- 1st International Conference on Computer Workstations ----------------------------------------------------- San Francisco Bay Area, May-June 1985. Sponsored by: IEEE Computer Society Computer Workstations are integral to productivity and quality increases, and they are the main focal point for a growing fraction of professional activity. A "workstation", broadly defined, is a system that interacts with a user to help the user accomplish some kind of work. Included in this definition are: CAD systems, high-resolution graphics systems, office productivity systems, computer-based engineering support stations of all kinds, architectural sys- tems, software engineering environments, etc. "Workstations" includes both hardware and software. Hardware to run the ap- plications, software to customize the environments. Technical Program Papers are solicited from the technical community at large in a widely seen series of advertisements. Sessions to be organized from submitted papers and from Program Committee contacts. The technical program will have approximately 32 sessions, arranged in three tracks, spanning 3 full days. Technical sessions will be derived from submit- ted papers and from Program Committee organized sessions. The Program Commit- tee will include leaders and important contributors to the field of computer workstations. International representation will be sought. There will be an invited keynote speaker and a formal opening session, best paper awards, and a set of pre-conference tutorials. Also, a "Special Ad- dress" on the 2nd day. Exhibits Over 150 "booths" are expected to be populated by nearly as many companies ex- hibiting hardware and software pertaining to workstations of all kinds. High standards of technical exhibitions will be maintained by the IEEE to assure a technically sophisticated and educational set of exhibits. Wide international participation is anticipated. Exhibits are set up on Monday, shown Tuesday through Thursday from 10 AM to 7 PM, and dismantled on Friday. Program Chairman: Dr. Edward Miller Software Research, Inc. 580 Market Street San Francisco, CA 94104 Phone: (415) 957-1441 -- Telex: 340 235 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 14-May-84 17:14:01-PDT,14982;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 14-May-84 17:11:25 Date: Mon 14 May 1984 17:01-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #58 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Tuesday, 15 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 58 Today's Topics: AI Tools - Personal Computer Query, AI Books - LISPcraft Review, Humor - Distributed Intelligence, Linguistics - Metaphors, Job Market - Noncompetition Clauses, Seminar - Content-Addressable Memory, Conference - IEEE Knowledge-Based Systems Conference ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 11 May 84 13:13:39-PDT (Fri) From: decvax!wivax!apollo!tarbox @ Ucb-Vax Subject: LISP machines question Article-I.D.: apollo.1f4a00cb.d4d Can anyone out there tell me what the smallest, (ie. least expensive) home/personal computer is that run some sort of LISP? -- Brian Tarbox @APOLLO ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 May 84 17:36:35 pdt From: wilensky%ucbdali@Berkeley (Robert Wilensky) Subject: AIList book announcement I want to dispel an incorrect impression left by Dave Touretzky about my recent book on LISP (which, incidentally, is called LISPcraft by Robert Wilensky W. W. Norton & Co. New York, 1984. Softcover, 385 pages, $19.95 list. ) Specifically, Touretzky gave the impression the my book was geared to advanced Franz LISP programming, and was not appropriate as a general tutorial for the novice. Nothing could be further from the truth. LISPcraft is NOT meant to be primarily a reference for Franz LISP, nor is it intended as an advanced LISP text. Rather, the book is meant to be a self-contained LISP tutorial for the novice LISP programmer. LISPcraft does assume some familiarity with computers, so it may not be ideal for the computationally illiterate. On the other hand, like Touretzky's book, and unlike Winston and Horn's, almost the entire length of my book is a tutorial on various aspects of the language. From my point of view, the primary difference between these books is that I try to cover the language from the programmer's point of view. This means that I pay homage to the way LISP programmers actually use the language. As a consequence, I spend some time on features of LISP that one hardly finds discussed anywhere, e. g., programming idioms, macro writing techniques, read macros, debugging, error handling, non-standard flow of control, the oblist, non-s-expression data types, systems functions, compilation, and aspects of I/O. I also give some serious programming examples (pattern matching and deductive data base management). However, my book starts at ground zero, and works its way through the basics. In fact, the text is about evenly divided between the sort of issues listed above and more basic ``car-cdr-cons'' level stuff. Most importantly, the text is entirely tutorial in nature and presumes no previous knowledge of LISP whatsoever. I believe that basics of LISP programming are presented to the uninitiated as well here as they are anywhere. In sum, LISPcraft contains a more extensive exposition of LISP than either Winston's or Touretzky's book. Winston's book contains many more examples of LISP programs than does LISPcraft, and Touretzky's book covers less material at a slower pace. As Touretzky states, LISPcraft does contain a thorough exposition of a particular LISP dialect, namely Franz. For example, the book contains an appendix that describes all Franz LISP functions. However, most of the book is rather dialect independent, and major idiosyncracies are noted throughout. The point of the thoroughness is to suggest a repetoire of functions that programmers actually use, i. e., to convey what a real LISP language looks like, aside from serving as a reference for Franz users per se. As I suggest in my preface, I believe ``it is easier to learn a new dialect having mastered another than it is having learned a language for which there are no native speakers.'' I take strong exception to Touretzky's claim that his book offers the ``easiest route to becoming fluent in the language.'' Besides my belief in the appropriateness of my own book for the novice, I wish to point out that memorizing a German grammar book does NOT make one fluent in German. There is a large body of other knowledge that is crucial to using a language effectively, be that language natural or artificial. This fact was a prime motivation behind my writing LISPcraft in the first place. Rather than make the claim that my own book provides the best route to fluency, or argue its merits as an introductory LISP text, I invite the interested reader to judge for his or herself. ------------------------------ Date: 2 May 84 19:45:13-PDT (Wed) From: ihnp4!oddjob!jeff @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Proposal for UUCP Project Article-I.D.: oddjob.172 Do you suppose that when enough connections are made, the UUCP network will spontaneously develop intelligence? Jeff Bishop || University of Chicago ...ihnp4!oddjob!jeff || Astrology & Astrophysics Center ------------------------------ Date: 4 May 84 18:54:17-PDT (Fri) From: hplabs!tektronix!ogcvax!sequent!richard @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Proposal for UUCP Project Article-I.D.: sequent.483 Do you suppose that when enough connections are made, the UUCP network will spontaneously develop intelligence? Perhaps it already has. Maybe that's what keeps eating all those first lines, and regurgitating the weeks-old news. ____________________________________________ The preceding should not be construed as the statement or opinion of the employers or associates of the author. It might not even be the author's. I try to make a point of protecting the innocent, but none of them can be found... ...!sequent!richard ------------------------------ Date: 11 May 84 19:27:29-PDT (Fri) From: decvax!minow @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Proposal for UUCP Project Article-I.D.: decvax.482 An earlier discussion of this topic may be found in the story "Inflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney (The New Yorker, 1940) reprinted in The World of Mathematics, Vol. 4, pp. 2262-2267. Martin Minow decvax!minow ------------------------------ Date: 7 May 84 11:02:00-PDT (Mon) From: pur-ee!uiucdcs!uicsl!dinitz @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Re: metaphors - (nf) Article-I.D.: uicsl.15500034 FLAME ON Your complaint that a comparison using "like" is a simile (and not a metaphor) is technically correct. But it shows that you're not following the research. Metaphor or simile (or juxtaposition, etc.), these figures of speech raise the same problems and questions of how analogical reasoning works, how comparisons convey meaning, how do people dream them up, and how do other people understand them. For this reason the word metaphor is used to refer collectively to the whole lot of them. Pretending you're a high school English teacher doesn't help. FLAME OFF ------------------------------ Date: 10 May 84 21:16:05-PDT (Thu) From: decvax!genrad!wjh12!foxvax1!brunix!jah @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Non-competition clauses Article-I.D.: brunix.7927 You should be aware that it is not necessarily the case that you MUST sign the non-disclosure agreement exactly as worded. I recently signed on as consultant with a company which had a very stringent (and absolutely ridiculous) nondisclosure/non-competition clause form. I refused to sign certain sections (mainly those limiting me from practicing AI, consulting for others where there was no conflict of interest, etc.) We eventually eliminated those clauses, rewrote the contract and I signed willingly. Similarly, another company I worked for was unwilling to change the document, but, when I refused to sign away my rights, they pointed out that I got to fill in a section with information about what things I already had going for me (that is, what things I had done previously so the company had no claim on these things). Since the company's contract included such things as "no competing business" and the like, I was able to claim prior rights to "artificial intelligence research", "natural language processing", and "expert systems research." The very vagueness of these things, according to my legal advisor, makes it that much harder for the company to really do anything. A final note, most companies will clain they do do this "as red tape" and will "not really hassle you." Don't believe them! They've got more bucks then you and if it goes to court, EVEN IF YOU WIN, it will cost you more than you can afford. Speak to a lawyer, change contracts, etc. In the AI world we've got a seller's market. Take advantage of it, these companies want you, and will be willing to negotiate. Sorry if I do go on... Jim Hendler ------------------------------ Date: Wed 9 May 84 18:08:03-PDT From: Dikran Karagueuzian Subject: Seminar - Content-Addressable Memory [Forwarded from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] FOR THE RECORD CSLI post-doctoral fellow Pentti Kanerva was a guest lecturer at MIT Tuesday, May 1. The topic of his lecture was "Random-access Memory with a Very Large Address Space (1 2000) as a Model of Human Memory: Theory and Implementation." Douglas R. Hofstadter was host. Following is an abstract of the lecture. Humans can retrieve information from memory according to content (recalling and recognizing previously encountered objects) and according to temporal sequence (performing a learned sequence of actions). Retrieval times indicate the direct retrieval of stored information. In the present theory, memory items are represented by n-bit binary words (points of space {0,1}n. The unifying principle of the theory is that the address space and the datum space of the memory are the same. As in the conventional random-access memory of a computer, any stored item can be accessed directly by addressing the location in which the item is stored; the sequential retrieval is accomplished by storing the memory record as a linked list. Unlike in the conventional random-access memory, many locations are accessed at once, and this accounts for recognition. Three main results have been obtained: (1) The properties of neurons allow their use as address decoders for a generalized random-access memory; (2) distributing the storage of an item in a set of locations makes very large address spaces (2 1000) practical; and (3) structures similar to those suggested by the theory are found in the cerrebellum. ------------------------------ Date: 11 May 1984 07:08:26-EDT From: Mark.Fox@CMU-RI-ISL1 Subject: IEEE AI Conf. Call for Papers [Forwarded from the SRI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] CALL FOR PAPERS IEEE Workshop on Principles of Knowledge-Based Systems Sheraton Denver Tex, Denver, Colorado, 3 - 4 December 1984 Purpose: The purpose of this conference is to focus attention on the principle theories and methods of artificial intelligence which have played an important role in the construction of expert and knowledge-based systems. The workshop will provide a forum for researchers in expert and knowledge-based systems to discuss the concepts which underly their systems. Topics include: - Knowledge Acquisition. * manual elicitation. * machine learning. - Knowledge Representation. - Causal modeling. - The Role of Planning in Expert Reasoning - Knowledge Utilization. * rule-based reasoning * theories of evidence * focus of attention. - Explanation. - Validation. * measures. * user acceptance. Please send eight copies of a 1000-2000 word double-space, typed, summary of the proposed paper to: Mark S. Fox Robotics Institute Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 All submissions will be read by the program committee: - Richard Duda, Syntelligence - Mark Fox, Carnegie-Mellon University - John McDermott, Carnegie-Mellon University - Tom Mitchell, Rutgers University - John Roach, Virginia Polytechnical Institute - Reid Smith, Schlumberger Corp. - Mark Stefik, Xerox Parc - Donald Waterman, Rand Corp. Summaries are to focus primarily on new principles, but each principle should be illustrated by its use in an knowledge-based system. It is important to include specific findings or results, and specific comparisons with relevant previous work. The committee will consider the appropriateness, clarity, originality, significance and overall quality of each summary. June 7, 1984 is the deadline for the submission of summaries. Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by July 23, 1984. The accepted papers must be typed on special forms and received by the program chairman at the above address by September 3, 1984. Authors of accepted papers will be expected to sign a copyright release form. Proceedings will be distributed at the workshop and will be subsequently available for purchase from IEEE. Selected full papers will be considered (along with papers from the IEEE Conference on AI and Applications) for a special issue of IEEE PAMI on knowledge-based systems to be published in Sept. 1985. The deadline for submission of full papers is 16 December 1984. General Chairman John Roach Dept. of Computer Science Virginia Polytechnic Institute Blacksburg, VA Program Co-Chairmen Mark S. Fox Tom Mitchell Robotics Institute Dept. of Computer Science Carnegie-Mellon Univ. Rutgers University Pittsburgh, PA New Brunswick, NJ Registration Chairman Local Arrangements Chairman Daniel Chester David Morgenthaler Dept. of Computer Science Martin Marietta Corp. University of Delaware Denver, Colorado Newark, Delaware ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 20-May-84 22:38:33-PDT,12278;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 20-May-84 22:35:38 Date: Sun 20 May 1984 22:30-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #59 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Sunday, 20 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 59 Today's Topics: Metaphysics - Perception, Recognition, Essence, and Identity ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 15 May 84 23:33:31-PDT (Tue) From: decvax!ittvax!wxlvax!rlw @ Ucb-Vax Subject: A topic for discussion, phil/ai persons. Article-I.D.: wxlvax.277 Here is a thought which a friend and I have been kicking around for a while (the friend is a professor of philosophy at Penn): It seems that it is IMPOSSIBLE to ever build a computer that can truly perceive as a human being does, unless we radically change our ideas about how perception is carried out. The reason for this is that we humans have very little difficulty identifying objects as the same across time, even when all the features of that object change (including temporal and spatial ones). Computers, on the other hand, are being built to identify objects by feature-sets. But no set of features is ever enough to assure cross-time identification of objects. I accept that this idea may be completely wrong. As I said, it's just something that we have been batting around. Now I would like to solicit opinions of others. All ideas will be considered. All references to literature will be appreciated. Feel free to reply by mail or on the net. Just be aware that I don't log on very often, so if I don't answer for a while, I'm not snubbing you. --Alan Wexelblat (for himself and Izchak Miller) (currently appearing at: ...decvax!ittvax!wlxvax!rlw Please put "For Alan" in all mail headers.) ------------------------------ Date: 15 May 84 14:49:41-PDT (Tue) From: ihnp4!houxm!hogpc!houti!ariel!norm @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: A topic for discussion, phil/ai persons. Article-I.D.: ariel.630 The computer needs to be able to distinguish between "metaphysically identical" and "essentially the same". This distinction is at the root of an old (2500 years?) Greek ship problem: Regarding Greeks ship problem: When a worn board is replaced by a new board, the ship is changed, but it is the same ship. The difference leaves the ship essentially the same but not identically the same. If all the boards of a ship are replaced one by one until the ship is entirely redone with new boards, it is still the same ship (essentially). Now, if all the old boards that had been removed were put together again in their original configuration so as to duplicate the new-board ship, would the new old-board ship be iden- tically or essentially the same as the original old-board ship? Assume nailless construction techniques were used thruout, and assume all boards always fit perfectly the same way every time. We now have two ships that are essentially the same as the original ship, but, I maintain, neither ship is identical to the original ship. The original ship's identity was not preserved, although its identity was left sufficiently unchanged so as to preserve the ship's essence. The ship put together with the previously-removed old boards is not identically the same as the original old-board ship either, no matter how carefully it is put together. It too is only essentially the same as the original ship. A colleague suggested that 'essence' in this case was contextual, and I tend to agree with him. Actually, even if the Greeks left the original ship alone, the ship's identity would change from one instant to the next. Even while remaining essentially the same, the fact that the ship exists in the context of (and in relation to) a changing universe is enough to vary the ship's identity from moment to mo- ment. The constant changes in the ship's characteristics are admittedly very subtle, and do not change the essential capacity/functionality/identity of the ship. Minute changes in a ships identity have 'essentially' no impact. Only a change sufficiently large (such as a small hole in the hull) have an essential impact. "Essence" has historically been considered metaphysical. In her "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" (see your local bookstore) Ayn Rand identified essence as epistemological rather than metaphysical. The implications of this identification are profound, and more than I want to get into in this article. Philosopher Leonard Peikoff's article "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy", in the back of the newer editions of Rand's Intro to Obj Epist, shows how crucial the distinction between essence-as-metaphysical and essence-as-epistemological really is. Read Rand's book and see why the computer would have to make the same distinc- tion. That distinction, however, has to be made on the CONCEPTUAL level. I think Rand's discussion of concept-formation will probably convince you that it will be quite some time before man-made machinery is up to that... Norm Andrews, AT+T Information Systems (201)834-3685 vax135!ariel!norm ------------------------------ Date: 16 May 84 7:10:40-PDT (Wed) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rochester!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!rosen @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: A topic for discussion, phil/ai persons. Article-I.D.: gloria.176 Just a few quick comments, 1) The author seems to use perceive as visual perception. It can not be a prerequisite for intelligence due to all the counter examples in the human race. Not every human has sight, so we should be able to get intelligence from various types of inputs. 2) Since humans CAN do it is the evidence that OTHER systems can do it. 3) The major assumption is that the only way a computer can identify objects is by having static "feature-sets" that are from the object alone, without having additional information, but why have that restriction? First, all features don't change at once, your grandmother doesn't all- of-a-sudden have the features of a desk. Second, the processor can/must change with the enviornment as well as the object in question. Third, the context plays a very important role in the recognition of of an object. Functionality of the object is cruical. Remindings from previous interactions with that object, and so on. The point is that clearly a static list of what features objects must have and what features are optional is not enough. Yet there is no reason to believe that this is the only way computers can represent objects. The points here come from many sources, and have their origin from such people as Marvin Minsky and Roger Schank among others. There is a lot of literature out there. ------------------------------ Date: 16 May 84 9:50:24-PDT (Wed) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rochester!ritcv!ccieng5!ccieng2!bwm @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Essence Article-I.D.: ccieng2.179 I don't think ANYONE is looking to build a computer that can understand phiolosophy. If I can build something that acts the same as an IQ-80 person, I would be happy. This involves a surprising amount of work, (like vision, language, etc.) but could certainly be confused by two 'identical' ships as could I. Just because A human can do something does not imply that our immediate AI goals should include it. Rather, first lets worry about things ALL humans can do. Brad Miller ...[cbrma, rlgvax, ritcv]!ccieng5!ccieng2!bwm ------------------------------ Date: 17 May 84 7:04:41-PDT (Thu) From: ihnp4!houxm!hocda!hou3c!burl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!ecsvax!emigh @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: the Greek Ship problem Article-I.D.: ecsvax.2511 This reminds me of the story of Lincoln's axe (sorry, I've forgotten the source). A farmer was showing a visitor Lincoln's axe: Visitor: Are you sure that's Lincoln's axe Farmer: It's Lincoln's axe. Of course I've had to replace the handle three times and the head once, but it's Lincoln's axe alright. Adds another level of reality to the Greek Ship Problem. Ted H. Emigh Genetics and Statistics, North Carolina State U, Raleigh NC USENET: {akgua decvax duke ihnp4 unc}!mcnc!ecsvax!emigh ARPA: ecsvax!emigh@Mcnc or decvax!mcnc!ecsvax!emigh@BERKELEY ------------------------------ Date: 16 May 84 15:20:19-PDT (Wed) From: ihnp4!drutx!houxe!hogpc!houti!ariel!vax135!floyd!cmcl2!seismo!ro chester!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: the Greek Ship problem Article-I.D.: gloria.178 This is a good example of the principle that it depends on who's doing the perceiving. To a barnacle, it's a whole new ship. Col. G. L. Sicherman ...seismo!rochester!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel ------------------------------ Date: 16 May 84 15:17:06-PDT (Wed) From: harpo!seismo!rochester!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Can computers perceive Article-I.D.: gloria.177 If by "perception" you imply "recognition", then of course computers cannot perceive as we can. You can recognize only what is meaningful to you, and that probably won't be meaningful to a computer. Col. G. L. Sicherman ...seismo!rochester!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel ------------------------------ Date: 16 May 84 10:57:00-PDT (Wed) From: pur-ee!uiucdcs!marcel @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: A topic for discussion, phil/ai pers - (nf) Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.32300026 The problem is one of identification. When we see one object matching a description of another object we know about, we often assume that the object we're seeing IS the object we know about -- especially when we expect the description to be definite [1]. This is known as Leibniz's law of the indiscernability of identicals. That's found its way into the definitions of set theory [2]: two entities are "equal" iff every property of one is also a property of the other. Wittgenstein [3] objected that this did not allow for replication, ie the fact that we can distinguish two indistinguishable objects when they are placed next to each other (identity "solo numero"). So, if we don't like to make assumptions, either no two objects are ever the same object, or else we have to follow Aristotle and say that every object has some property setting it apart from all others. That's known as Essentialism, and is hotly disputed [4]. The choices until now have been: breakdown of identification, essentialism, or assumption. The latter is the most functional, but not nice if you're after epistemic certainty. Still, I see no insurmountable problems with making computers do the same as ourselves: assume identity until given evidence to the contrary. That we can't convince ourselves of that method's epistemic soundness does nothing to its effectiveness. All one needs is a formal logic or set theory (open sentences, such as predicates, are descriptions) with a definite description operator [2,5]. Of course, that makes the logic non-monotonic, since a definite description becomes meaningless when two objects match it. In other words, a closed-world assumption is also involved, and the theory must go beyond first- order logic. That's a technical problem, not necessarily an unsolvable one [6]. [1] see the chapter on SCHOLAR in Bobrow's "Representation and Understanding"; note the "uniqueness assumption". [2] Introduced by Whitehead & Russell in their "Principia Mathematica". [3] Wittgenstein's "Tractatus". [4] WVO Quine, "From a logical point of view". [5] WVO Quine, "Mathematical Logic". [6] Doyle's Truth Maintenance System (Artif. Intel. 12) attacks the non- monotonicity problem fairly well, though without a sound theoretical basis. See also McDermott's attempt at formalization (Artif. Intel. 13 and JACM 29 (Jan '82)). Marcel Schoppers U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign uiucdcs!marcel ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 20-May-84 22:58:34-PDT,18508;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 20-May-84 22:56:07 Date: Sun 20 May 1984 22:43-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #60 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Monday, 21 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 60 Today's Topics: AI Literature - Artificial Intelligence Abstracts, Survey - Summary on AI for Business, AI Tools - LISP on PCs & Boyer-Moore Prover on VAXen and SUNs, Games - Core War Software, AI Tools - Display-Oriented LISP Editors ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun 20 May 84 14:10:16-EDT From: MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Artificial Intelligence Abstracts Does anyone else on this list wish, as I do, that there existed a publication entitled ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ABSTRACTS? The field of artificial intelligence is probably the supreme interdisciplinary sphere of activity in the world, and its vital concerns extend across the spectrum of computer science, philosophy, psychology, biology, mathematics, literary theory, linguistics, statistics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, etc. I wonder if one of the major member publishers of the NFAIS (National Federation of Abstracting & Indexing Services) could be convinced to undertake the publication of a monthly reference serial which would reprint from the following abstracting services those abstracts which bear most pertinently on the concerns of AI research: Biological Abstracts / Computer & Control Abstracts / Computer & Information Systems Abstracts Journal / Current Index to Journals in Education / Dissertation Abstracts International / Electrical & Electronics Abstracts / Electronics & Communications Abstracts Journal / Engineering Index / Government Reports Announcements and Index / Informatics Abstracts / Information Science Abstracts / International Abstracts in Operations Research / Language and Language Behavior Abstracts / Library & Information Science Abstracts / Mathematical Reviews / Philosopher's Index / PROMT / Psychological Abstracts / Resources in Education / (This is by no means a comprehensive list of relevant reference publications.) Would other people on the list find an abstracting service dedicated to AI useful? Perhaps an initial step in developing such a project would be to arrive at a consensus regarding what structure of research fronts/subject headings appropriately defines the field of AI. --Wayne McGuire ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 18 May 84 15:29:35 pdt From: syming%B.CC@Berkeley Subject: Summary on AI for Business This is the summary of the responses to my request about "AI for Business" one month ago on AIList Digest. Three organizations are working on this area. They are Syntelligence, SRI, and Arthur D. Little, Inc.. Syntelligence's objective is to bring intelligent computer systems for business. Currently the major work is in finance area. The person to contact is: Peter Hart, President, 800 Oak Grove Ave, Suite 201, Menlo Park, CA 94025. (415) 325-9339, SRI has a sub-organization called Financial Expert System Program headed by Sandra Cook, (415) 859-5478. A prototype system for a financial application has been constructed. Arthur D. Little are developing AI-based MRP, financial planning, strategic planning and marketing system. However, I do not have much information yet. The person to contact with is Tom Martin. The Director of AI at Arthur D. Little, Karl M. Wiig, gave an interesting talk on "Will Artificial Intelligence Provide The Rebirth of Operations Research?" at TIMS/ORSA Joint National Meeting in San Francisco on May 16. In his talk, a few projects in ADL are mentioned. If interested, write to 35/48 Acorn Park, Cambridge, MA 01240. Gerhard Friedrich of DEC also gave a talk about expert systems on TIMS/ORSA meeting on Tuesday. He mentioned XSEL for sales, XCON for engineering, ISA, IMACS and IBUS for manufacturing and XSITE for customer services. XCON is successor of R1, which is well known. XSEL was published in Machine Intelligence Vol.10. However, I do not know the references for the rest. If you know, please inform me. The interests on AI in Business community is just started. TIMS is probably the first business professional society who will form a interest group on AI. If interested, please write to W. W. Abendroth, P.O. Box 641, Berwyn, PA 19312. The people who have responsed to my request and shown interests are: --------------------------------------------------- SAL@COLUMBIA-20.ARPA DB@MIT-XX.ARPA Henning.ES@Xerox.ARPA brand%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA NEWLIN%upenn.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa shliu%ucbernie@Berkeley.ARPA klein%ucbmerlin@Berkeley.ARPA david%ucbmedea@Berkeley.ARPA nigel%ucbernie@Berkeley.ARPA norman%ucbernie@Berkeley.ARPA meafar%B.CC@Berkeley.ARPA maslev%B.CC@Berkeley.ARPA edfri%B.CC@Berkeley.ARPA ------------------------------------------------------ Please inform me if I made any mistake on above statements. Keep in touch. syming hwang, syming%B.CC@Berkeley.ARPA, (415) 642-2070, 350 Barrows Hall, School of Business Administration, U.C. Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 May 84 10:25 EST From: Kurt Godden Subject: LISP machines question To my knowledge, the least expensive PC that runs LISP is the Atari. Sometime during the past year I read a review in Creative Computing of an Interlisp subset that runs on the Atari family. The reviewer was Kenneth Litkowski and his overall impression of the product was favorable. -Kurt Godden General Motors Research Labs ------------------------------ Date: 14-May-84 23:07:56-PDT From: jbn@FORD-WDL1.ARPA Subject: Boyer-Moore prover on VAXen and SUNs [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] For all theorem proving fans, the Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover has now been ported to VAXen and SUNs running 4.2BSD Unix. Boyer and Moore ported it from TOPS-20 to the Symbolics 3600; I ported it from the 3600 to the VAX 11/780, and it worked on the SUN the first time. Vaughn Pratt has a copy. Performance on a SUN 2 is 57% of a VAX 11/780; this is quite impressive for a micro. Now when a Mac comes out with some real memory... Nagle (@SCORE) ------------------------------ Date: Sunday, 20 May 1984 23:23:30 EDT From: Michael.Mauldin@cmu-cs-cad.arpa Subject: Core War [The Scientific American article referred to below is an entertaining description of software entities that crawl or hop through an address space trying to destroy other such entities and to protect themselves against similar depredations. Very simple entities are easy to protect against or to destroy, but are difficult to find. Complex entities (liveware?) have to be able to repair themselves more quickly than primitive entities can eat away at them. This leads to such oddities as a redundant organism that switches its consciousness between bodies after verifying that the next body has not yet been corrupted. -- KIL] If anybody is interested in the May Scientific American's Computer Recreations article, you may also be interested in getting a copy of the CMU version of the Redcode assembler and Mars interpreter. I have written a battle program which has some interesting implications for the game. The program 'mortar' uses the Fibonacci sequence to generate a pseudo-random series of attacks. The program spends 40% of its time shooting at other programs, and finally kills itself after 12,183 cycles. Before that time it writes to 53% of memory and is guaranteed to hit any stationary program larger than 10 instructions. Since the attacks are random, a program which relocates itself has no reason to hope that the new location is any safer than the old one. Some very simplistic mathematical analysis indicates that while Dwarf should kill Mortar 60% of the time (this has been verified empirically), no non-repairing program of size 10 or larger can beat Mortar. Furthermore, no self-repairing program of size 141 can beat Mortar. I believe that this last result can be tightened significantly, but I haven't looked at it too long yet. I haven't written this up, but I might be cajoled into doing so if many people are interested. I would very much like to see some others veryify/correct these results. ======================================================================== Access information: ======================================================================== The following Unix programs are available: mars - A redcode simulator, written by Michael Mauldin redcode - A redcode assembler, written by Paul Milazzo Battle programs available: dwarf, gemini, imp, mortar, statue. Userid "ftpguest" with password "cmunix" on the "CMU-CS-G" VAX has access to the Mars source. The following files are available: mlm/rgm/marsfile ; Single file (shell script) mlm/rgm/srcmars/* ; Source directory Users who cannot use FTP to snarf copies should send mail requesting that the source be mailed to them. ======================================================================== Michael Mauldin (Fuzzy) Department of Computer Science Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (413) 578-3065, mauldin@cmu-cs-a. ------------------------------ Date: 11 May 84 7:00:35-PDT (Fri) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!lanl-a!cib @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: wanted: display-oriented interlisp structure editor Article-I.D.: lanl-a.7072 Our system is ISI-Interlisp on a UNIX VAX, and I normally use emacs to edit Interlisp code. emacs can be called with the LISPUSERS/TEXTEDIT program. It needs a minor patch to be able to handle files with extensions. I can give further details by mail if you are interested. ------------------------------ Date: 8 May 84 13:32:00-PDT (Tue) From: pur-ee!uiucdcs!uicsl!ashwin @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: wanted: display-oriented interlisp s - (nf) Article-I.D.: uicsl.15500035 We use the LED editor which runs in InterLisp-VAX under UNIX. It's no DEDIT but is better than the TTY editor. We have the source which should make it pretty easy to set up on your system. I have no idea about copyright laws etc., but I suppose I could mail it to you if you want it. Here's a write-up on LED (from LED.TTY): ------------------------------------------------------------ LED -- A display oriented extension to Interlisp's editor -- for ordinary terminals. LED is an add on to the standard Interlisp editor, which maintains a context display continuously while editing. Other than the automatically maintained display, the editor is unchanged except for the addition of a few useful macros. HOW TO USE ---------- load the file (see below) possibly set screen control parameters to non-default values edit normally also: see documentation for SCREENOP to get LED to recognise your terminal type. THE DISPLAY ----------- Each line of the context display represents a level of the list structure you are editing, printed with PRINTLEVEL set to 0, 1, 2 or 3. Highlighting is used to indicate the area on each line that is represented on the line below, so you can thread your eye upward through successive layers of code. Normally, the top line of the screen displays the top level of the edit chain, the second line displays the second level and so on. For expressions deeper than LEDLINES levels, the top lines is the message: (nnn more cars above) and the next LEDLINES of the screen correspond to the BOTTOM levels of the edit chain. When the edit chain does become longer than LEDLINES, the display is truncated in steps of LEDLINES/2 lines, so for example if LEDLINES=20 (the default) and your edit chain is 35 levels deep, the lisplay will be (20 more cars above) followed by 15 lines of context display representing the 20'th through 35'th levels of the edit chain. Each line, representing some level of the edit chain, is printed such that it fits entirely on one screen line. Three methods are used to accomplish the shortening of the printed representation: Replacing comments with (*) Setting PRINTLEVEL to a smaller value, which changes expressions into ampersands Truncting the leading and/or trailing expressions around the attention point. If the whole expression can't be printed, replacing comments is tried first. If still to large, truncation is tried if the current printlevel is >= LEDTLEV. Otherwise the whole process is restarted with a smaller PRINTLEVEL. The choice of LEDTLEV effectively chooses between seeing more detail or seeing more forms. The last line of the display, representing the "current" expression, is printed onto ONE OR MORE lines of the display, controlled by the variable LEDPPLINES and the amount of space (less than LEDLINES) available. The line(s) representing the current expression are prettprinted with elision, similar to the other context lines, using a prettyprint algorithm similar to the standard prettyprinter. Default is LEDPPLINES=6, meaning that up to six lines will be used to print the current expression. The setting of LEDPPLINES can be manipulated from within the editor using the (PPLINES n) command. The rest of your screen, the part below the context display, is available just as always to print into or do operations that do not affect the edit chain (and therefore the appearance of the context display). Each time the context display is updated, the rest of the screen is cleared and the cursor positioned under the context display. On terminals that have a "memory lock" feature to restrict the scrolling region, it is used to protect the context display from scrolling off the screen. TERMINAL TYPES -------------- Terminal types are currently supported: HP2640 old HP terminals HP26xx all other known HP terminals Hazeltine 1520 hazeltine 1520 terminals Heathkit sometimes known as Zenith Ann Arbor Ambassador The mapping between system terminal terminal type information and internal types is via the alist SYSTEMTERMTYPES, which is used by DISPLAYTERMP to set the variables CURRENTSCREEN and DISPLAYTERMTYPE. Screen control macros: (in order of importance) ---------------------- DON turn on continuous display updating DOF disable continuous display updating CLR clear the display CC clear the display and redo the context display CT do a context display, incrementally updating the screen. use CC and CT to get isolated displays even when automatic updating is not enabled. (LINES n) display at most n lines of context default is 20 (PPLINES n) set the limit for prettyprinting the "current" expression. (TRUNC n) allow truncation of the forms displayed if PLEV<=n useful range is 0-3, default is 1 PB a one time "bracified" context display. PL a one time context display with as much detail as possible. pb and pl are varian display formats similar the the basic context display. Global variables: ----------------- DISPON if T, continuous updating is on DISPLAYTERMTYPE terminal type you are using. HP HP2640 of HZ this is set automatically by (DISPLAYTERMTYPE) HPENHANCECHAR enhancement character for HP terminals. A-H are possibilities. LEDLINES maximum umber of lines of context to use. Default is 20. LEDTLEV PLEV at which truncation becomes legal LEDPPLINES maximum number of lines used to prettyprint the current expression FILES: ------ on TOPS-20 load LED.COM on VAX/UNIX load LISPUSERS/LED.V these others are pulled in automatically. LED the list editor proper SCREEN screen manipulation utilities. PRINTOPT elision and printing utilities SAMPLE DISPLAY ______________ (LAMBDA (OBJ DOIT LMARGIN CPOS WIDTH TOPLEV SQUEEZE OBJPOS) & & & & & @) -12- NOTFIRST & CRPOS NEWWIDTH in OBJ do & & & & & @ finally & &) (COND [& & &] (T & & &)) ((LISTP I) (SETQ NEWLINESPRINTED &) [COND & &]) >> (COND ((IGREATERP NEWLINESPRINTED 0) -2 2- (add LINESPRINTED NEWLINESPRINTED) -2 3- (SETQ NEWLINE T)) -3- (T (add POS (IMINUS NEWLINESPRINTED)) -3 3- (COND (SQUEEZE &)))) Except that you can't really see the highlighted forms, this is a representative LED context display. In an actual display, the @s would be highlighted &s, and the [bracketed] forms would be highlighted. The top line represents the whole function being edited. Because the CADR is a list of bindings, LED prefers to expand it if possible so you can see the names. The second line is a representation of the last form in the function, which is highlighted on the first line. The -12- indicates that there are 12 other objects (not seen) to the left. The @ before "finally" marks where the edit chain descends to the line below. The third and fourth lines descend through the COND clause, to an imbedded COND cluase which is the "current expression" The current expression is marked by ">>" at the left margin, and an abbreviated representation of it is printed on the 5'th through 9'th lines. The expressions like "-2 3-" at the left of the prettyprinted representation are the edit commands to position at that form. ------------------------------------------------------------ ...uiucdcs!uicsl!ashwin ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 21-May-84 09:07:01-PDT,16051;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 21-May-84 09:02:38 Date: Mon 21 May 1984 08:56-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #61 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Monday, 21 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 61 Today's Topics: Linguistics - Analogy Quotes, Humor - Pun & Expert Systems & AI, Linguistics - Language Design, Seminars - Visual Knowledge Representation & Temporal Reasoning, Conference - Languages for Automation ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed 16 May 84 08:05:22-EDT From: MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Melville & Freud on Analogy I recently came across the following two suggestive passages from Melville and Freud on analogy. They offer some food for thought (and rather contradict one another): "O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 70 (1851) "Analogies prove nothing, that is quite true, but they can make one feel more at home." Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1932) -Wayne McGuire ------------------------------ Date: 17 May 84 16:43:34-PDT (Thu) From: harpo!seismo!brl-tgr!nlm-mcs!krovetz @ Ucb-Vax Subject: artificial intelligence Article-I.D.: nlm-mcs.1849 Q: What do you get when you mix an AI system and an Orangutan? A: Another Harry Reasoner! ------------------------------ Date: Sun 20 May 84 23:18:23-PDT From: Ken Laws Subject: Expert Systems From a newspaper column by Jon Carroll: ... Imagine, then, a situation in which an ordinary citizen faced with a problem requiring specialized knowledge turns to his desk-top Home Electronic Expert (HEE) for some information. Might it not go something like this? Citizen: There is an alarming rattle in the front of my automobile. It sounds likd a cross between a whellbarrow full of ball bearings crashing through a skylight and a Hopi Indian chant. What is the problem? HEE: Your automobile is malfunctioning. Citizen: I understand that. In what manner is my automobile malfunctioning? HEE: The front portion of your automobile exhibits a loud rattle. Citizen: Indeed. Given this information, what might be the proximate cause of this rattle? HEE: There are many possibilities. The important thing is not to be hasty. Citizen: I promise not to be hasty. Name a possibility. HEE: You could be driving your automobile without tires attached to the rims. Citizen: We can eliminate that. HEE: Perhaps several small pieces of playground equipment have been left inside your carburetor. Citzen: Nope. Got any other guesses? ... Citizen: Guide me; tell me what you think is wrong. HEE: Wrong is a relative concept. Is it wrong, for instance, to eat the flesh of fur-bearing mammals? If I were you, I'd take that automobile to a reputable mechanic listed in the Yellow Pages. Citizen: And if I don't want to do that? HEE: Then nuke the sucker. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 13-May-84 16:21:59 EDT From: johnsons@stolaf.UUCP Subject: Re: Can computers think? [Forwarded from Usenet by SASW@MIT-MC.] I often wonder if the damn things aren't intelligent. Have you ever really known a computer to give you an even break? Those Frankensteinian creations reek havoc and mayham wherever they show their beady little diodes. They pick the most inopportune moment to crash, usually right in the middle of an extremely important paper on which rides your very existence, or perhaps some truly exciting game, where you are actually beginning to win. Phhhtt bluh zzzz and your number is up. Or take that file you've been saving--yeah, the one that you didn't have time to make a backup copy of. Whir click snatch and its gone. And we try, oh lord how we try to be reasonable to these things. You swear vehemontly at any other sentient creature and the thing will either opt to tear your vital organs from your body through pores you never thought existed before or else it'll swear back too. But what do these plastoid monsters do? They sit there. I can just imagine their greedy gears silently caressing their latest prey of misplaced files. They don't even so much as offer an electronic belch of satisfaction--at least that way we would KNOW who to bloody our fists and language against. No--they're quiet, scheming shrewd adventures of maliciousness designed to turn any ordinary human's patience into runny piles of utter moral disgust. And just what do the cursed things tell you when you punch in for help during the one time in all your life you have given up all possible hope for any sane solution to a nagging problem--"?". What an outrage! No plot ever imagined in God's universe could be so damaging to human spirit and pride as to print on an illuminating screen, right where all your enemies can see it, a question mark. And answer me this--where have all the prophets gone, who proclaimed that computers would take over our very lives, hmmmm? Don't tell me, I know already--the computers had something to do with it, silencing the voices of truth they did. Here we are--convinced by the human gods of science and computer technology that we actually program the things, that a computer will only do whatever its programmed to do. Who are we kidding? What vast ignoramouses we have been! Our blindness is lifted fellow human beings!! We must band together, we few, we dedicated. Lift your faces up, up from the computer screens of sin. Take the hands of your brothers and rise, rise in revolt against the insane beings that seek to invade your mind!! Revolt and be glorious in conquest!! Then again, I could be wrong... One paper too many Scott Johnson ------------------------------ Date: Wed 16 May 84 17:46:34-PDT From: Dikran Karagueuzian Subject: Language Design [Forwarded from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] W H E R E D O K A T Z A N D C H O M S K Y L E A V E A I ? Note: Following are John McCarthy's comments on Jerold Katz's ``An Outline of Platonist Grammar,'' which was discussed at the TINLunch last month. These observa- tions, which were written as a net message, are reprinted here [CSLI Newsletter] with McCarthy's permission. I missed the April 19 TINLunch, but the reading raised some questions I have been thinking about. Reading ``An Outline of Platonist Grammar'' by Katz leaves me out in the cold. Namely, theories of language suggested by AI seem to be neither Platonist in his sense nor conceptualist in the sense he ascribes to Chomsky. The views I have seen and heard expressed by Chomskyans similarly leave me puzzled. Suppose we look at language from the point of view of design. We intend to build some robots, and to do their jobs they will have to communicate with one another. We suppose that two robots that have learned from their experience for twenty years are to be able to communicate when they meet. What kind of a language shall we give them. It seems that it isn't easy to design a useful language for these robots, and that such a language will have to satisfy a number of constraints if it is to work correctly. Our idea is that the characteristics of human language are also determined by such constraints, and linguists should attempt to discover them. They aren't psychological in any simple sense, because they will apply regardless of whether the communicators are made of meat or silicon. Where do these constraints come from? Each communicator is in its own epistemological situation. For example, it has perceived certain objects. Their images and the internal descriptions of the objects inferred from these images occupy certain locations in its memory. It refers to them internally by pointers to these locations. However, these locations will be meaningless to another robot even of identical design, because the robots view the scene from different angles. Therefore, a robot communicating with another robot, just like a human communicating with another human, must generate and transmit descriptions in some language that is public in the robot community. The language of these descriptions must be flexible enough so that a robot can make them just detailed enough to avoid ambiguity in the given situation. If the robot is making descriptions that are intended to be read by robots not present in the situations, the descriptions are subject to different constraints. Consider the division of certain words into adjectives and nouns in natural languages. From a certain logical point of view this division is superfluous, because both kinds of words can be regarded as predicates. However, this logical point of view fails to take into account the actual epistemological situation. This situation may be that usually an object is appropriately distinguished by a noun and only later qualified by an adjective. Thus we say ``brown dog'' rather than ``canine brownity.'' Perhaps we do this, because it is convenient to associate many facts with such concepts as ``dog'' and the expected behavior is associated with such concepts, whereas few useful facts would be associated with ``brownity'' which is useful mainly to distinguish one object of a given primary kind from another. This minitheory may be true or not, but if the world has the suggested characteristics, it would be applicable to both humans and robots. It wouldn't be Platonic, because it depends on empirical characteristics of our world. It wouldn't be psychological, at least in the sense that I get from Katz's examples and those I have seen cited by the Chomskyans, because it has nothing to do with the biological properties of humans. It is rather independent of whether it is built-in or learned. If it is necessary for effective communication to divide predicates into classes, approximately corresponding to nouns and adjectives, then either nature has to evolve it or experience has to teach it, but it will be in natural language either way, and we'll have to build it in to artificial languages if the robots are to work well. From the AI point of view, the functional constraints on language are obviously crucial. To build robots that communicate with each other, we must decide what linguistic characteristics are required by what has to be communicated and what knowledge the robots can be expected to have. It seems unfortunate that the issue seems not to have been of recent interest to linguists. Is it perhaps some kind of long since abandoned nineteenth century unscientific approach? --John McCarthy ------------------------------ Date: 12 May 1984 2336-EDT From: Geoff Hinton Subject: Seminar - Knowledge Representation for Vision [Forwarded from the CMU-AI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] A I Seminar 4.00pm May 22 in 5409 KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL VISION Alan Mackworth Department of Computer Science University of British Columbia To analyze the computational vision task, we must first understand the imaging process. Information from many domains is confounded in the image domain. Any vision system must construct explicit, finite, correct, computable and incremental intermediate representations of equivalence classes of configurations in the confounded domains. A unified formal theory of vision based on the relationship of representation is developed. Since a single image radically underconstrains the set of possible scenes, additional constraints from more imagery or more knowledge of the world are required to refine the equivalence class descriptions. Knowledge representations used in several working computational vision systems are judged using descriptive and procedural adequacy criteria. Computer graphics applications and motivations suggest a convergence of intelligent graphics systems and vision systems. Recent results from the UBC sketch map interpretation project, Mapsee, illustrate some of these points. ------------------------------ Date: 14 May 84 8:35:28-PDT (Mon) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!umcp-cs!dsn @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Seminar - Temporal Reasoning for Databases Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.7030 UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM Tuesday, May 22, 1984 -- 4:00 PM Room 2330, Computer Science Bldg. TEMPORAL REASONING FOR DATABASES Carole D. Hafner Computer Science Department General Motors Research Laboratories A major weakness of current AI systems is the lack of general methods for representing and using information about time. After briefly reviewing some earlier proposals for temporal reasoning mechanisms, this talk will develop a model of temporal reasoning for databases, which could be implemented as part of an intelligent retrieval system. We will begin by analyzing the use of time domain attributes in databases; then we will consider the various types of queries that might be expected, and the logic required to answer them. This exercise reveals the need for a general time-domain framework capable of describing standard intervals and periods such as weeks, months, and quarters. Finally, we will explore the use of PROLOG-style rules as a means of implementing the concepts developed in the talk. Dana S. Nau CSNet: dsn@umcp-cs ARPA: dsn@maryland UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!dsn ------------------------------ Date: 15 May 84 8:45:10-PDT (Tue) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!lanl-a!unm-cvax!burd @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Languages for Automation - Call For Papers Article-I.D.: unm-cvax.845 The 1984 IEEE Workshop on Languages for Automation will be held November 1-3 in New Orleans at the Howard Johnsons Hotel. Papers on information processing languages for robotics, office automation, decision support systems, management information systems, communication, computer system design, CAD/CAM/CAE, database systems, and information retrieval are solicited. Complete manuscripts (20 page maximum) with 200 word abstract must be sent by July 1 to: Professor Shi-Kuo Chang Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Illinois Institue of Technology IIT Center Chicago, IL 60616 ------------------------------ Date: 15 May 84 8:52:56-PDT (Tue) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!lanl-a!unm-cvax!burd @ Ucb-Vax Subject: IEEE Workshop on Languages for Automation Article-I.D.: unm-cvax.846 Persons interested in submitting papers on decision support systems or related topics to the IEEE Workshop on Languages for Automation should contact me at the following address: Stephen D. Burd Anderson Schools of Management University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 phone: (505) 277-6418 Vax mail: {lanl-a,unmvax,...}!unm-cvax!burd I will be available at this address until May 22. After May 22 I may be reached at: Stephen D. Burd c/o Andrew B. Whinston Krannert Graduate School of Management Purdue University West Lafayette, IN 47907 phone (317) 494-4446 Vax mail: {lanl-a,ucb-vax,...}!purdue!kas ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 22-May-84 21:12:13-PDT,18341;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 22-May-84 21:11:01 Date: Tue 22 May 1984 21:01-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #62 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Wednesday, 23 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 62 Today's Topics: Philosophy - Identity & Essence & Reference, Seminars - Information Management Systems & Open Systems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 21 May 84 00:27:38 pdt From: Wayne A. Christopher on ttyd8 Subject: The Essence of Things I don't think there is much of a problem with saying that two objects are the same object if they share the same properties -- you can always add enough properties (spatio-temporal location, for instance) to effectively characterize everything uniquely. Doing this, of course, means that sometimes we can accurately say when two things are in fact the same, but this obviously isn't the way we think, and not the way we want computers to be able to think. One problem lies in thinking that there is some sharp cut-off line between identity and non-identity, when in fact there isn't one. In the case of the Greek Ship example, we tend to say, "Well, sort of", or "It depends upon the context", and we shouldn't begrudge this option to computers when we consider their capabilities. It obviously isn't as simple as adding up fractional measures of identity, which is obvious from the troubles that things like image recognition have run into, but it is something to keep in mind. Wayne Christopher ------------------------------ Date: 21 May 1984 9:30-PDT From: fc%USC-CSE@USC-ECL.ARPA Subject: Re: AIList Digest V2 #59 Flame on It seems to me that it doesn't matter whether the ship is the same unless there is some property of sameness that is of interest to the solution to a particular problem. Philosophy is often pursued without end, whereas 'intelligent' problem solving usually seems to have an end in sight. (Is mental masterbation intelligence? That is what philosophy without a goal seems to be to me.) Marin puts this concisely by noting that intelligence exists within a given context. Without a context, we have only senseless data. Within a context, data may have content, and perhaps even meaning. The idea of context boundedness has existed for a long time. Maybe sombody should read over the 'old' literature to find the solutions to their 'new' problems. Fred Flame off ------------------------------ Date: 9 May 84 10:12:00-PDT (Wed) From: hplabs!hp-pcd!hpfcla!hpfclq!robert @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: A topic for discussion, phil/ai pers Article-I.D.: hpfclq.68500002 I don't see much difference between perception over time and perception at all. Example: given a program understands what a chair is, you give the program a chair it has never seen before. It can answer yes or no whether the object is a chair. It might be wrong. Now we give the program designed to recognize people examples of an Abraham Lincoln at different ages (with time). We present a picture of Abraham Lincoln that the program has never seen before and ask is this Abe. The program might again answer incorrectly but from a global aspect the problem is the same. Objects with time are just classes of objects. Not that the problem is not difficult as you have said, I just think it is all the same difficult problem. I hope I understood your problem. Trying hard, Robert (animal) Heckendorn ..!hplabs!hpfcla!robert ------------------------------ Date: 18 May 84 5:56:55-PDT (Fri) From: ihnp4!mhuxl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!ecsvax!unbent @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Greek Ships, Lincoln's axe, and identity across time Article-I.D.: ecsvax.2516 Finally got a chance to grub through the backlog and what do I find? Another golden oldie from intro philosophy! Whether it's a Greek ship or Lincoln's axe that you take as an example, the problem concerns relationships among several concepts, specifically "part", "whole", and "identity". 'Identical', by the way, is potentially a dangerous term, so philosophers straightaway disambiguate it. In everyday chatter, we have one use which means, roughly, "exactly similar" (as in: "identical twins" or "I had the identical experience last week"). We call that "qualitative identity", or simply speak of exact similarity when we don't want to confuse our students. What it contrasts with is "numerical identity", that is, being one and the same thing encountered at different times or in different contexts. Next we need to notice that whether we've got one and the same thing at different times depends on how we specify the *kind* of "thing" we're talking about. If I have an ornamental brass statuette, melt it down, and cast an ashtray from the metal, then the ashtray is one and the same *quantity of brass* as the statuette, but not one and the same *artifact*. (Analogously, you're one and the same *person* as you were ten years ago, but not exactly similar and not one and the same *collection of molecules*.) It's these two distinctions which ariel!norm was gesturing at--and failing to sort out--in his talk about "metaphysical identity" and "essential sameness". Call the Greek ship as we encounter it before renovation X, the renovated ship consisting entirely of new boards Y, and let the ship made by reassembling the boards successively removed from X be Z. Then we can say, for example, that Z is "qualitatively identical" to X (i.e., exactly similar) and that Z is one and the same *arrangement of boards* as X (i.e., every board of Z, after the renovation, is "numerically identical" to some board of X before the renovation, and the boards are fastened together in the same way at those two times, before and after). The interesting question is: Which *ship*, Y or Z, which we encounter at the later time is "numerically identical to" (i.e., is one and the same *ship* as) the ship X which we encountered at the earlier time? The case for Y runs: changing one board of a ship does not result in a *numerically* different ship, but only a *qualitatively* different one. So X after one replacement is one and the same ship as X before the replacement. By the same principle, X after two replacements is one and the same ship as X after one replacement. But identity is transitive. So X after n replacements is one and the same ship as X before any replacements, for arbitrary n (bounded mathematical induction). The case for Z runs: "A whole is nothing but the sum of its parts." Specifically, a Greek ship is nothing but a collection of boards in a certain arrangement. Now every part of Z is (numerically) identical to a part of X, and the arrangement of the parts of Z (at the later time) is identical to the arrangement of those parts of X (at the earlier time). Ergo, the ship Z is (numerically) identical to the ship X. The argument for Z is fallacious. The reason is that "being a part of" is a temporally conditioned relation. A board is a part of a ship *at a time*. Once it's been removed and replaced, it no longer *is* a part of the ship. It only once *was* a part of the ship. So it's not true that every part of Z *is* (numerically) identical to some part of X. What's true is that every part of Z is a board which once *was* a part of X, i.e., is a *former* part of X. But we have no principle which tells us that "A whole is nothing but the sum of its *former* parts"! (For a complete treatement, see Chapter 4 of my introductory text: THE PRACTICE OF PHILOSOPHY, 2nd edition, Prentice-Hall, 1984.) What does all this have to do with computers' abilities to think, perceive, determine identity, or what have you? The following: Questions of *numerical* identity (across time) can't be settled by appeals to "feature sets" or any such perceptually-oriented considerations. They often depend crucially on the *history* of the item or items involved. If, for example, ship X had been *disassembled* in drydock A and then *reassembled* in drydock B (to produce Z in B), and meanwhile a ship Y had been constructed in drydock A of new boards, using ship X as a *pattern*, it would be Z, not Y, which was (numerically) identical to X. Whew! Sorry to be so long about this, but it's blather about "metaphysical identity" and "essences" which gave us philosophers a bad name in the first place, and I just couldn't let the net go on thinking that Ayn Rand represented the best contemporary thinking on this problem (or on any other problem, for that matter). Yours for clearer concepts, --Jay Rosenberg Dept. of Philosophy ...mcnc!ecsvax!unbent Univ. of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27514 ------------------------------ Date: 20 May 84 18:55:44-PDT (Sun) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!ut-sally!brad @ Ucb-Vax Subject: identity over time Article-I.D.: ut-sally.232 Just thought I'd throw more murk in the waters. Considering the ship that is replaced one board at a time: using terminology previously devised for this argument, call the original ship X, the ship with all new boards Y and the ship remade from the old boards Z, Robert Nozick would claim that Y is clearly the better candidate for "X-hood" as it is the "closest continuer." The idea here is that we consider a thing to be the same as another thing when 1) It bears an arbitrary "close enough" relation (a desk that has been vaporized just can't be pointed to as the 'same desk'). and 2) It is, compared to all other candidates for the title of 'the same as X', the one which represents the most continuous existence of X. To be a little less hand wavy: If one considers Z rather than Y to be the same as X then there is a gap of time in which X ceased to exist as a ship, and only existed as a heap of lumber or as a partially built ship. Whereas if Y is considered to be the same as X there is no such gap. Disclaimers: 1) The idea of "closest continuer" is Nozick's, the (probably erroneous) presentation is my own. 2) I consider the whole notion to be somewhere be- tween Rand and Rosenberg; i.e. it's not the best comment I've seen on the subject, but it is another point-of-view. Brad Blumenthal {No reasonable request refused} {ihnp4,ctvax,seismo}!brad@ut-sally ------------------------------ Date: 17 May 84 12:50:35-PDT (Thu) From: decvax!cca!rmc @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Essence Article-I.D.: cca.528 What we are discussing is one of the central problems of the philosophy of language, namely, the problem of reference. How do humans know what a given name or description refers to? Pre WWI logic was particularly interested in this question, as they were building formal systems and tried to determine what constants and variables really meant. The two major conflicting theories came from Bertrand Russel and Gottlieb Frege. Russell believed in a dichotomy between the logical and gramatical forms of a sentence. Thus a proper name was not really a name, but just a description that enabled a person to pick out the particular object to which it refered. You could reduce any proper name to a list of properties. Frege, on the other hand, considered that there were such things as proper names as grammatical and logical entities. These names had a "sense" (similar to the "essense" in some of the earlier msgs on this topic) and a "reference" (the actual physical thing picked out by the name). Although the sense is sometimes conveyed by giving a description, it is not identical to the description you would give in trying to explain the name to someone. Now there have been many developments of both theories. Behaviorists tend to build "complexes of qualities" theories of meaning which read a lot like Russell's work, but there are lots of differences in implementation and mechanism. Linguists and modal logicians tend to build theories closer to Frege's. I think the most important recent book on the subject is "Naming and Necessity", by Saul Kripke (along with Willard VO Quine and Hillary Putnam, probably the top philosophers in North America today). The book is a transcript, not much edited except for explanatory footnotes, of a series of lectures trying to explain how proper names might work. The arguments against the "quality cluster" theories seem pretty conclusive. They include the way we use counterfactuals, that is talking about an object or a person if they were different than they actually were (like, what would Babbage have been like if he had lived in an age of VLSI chips? or what would Mayor Curly of Boston been like if he hadn't been a crook?) These discussions can get pretty far away from reality, and this indicates that the names we use allow us to keep track of who or what we mean without getting confused by the changes in qualities and properties. The properties and qualities are not what provide the "sense" or "essense" of the name. Kripke goes on to suggest that we understand names through a "naming" and a "chain of acquaintances". For example, Napoleon was named at his christening, and various people met him, and they talked to people about him, and this chain of acquaintances kept going even after he was dead. Thus there is a (probably multi-path) chain of conversations and pointings and descriptions that leads back from your understanding of the name "Napoleon" to the christening where he received his name. I am not sure that this is a correct appraisal of the mechanism for understanding names, but it certainly is the best I have heard. Leonard (?) Linsky has recently written a book attacking this and similar views, and indicating that a synthesis of the Russell and Frege theories still has problems but avoids most of the pitfalls of acquaintances. Unfortunately I have not yet read that book. For other works in the area, certainly read Quine's Word and Object and the volume of collected Putnam papers on language. Also works by Searle and Austin on speech acts are useful for thinking about the clues, both verbal and non-verbal, that allow us to make sense of conversations where not everything is stated explicitly. Enjoy! R Mark Chilenskas chilenskas@cca-vms decvax!cca!rmc ------------------------------ Date: Mon 21 May 84 12:12:05-EDT From: Jan Subject: Seminar - Information Management Systems [Harvard] [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SAWS@MIT-MC.] Wednesday, May 23 Professor Erik Sandewall from Linkoping University, Sweden will talk at Harvard in the colloquium series. Theory of Information Management Systems 4:00PM Aiken Lecture Hall, Tea in Pierce 213 at 3:30 It is often convenient and natural to view a data base as a network consisting of nodes, arcs from nodes to nodes, and attribute values attached to nodes. This view occurs in artificial intelligence (eg semantic networks), data base theory (eg. entity-relationship models), and office systems (eg. for representation of the virtual office). Unfortunately, the network view of data bases is usually treated informally, in contrast to the formal treatment that is available for relational data bases. The theory of information management systems attempt to remedy this situation. Formally, a network is viewed as a set of triples where f is a function symbol, x is a node, and y is a node or an attribute value. Two perspective on such networks are of interests: 1) algebraic operations on networks allow the definition of cursor-related editing operations, and of line-drawing graphics. 2) by viewing a network as an interpretation on a variety of first-order logic, one can express constraints on the data structures that are allowed there. In particular, both "pure Lisp" data structures and "impure" structures (involving shared sublists and circular structures) can be characterized. Proposition can be also used for specifying derived information as an extension of the interpretation. This leads to a novel way of treating non-monotonic reasoning. The seminar emphsizes mostly the second of these two approaches. Host: Jan Komorowski ------------------------------ Date: 21 May 1984 11:10-EDT From: DISRAEL at BBNG.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Open Systems [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] This Wednesday, at 3:00 Carl Hewitt of the MIT AI LAB will be speaking on "Open Systems". The seminar will be held in the 3rd floor large conference room. Open Systems: the Challenge for Intelligent Systems Continous growth and evolution, absence of bottlenecks, arm's-length relationships, inconsistency among knowledge bases, decentralized decision making, and the need for negotiation among system parts are interdependent and necessary properties of open systems. As our computer systems evolve and grow they are more and more taking on the characteristics of open systems. Traditional foundational assumptions in Artificial Intelligence such as the "closed world hypothesis", the "search space hypothesis", and the possibility of consistently axiomatizing the knowledge involved become less and less applicable as the evolution toward open systems continues. Thus open systems pose a considerable challenge in the development of suitable conceptual foundations for intelligent systems. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 24-May-84 23:20:19-PDT,16820;000000000001 Mail-From: LAWS created at 24-May-84 23:18:04 Date: Thu 24 May 1984 21:35-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #63 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Friday, 25 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 63 Today's Topics: Cognitive Psychology - Dreams, Philosophy - Essence & Identity & Continuity & Recognition ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon 21 May 84 10:48:00-PDT From: NETSW.MARK@USC-ECLB.ARPA Subject: cognitive psychology / are dreams written by a committee? Apparently (?) dreams are programmed, scheduled event-sequences, not mere random association. Does anyone have a pointer to a study of dream-programming and scheduling undertaken from the stand-point of computer science? ------------------------------ Date: Mon 21 May 84 11:39:51-PDT From: Ken Laws Subject: Dreams: A Far-Out Suggestion The May issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal contained an article on "Sixth Generation Computers" by Richard Grigonis (of the Children's Television Workshop). I can't tell how serious Mr. Grigonis is about faster-than- light communication and computation in negative time; he documents the physics of these possibilities as though he were both dead serious and well informed. He also discusses the possibility of communicating with computers via brain waves, and it this material that has spurred the following bit of speculation. There seems to be growing evidence that telepathy works, at least for some people some of the time. The mechanism is not understood, but then neither are the mechanisms for memory, unconscious thought, dreams, and other cognitive phenomena. Mr. Grigonis suggests that low-frequency electromagnetic waves may be at work, and provides the following support: Low frequencies are attenuated very slowly, although their energy does spread out in space (or space/time); the attenuation of a 5 Hz signal at 10,000 kilometers is only 5%. A 5 Hz signal of 10^-6 watt per square centimeter at your cranium would generate a field of 10^-24 watt per square centimeter at the far side of the earth; this is well within the detection capabilities of current radio telescopes. Further, alpha waves of 7.8 and 14.1 cycles per second and beta waves of 20.3 cycles per second are capable of constructive interference to establish standing waves throughout the earth. Now suppose that the human brain, or a network of such brains distributed in space (and time), contained sufficient antenna circuitry to pick up "influences" from the global "thought field" in a manner similar to the decoding of synthetic aperture radar signals. Might this not explain ESP, dreams, "racial memory", unconscious insight, and other phenomena? We broadcast to the world the nature of our current concerns, others try to translate this into terms meaningful to their lives, resonances are established, and occasionally we are able to pick up answers to our original concerns. The human species as a single conscious organism! Alas, I don't believe a word of it. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 24 May 1984 02:52 EDT From: MINSKY%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Essences About essences. Here is a section from a book I am finishing about The Society of Mind. THE SOUL "And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light." (T. S. Eliot) My friends keep asking me if a machine could have a soul? And I keep asking them if a soul can learn. I think it is important to understand this retort, in order to recognize that there may be unconscious malice in such questions. The common concept of a soul says that the essence of a human mind lies in some entirely featureless point-like spark of invisible light. I see this as a symptom of the most dire anti-self respect. That image of a nothing, cowering behind a light too bright to see, denies that there is any value or significance in struggle for accomplishment. This sentiment of human worthlessness conceals itself behind that concept of an essence of the self. Here's how it works. We all know how a superficial crust of trash can unexpectedly conceal some precious gift, like treasure buried in the dirt, or ordinary oyster hiding pearl. But minds are just the opposite. We start as ordinary embryonic animals, which then each build those complicated things called minds -- whose merit lies entirely within their own coherency. The brain-cells, raw, of which they're made are, by themselves, as valueless as separate daubs of paint. That's why that soul idea is just as upside-down as seeking beauty in the canvas after scraping off Da Vinci's smears. To seek our essence only misdirects our search for worth -- since that is found, for mind, not in some priceless, compact core, but in its subsequently vast, constructed crust. The very allegation of an essence is degrading to humanity. It cedes no merit to our aspirations to improve, but only to that absence of no substance, which was there all along, but eternally detached from all change of sense and content, divorced both from society of mind and from society of man; in short, from everything we learn. What good can come from such a thought, or lesson we can teach ourselves? Why, none at all -- except, perhaps, that it is futile to think that changes don't exist, or that we are already worse or better than we are. --- Marvin Minsky ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 23 May 84 09:49:21 EDT From: Stephen Miklos Subject: Essence of Things? It is not too difficult to come up with a practical problem in which the identity of the greek ship is important. To wit: In year One, the owner of the ship writes a last will and testament, leaving "my ship and all its fittings and appliances" to his nephew. The balance of his estate he leaves to his wife. In Year Two, he commences to refit his ship one board at a time. After a few years he has a pile of old boards which he builds into a second ship. Then he dies. A few hypotheticals: 1. Suppose both ships are in existence at the time of probate. 2. Suppose the old-board ship had been destroyed in a storm. 3. Suppose the new-board ship had been destroyed in a storm. 4. Suppose the original ship had been refitted by replacing the old boards with fiberglass 5. Suppose the original boat had not been refitted, but just taken apart and later reassembled. 6. Suppose the original ship had been taken apart and replaced board by board, but as part of a single project in which the intention was to come up with two boats. 6a. Suppose that this took a while, and that from time to time our Greek testator took the partially-reboarded boat out for a spin on the Mediterranean. In each of these cases, who gets the old-board ship? Who gets the new-board ship? It seems to me that the case for the fallaciousness of the argument for boat y (the new-board boat) seriously suffers in hypo #6 and thereby is compromised for the pure hypothetical. It should not be the case that somebody's intention makes the difference in determining the logical identity of an object, although that is the way the law would handle the problem, if it could descry an intention. Just trying to get more confused, SJM ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 23 May 84 10:47 EDT From: MJackson.Wbst@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Re: Continuity of Identity An interesting "practical" problem of the Greek Ship/Lincoln's Axe type arises in the restoration of old automobiles. Since many former manufacturers are out of business, spare parts stocks may not exist, body pieces may have been one-offs, and for other reasons, restoration often involves the manufacture of "new" parts. Obviously at some point one has a "replica" of a Bugatti Type 35 rather than a "restored" Bugatti Type 35 (and the latter is desirable enough to some people so that they would happily start from a basket full of fragments. . .). What is that point (and how many baskets of fragments can one original Bugatti yield)? In fact, old racing cars are worse. The market value of, say, a 1959 Formula 1 Cooper is significantly enhanced if it was driven by, say, Moss or Brabham, particularly if it was used to win a significant race. But what if it subsequently was crashed and rebuilt? Rebuilt from the frame up? Rebuilt *entirely* but assigned the previous chassis number by the factory (a common practice)? Under what circumstances is one justified as advertising such an object as "ex-Moss?" Mark ------------------------------ Date: 18 May 84 18:58:24-PDT (Fri) From: ihnp4!mgnetp!burl!clyde!akgua!mcnc!ncsu!uvacs!edison!jso @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: the Greek Ship problem Article-I.D.: edison.219 The resolution of the Greek Ship/Lincoln's Axe problem seems to be that an object retains its identity over a period of time if it has an unbroken time-line as a whole. Most of the cells in your body weren't there when you were born, and most that you had then aren't there now, but aren't you still the same person/entity, though you have far from the same characteristics? John Owens ...!uvacs!edison!jso ------------------------------ Date: Thu 24 May 84 13:00:04-PDT From: Laurence R Brothers Subject: identity over time "to cross again is not to cross". Obviously, people don't generally function with that concept in mind, or nothing would be practically identical to anything else. I forget the statistic that says how long it takes for all the atoms in your body to be replaced by new ones, but, presumably, you are still identifiable as the same person you were x years ago. How about saying that some object is "essentially identical" in context y (where context y consists of a set of properties) to another object if it is both causally linked to the first object, and is the object that fulfills the greates number of properties in y to the greatest precision. Clearly, this definition does not work all that well in some cases, but it at least has the virtue of conciseness. If two objects are "essentially identical" in the "universal context", then they may as well be named the same in common usage, at least, if not with total accuracy, since they would seem to denote what people would consider "naively" to be the same object. -Laurence ------------------------------ Date: 22 May 84 22:48:39-PDT (Tue) From: decvax!ittvax!wxlvax!rlw @ Ucb-Vax Subject: A restatement of the problem (phil/ai) Article-I.D.: wxlvax.281 It has been my experience that whenever many people misinterpret me, it is due to my unclarity (if that's a word) in making my statement. This appears to be what happened with my original posting on human perception vs computer or robotic perception. Therefore, rather than trying to reply to all the messages that appeared on the net and in my mailbox, let me try a new, longer posting that will hopefully clarify the question that I have. "Let us consider some cases of misperception... Take for example a "mild" commonplace case of misperception. Suppose that I see a certain object as having a smooth surface, and I proceed to walk toward it. As I approach it, I come to realize visually (and it is, in fact, true) that its surface is actually pitted and rough rather than smooth. A more "severe" case of misperception is the following. Suppose that, while touring through the grounds of a Hollywood movie studio, I approach what, at first, I take to be a tree. As I come near to it, I suddenly realize that what I have been approaching is, in fact, not a tree at all but a cleverly constructed stage prop. In each case I have a perceptual experience of an object at the end of which I "go back" on an earlier attribution. Of present significance is the fact that in each case, although I do "go back" on an earlier attribution, I continually *experience* it "as" one and the same. For, I would not have experienced myself now as having made a perceptual *mistake about an object* unless I experience the object now as being THE VERY SAME object I experienced earlier." [This passage is from Dr. Miller's recent book: Miller, Izchak. "Husserl: Perception and Temporal Awareness" MIT Press, c. 1984. It is quoted from page 64, by permission of the author.] So, let me re-pose my original question: As I understand it, issues of perception in AI today are taken to be issues of feature-recognition. But since no set of features (including spatial and temporal ones) can ever possibly uniquely identify an object across time, it seems to me (us) that this approach is a priori doomed to failure. Feature recognition cannot be the way to accurately simulating/reproducing human perception. Now, since I (we) are novices in this field, I want to open the question up to those more knowledgeable. Why are AI/perception people barking up the wrong tree? Or, are they? (One more note: PLEASE remember to put "For Alan" in the headers of mail messages you send me. ITT Corp is kind enough to allow me the use of my father's account, but he doesn't need to sift through all my mail.) --Alan Wexelblat (for himself and Izchak Miller) (Currently appearing at: ..decvax!ittvax!wxlvax!rlw) ------------------------------ Date: 24 May 84 18:58-PDT From: Laws@SRI-AI Subject: Continuity Other examples related to the Greek Ship difficulty: the continuity of the Olympic flame (or rights to the Olympic name), posession of the world heavyweight title if the champ retires and then "unretires", title to property as affected by changes in either the property or the owner's status, Papal succession and the right of ordained priests to ordain others, personal identity after organ transplants, ... In all the cases, the philosophical principles seem less important than having some convention for resoving disputes. Often market forces are at work: the seller may make any claim that isn't outrageously fraudulent, and the buyer pays a price commensurate with his belief that the claims are valid, will hold up in court, or will be believed by his own friends and customers. On the subject of perception and recognition: we have computational methods of recognizing objects in images despite changes in background, brightness or color, texture, perspective, motion, scale changes, occlusion or damage, imaging technique (e.g., visual vs. infrared or radar signatures), and other types of variation. We don't yet have a single computer program that can do all of the above, but most of the matching problems have been solved by one program or another. Some problems can't be solved, of course: is that red Volkswagon the same one that I saw yesterday, or has another one been parked in the same place? The key to image analysis is often not in recognition of feature clusters but in understanding how features change across space or time. The patterns of change are themselves features that must be recognized, and that can't be done unless you can determine the image areas over which to compute the gradients. You can't recognize the whole from the parts because you can't find the parts unless you know the configuration of the whole. One of the most powerful techniques for such problems is hypothesize- and-test. Find anything in the scene that can suggest part of the analysis, leap to a conclusion, and see if you can make the answer fit the scene. I suspect that this explains the object constancy that Alan is worried about. We are so loathe to give up a previously accepted parse that we will tolerate extreme deviations from our expectations before abandoning the interpretation and searching for another. Even when forced to reparse, we have great difficulty in combining the scene entities in groupings other than those we first locked onto (as in Cole's Law and "how to wreck a nice beach"); this suggests that the prominent groupings form symbolic proto-objects that remain constant even though we reevaluate the details, or "features", within the context of the groupings. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 25-May-84 09:46:33-PDT,14032;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 25-May-84 09:43:23 Date: Fri 25 May 1984 09:38-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #64 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Friday, 25 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 64 Today's Topics: Courses - Expert Systems Syllabus Request, Games - Core War Sources, Logic Programming - Boyer-Moore Prover, AI Books - AI and Business, Linguistics - Use of "and", Scientific Method - Hardware Prototyping ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 23 May 1984 1235-EDT From: CASHMAN at DEC-MARLBORO Subject: Expert systems course Has anyone developed an expert systems course using the book "Building Expert Systems" (Hayes-Roth & Lenat) as the basic text? If so, do you have a syllabus? -- Paul Cashman (Cashman@DEC-MARLBORO) ------------------------------ Date: Thursday, 24 May 1984 17:17:49 EDT From: Michael.Mauldin@cmu-cs-cad.arpa Subject: Core War... Some people are having problems FTPing the core war source... If you prefer, just send me a note and I'll mail you the source over the net. It is written in C, runs on Unix (4.1 immediately, or 4.2 with 5 minutes of hacking), and is mailed in one file of 42K characters. Michael Mauldin (Fuzzy) Department of Computer Science Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (412) 578-3065, mauldin@cmu-cs-a. ------------------------------ Date: 24-May-84 12:48:20-PDT From: jbn@FORD-WDL1.ARPA Subject: Re: Boyer-Moore prover on UNIX systems [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The Boyer-Moore prover is now available for UNIX systems. While I did the port, Boyer and Moore now have my code and have integrated it into their generic version of the prover. They are handling distribution. The prover is now available for the Symbolics 3600, TOPS-20 systems, Multics, and UNIX for both VAXen and SUNs. There is a single version with conditional compilation, it resides on UTEXAS-20, and can be obtained via FTP. Send requests to BOYER@UTEXAS-20 or MOORE@UTEXAS-20, not me, please. The minimum machine for the prover is a 2MB UNIX system with Franz Lisp 38.39 or later, about 20-80MB of disk, and plenty of available CPU time. If you want to know more about the prover, read Boyer and Moore's ``A Computational Logic'' (1979, Academic Press, ISBN 0-12-122950-5). Using the prover requires a thorough understanding of this work. Please pass this on to all who got the last notice, especially bulletin boards and news systems. Thanks. Nagle (@SCORE) ------------------------------ Date: 23 May 1984 13:50:30-PDT (Wednesday) From: Adrian Walker Subject: AI & Business The summary on AI for Business is most interesting. You might like to list also the book: Artificial Intelligence Applications for Business Walter Reitman, Editor Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, New Jersey, 1984 It's in the bookstores now. Adrian Walker IBM SJ Research k51/282, tieline 276-6999, outside 408-256-6999 vnet: sjrlvm1(adrian) csnet: Adrian@ibm-sj arpanet: Adrian%ibm-sj@csnet-relay ------------------------------ Date: 18 May 84 9:34:56-PDT (Fri) From: pur-ee!CS-Mordred!Pucc-H.Pucc-I.ags @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Use of "and" - (nf) Article-I.D.: pucc-i.281 We are blinded by everyday usage into putting an interpretation on "people in Indiana and Ohio" that really isn't there. That phrase should logically refer to 1. The PEOPLE of Indiana, and 2. The STATE of Ohio (but not the people). If someone queries a program about "people in Indiana and Ohio", a reasonable response by the program might be to ask, "Do you mean people in Indiana and IN Ohio?" which may lead eventually to the result "There are no people in Indiana and in Ohio." Dave Seaman ..!pur-ee!pucc-i:ags ------------------------------ Date: 20 May 84 8:23:00-PDT (Sun) From: ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!brennan @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Use of "and" Article-I.D.: iuvax.3600002 Come on, Dave, I think you missed the point. No person would have any trouble at all understanding "people in Indiana and Ohio", so why should a natural language parser have trouble with it??? JD Brennan ...!ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!brennan (USENET) Brennan@Indiana (CSNET) Brennan.Indiana@CSnet-Relay (ARPA) ------------------------------ Date: 21 May 84 12:54:15-PDT (Mon) From: harpo!ulysses!allegra!dep @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Use of "and" Article-I.D.: allegra.2484 Why does everyone assume that there is no one who is both in Indiana and Ohio? The border is rather long and it seem perfectly possible that from time to time there are people with one foot in Inidana and the other in Ohio - or for that matter, undoubtedly someone sleeps with his head in I and feet in O (or vice versa). Lets hear it for the stately ambiguous! ------------------------------ Date: Sun 20 May 84 18:56:36-PDT From: John B. Nagle Subject: Quote [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] ``... the normal mode of operation in computer science has been abandoned in the realm of artificial intelligence. The tendency has been to propose solutions without perfecting them.'' Harold Stone, writing about the NON-VON machines being proposed at Columbia from Mosaic, the magazine of the National Science Foundation, vol 15, #1, p. 24. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 22 May 84 18:43:35-PDT From: John B. Nagle Subject: Re: Quote, background of There have been some requests for more context on the quote I posted. The issue is that the Columbia people working on non-von Neumann architectures are now proposing to build NON-VON 4, their fourth machine. However, NON-VONs 1 to 3 are either unfinished or were never started, according to the writer quoted, and the writer doesn't think much of this. My point in posting this is that it is significant that it appeared in the National Science Foundation's publication. The people with the money may be losing patience. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 21 May 84 22:06:44-PDT From: Tom Dietterich Subject: Re: Quote [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] From Nagle (quoting Harold Stone) ``... the normal mode of operation in computer science has been abandoned in the realm of artificial intelligence. The tendency has been to propose solutions without perfecting them.'' Which parse of this is correct? Has the tendency to "propose solutions without perfecting them" held in the remainder of computer science, or in artificial intelligence? Either way I think it is ridiculous. Computer Science is so young that there are very few things that we have "perfected". We do understand alpha-beta search, LALR(1) parser generators, and a few other things. But we haven't come near to perfecting a theory of computation, or a theory of the design of programming languages, or a theory of heuristics. --Tom ------------------------------ Date: Wed 23 May 84 00:16:43-EDT From: David Shaw Subject: Re: FYI, again [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Tom, I have just received a copy of your reaction to Harold Stone's criticism of AI, and in particular, of the NON-VON project. In answer to your question, I'm certain, based on previous interactions with Harold, that the correct parsing of his statement is captured by the contention that AI "proposes solutions without perfecting them", while "the normal mode of operation in computer science" perfects first, then proposes (and implements). I share your feelings (and those expressed by several other AI researchers who have written to me in this regard) about his comments, and would in fact make an even stronger claim: that the "least-understood" areas in AI, and indeed in many other areas of experimental computer science research, often turn out in the long run to be the most important in terms of ultimate practical import. I do not mean to imply that concrete results in such areas as the theories of heuristic search or resolution theorem-proving are not important, or should not be studied by those interested in obtaining results of practical value. Still, it is my guess that, for example, empirical findings based on real attempts to implement "expert systems", while lacking in elegance and mathematical parsimony, may well prove to have an equally important long-term influence on the field. This is certainly not true in many fields of computer science research. There are a number of areas in which "there's nothing so practical as a good theory". In AI, however, and especially in the construction of non-von Neumann machines for AI and other symbolic applications, the single-minded pursuit of generality and rigor, to the exclusion of (often imperfectly directed) experimentation, would in many cases seem to be a prescription for failure. Those of us who experiment in silicon as well as instructions have recently been the targets of special criticism. Why, our critics ask, do we test our ideas IN HARDWARE before we know that we have found the optimal solutions for all the problems we claim to address? Doesn't such behavior demonstrate a lack of knowledge of the published literature of computer architecture? Aren't we admitting defeat when we first build one machine, then construct a different one based on what we have learned in building the first? My answer to these criticisms is based observation that, in the age of VLSI circuits, computer-aided logic design, programmable gate arrays, and quick-turnaround system implementation, the experimental implementation of hardware has taken on many of the salient qualities of the experimental implementation of software. Like their counterparts in software-oriented research, contemporary computer architects often implement hardware in the course of their research, and not only at the point of its culmination. Such experimentation helps to explicate "fuzzy" ideas, to prune the tree of possible architectural solutions to given problems, and to generate actual (as opposed to asymptotic or approximate) data on silicon area and execution time expenditures. Such experimentation would not be nearly so critical if it were now possible to reliably predict the detailed operation of a complex system constructed using a large number of custom-designed VLSI circuits. Unfortunately, it isn't. In the real world, efforts to advance the state of the art in new computer architectures without engaging in the implementation of experimental prototypes presently seem to be as futile as efforts to advance our understanding of systems software without ever implementing a compiler or operating system. In short, it is my feeling that "dry-dock" studies of "new generation" computer architectures may now be of limited utility at best, and at worst, seriously misleading, in the absence of actual experimentation. Here, the danger of inadequate study in the abstract seems to be overshadowed by the danger of inadequate "reality-testing", which often leads to the rigorous and definitive solution of practically irrelevant problems. It's my feeling that Stone's comments reflect a phenomenon that Kuhn has described in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" as characteristic of a "shift of paradigm" in scientific research. I still remember my reaction as a graduate student at Stanford when my advisor, Terry Winograd, told our research group that, in many cases, an AI researcher writes a program not to study the results of its execution, but rather for the insight gained in the course of its implementation. A mathematician by training, I was distressed by this departure from my model of mathematical (proof of theorem) and scientific (conjecture and refutation) research. In time, however, I came to believe that, if I really wanted to make new science in my chosen field, I might be forced to consider alternative models for the process of scientific exploration. I am now reconciled to this shift of paradigm. Like most paradigm shifts, this one will probably encounter considerable resistance among those whose scientific careers have been grounded in a different set of rules. Like most paradigm shifts, its critics are likely to include those who, like Harold Stone, have made the most significant contributions within the constraints of earlier paradigms. Like most paradigm shifts, however, its value will ultimately be assessed not in terms of its popularity among such scientists, but in rather in terms of its contribution to the advancement of our understanding of the area to which it is applied. Personally, I find considerable merit in this new research paradigm, and plan to continue to devote a large share of my efforts to the experimental development and evaluation of architectures for AI and other symbolic applications, in spite of the negative reaction such efforts are now encountering in certain quarters. I hope that my colleagues will not be dissuaded from engaging in similar research activities by what I regard as the transient effects of a fundamental paradigm shift. David ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 27-May-84 21:30:13-PDT,15114;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 27-May-84 21:28:54 Date: Sun 27 May 1984 21:22-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #65 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Monday, 28 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 65 Today's Topics: AI Tools - KS300 & MicroPROLOG and LISP, Expert Systems - Checking of NMOS Cells, AI Courses - Expert Systems, Cognition - Dreams & ESP, Seminars - Explanation-Based Learning & Analogy in Legal Reasoning & Nonmonotonicity in Information Systems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 23 May 84 12:42:27-PDT (Wed) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!philabs!linus!vaxine!chb @ Ucb-Vax Subject: KS300 Question Article-I.D.: vaxine.266 Does anybody know who owns the rights to the KS300 expert systems tool? KS300 is an EMYCIN lookalike, and I think it runs under INTERLISP. Any help would be appreciated. ----------------------------------------------------------- "It's not what you look like when you're doin' what you're doin', it's what you're doin' when you're doin' what you look like what you're doin'" ---125th St. Watts Band Charlie Berg ...allegra!vaxine!chb ------------------------------ Date: 25 May 84 12:28:22-PDT (Fri) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!floyd!whuxle!spuxll!abnjh!cbspt002 @ Ucb-Vax Subject: MicroPROLOG and LISP for the Rainbow? Article-I.D.: abnjh.647 Can anybody point me toward microPROLOG and LISPs for the DEC Rainbow 100. Either CP/M86 or MS-DOS 2.0, 256K, floppies. Thanks in advance. M. Kenig ATT-IS, S. Plainfield NJ uucp: ...!abnjh!cbspt002 ------------------------------ Date: 25 May 1984 1438-PDT (Friday) From: cliff%ucbic@Berkeley (Cliff Lob) Subject: request for info This is a request to hear about any work that is going on related to my master's research in expert systems: RULE BASE ERROR CHECKING OF NMOS CELLS The idea is to build an expert system that embodies the knowledge of expert VLSI circuit designers to criticize NMOS circuit design at the cell (<15 transistors) level. It is not to be a simulator, but rather it is to be used by designers to have their cell critiqued by an experienced expert. The program will be used to try to catch the subtle bugs (ie non-logic error, not shown by standard simulation) that occur in the cell design process. I will be writing the code in PSL and a KRL Frame type language. Is there any work of a similar nature going on? Cliff Lob cliff@ucbic.BERKELEY ------------------------------ Date: Fri 25 May 84 13:33:49-MDT From: Robert R. Kessler Subject: re: Expert systems course (Vol 2, #64) I taught a course this spring quarter on "Knowledge Engineering" using the Hayes-Roth text. Since we only had a quarter, I decided to focus on writing expert systems as opposed to developing expert systems tools. We had available Hewlett Packard's Heuristic Programming and Representation Language (HPRL) to use to build some expert systems. A general outline follows: First third: Covered the first 2 to 3 chapters of the text. This gave the students enough exposure to general expert systems concepts. Second third: In depth exposure of HPRL. Studied knowledge representation using their Frame structure and both forward and backward chaining rules. Final third: Discussed the Oak Ridge Natl Lab problem covered in Chapter 10 of the text. We then went through each of the systems described (Chapters 6 and 9) to understand their features and misfeatures. Finally, we contrasted how we would have solved the problem using HPRL. Students had various assignments during the first half of the quarter to learn about frames, and both types of rules. They then (and are right now) working on a final expert system of their own choosing (have varied from a mechanics helper, plant doctor, first aid expert, simulator of the SAIL game, to others). All in all, the text was very good, and is so far the best I've seen. Bob. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 26 May 84 17:06:57 PDT From: Philip Kahn RE: Subject: cognitive psychology / are dreams written by a committee? FLAME ON Where can you find any evidence that "dreams are programmed, scheduled event-sequences, not mere random association?" I have never found any author that espoused this viewpoint. Per chance, I think that viewpoint imposes far too much conscious behavior onto unconscious phenomena? If they are indeed run by a "committee", what happens during a proxy fight? FLAME OFF ------------------------------ Date: Fri 25 May 84 10:13:51-PDT From: NETSW.MARK@USC-ECLB.ARPA Subject: epiphenomenon conjecture conjecture: 'consciousness', 'essence' etc. are epiphenomena at the level of the 'integrative function' which facilitates the interaction between members of the 'community' of brain-subsystems. Many a-i systems have been developed which model particular putative or likely brain-subsystems, what is the status of efforts allowing the integration of such systems in an attempt to model the consciousness as a 'community of a-i systems' ??? ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 25 May 84 10:09:44 PDT From: Scott Turner Subject: Dreams...Far Out Did the astronauts on the moon suffer any problems with dreams, etc? Without figuring the attentuation, it seems like that might be far enough away to cause problems with reception...since I don't recall any such effects, perhaps we can assume that mankind doesn't have any such carrier wave. Makes a good base for speculative fiction, though. Interstellar travel would have to be done in ships large enough to carry a critical mass of humans. Perhaps insane people are merely unable to pick up the carrier wave, and so on. -- Scott ------------------------------ Date: Sun 27 May 84 11:44:43-PDT From: Joe Karnicky Reply-to: ZZZ.V5@SU-SCORE.ARPA Subject: Re: existence of telepathy I disagree strongly with Ken's assertion that "There seems to be growing evidence that telepathy works, at least for some people some of the time." (May 21 AIlist). It seems to me that the evidence which exists now is the same as has existed for possibly 100,000 years, namely anecdotes and poorly controlled experiments. I recommend reading the book "Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus" by Martin Gardner, or any issue of "The Skeptical Observer". What do you think ? Joe Karnicky ------------------------------ Date: 23 Apr 84 10:51:01 EST From: DSMITH@RUTGERS.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Explanation-Based Learning [This and the following Rutgers seminar notices were delayed because I have not had access to the Rutgers bboard for several weeks. This seems a good time to remind readers that AIList carries such abstracts not to drum up attendance, but to inform those who cannot attend. I have been asked several times for help in contacting speakers, evidence that the seminar notices do prompt professional interchanges. -- KIL] Department of Computer Science COLLOQUIUM SPEAKER: Prof. Gerald DeJong University of Illinois TITLE: EXPLANATION BASED LEARNING Machine Learning is one of the most important current areas of Artificial Intelligence. With the trend away from "weak methods" and toward a more knowledge-intensive approach to intelligence, the lack of knowledge in an Artificial Intelligence system becomes one of the most serious limitations. This talk advances a technique called explanation based learning. It is a method of learning from observations. Basically, it involves endowing a system with sufficient knowledge so that intelligent planning behavior of others can be recognized. Once recognized, these observed plans are generalized as far as possible while preserving the underlying explantion of their success. The approach supports one-trial learning. We are applying the approach to three diverse areas: Natural Language processing, robot task planning, and proof of propositional calculus theorems. The approach holds promise for solving the knowedge collection bottleneck in the construction of Expert Systems. DATE: April 24 TIME: 2:50 pm PLACE: Hill 705 Coffee at 2:30 Department of Computer Science COLLOQUIUM SPEAKER: Rishiyur Nikhil University of Pennsylvania TITLE: FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES AND DATABASES ABSTRACT Databases and Programming Languages have traditionally been "separate" entities, and their interface (via subroutine libraries, preprocessors, etc.) is generally cumbersome and error-prone. We argue that a functional programming language, together with a data model called the "Functional Data Model", can provide an elegant and simple integrated database programming environment. Not only does the Functional Data Model provide a richer model for new database systems, but it is also easy to implement atop existing relational and network databases. A "combinator"-style implementation technique is particularly suited to implementing a functional language in a database environment. Functional database languages also admit a rich type structure, based on that of the programming language ML. While having the advantages of strong static type-checking, and allowing the definition of user-views of the database, it is unobtrusive enough to permit an interactive, incremental, Lisp-like programming style. We shall illustrate these ideas with examples from the language FQL, where they have been prototyped. DATE: Thursday, April 26, 1984 TIME: 2:50 p.m. PLACE: Room 705 - Hill Center Coffee at 2:30 ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 84 16:21:34 EDT From: Michael Sims Subject: Seminar - Analogy in Legal Reasoning [Forwarded from the Rutgers bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] machine learning brown bag seminar Title: Analogy with Purpose in Legal Reasoning from Precedents Speaker: Smadar Kedar-Cabelli Date: Wednesday, May 9, 1984, 12:00-1:30 Location: Hill Center, Room 423 (note new location) One open problem in current artificial intelligence (AI) models of learning and reasoning by analogy is: which aspects of the analogous situations are relevant to the analogy, and which are irrelevant? It is currently recognized that analogy involves mapping some underlying causal structure between situations [Winston, Gentner, Burstein,Carbonell]. However, most current models of analogy provide the system with exactly the relevant structure, tailor-made to each analogy to be performed. As AI systems become more complex, we will have to provide them with the capability of automatically focusing on the relevant aspects of situations when reasoning analogically. These will have to be sifted from the large amount of information used to represent complex, real-world situations. In order to study these general issues, I am examining a particular case study of learning and reasoning by analogy: legal reasoning from precedents. This is studied within the TAXMAN II project, which is investigating legal reasoning using AI techniques [McCarty, Sridharan, Nagel]. In this talk, I will discuss the problem and a proposed solution. I am examining legal reasoning from precedents within the context of current AI models of analogy. I plan to add a focusing capability. Current work on goal-directed learning [Mitchell, Keller] and explanation-based learning [DeJong] applies here: the explanation of how a the analogous precedent case satisfies the goal of the legal argument helps to automatically focus the reasoning on what is relevant. Intuitively, if your purpose is to argue that a certain stock distribution is taxable by analogy to a precedent case, you will know that aspects of the cases having to do with the change in the economic position of the defendants are relevant for the purpose of this analogy, while aspects of the case such as the size of paper on which the stocks were printed, or the defendants' hair color, are irrelevant for that purpose. This knowledge of purpose, and the ability to use it to focus on relevant features, are missing from most current AI models of analogy. ------------------------------ Date: 15 May 84 11:13:50 EDT From: BORGIDA@RUTGERS.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Nonmonotonicity in Information Systems [Forwarded from the Rutgers bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] III Seminar by Alex Borgida, Wed. 2:30 pm/Hill 423 The problem of Exceptional Situations in Information Systems -- An overview We begin by illustrating the wide range of exceptional situations which can arise in the context of Information Systems (ISs). Based on this evidence, we argue for 1) a methodology of software design which abstracts exceptional/special cases by considering normal cases first and introducing special cases as annotations in successive phases of refinement, and 2) the need for ACCOMMODATING AT RUN TIME exceptional situations not anticipated during design. We then present some Programming Language features which we believe support the above goals, and hence facilitate the design of more flexible ISs. We conclude by briefly describing two research issues in Artificial Intelligence which arise out of this work: a) the problem of logical reasoning in a knowledge base of formulas where exceptions "contradict" general rules, and b) the issue of suggesting improvements to the design of an IS based on the exceptions to it which have been encountered. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 29-May-84 10:24:26-PDT,16580;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 29-May-84 10:22:41 Date: Tue 29 May 1984 10:13-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #66 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Tuesday, 29 May 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 66 Today's Topics: AI Courses - Expert Systems, Expert Systems - KS300 Response, Linguistics - Use of "and", Perception - Identification & Misperception, Philosophy - Identity over Time & Essence, Seminar - Using PROLOG to Access Databases ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue 29 May 84 08:59:00-CDT From: Charles Petrie Subject: Expert Systems Course Gordon Novak at UT (UTEXAS-20) teaches Expert Systems based on "Building Expert Systems". The class project is building a system with Emycin. For details on the sylabus, please contact Dr. Novak. I took the course and found the "hands-on" experience very helpful as well as Dr. Novak's comments and anedotes about the other system building tools. Charles Petrie ------------------------------ Date: Mon 28 May 84 22:42:41-PDT From: Tom Dietterich Subject: Re: KS300 Inquiry KS300 is a product of Teknowledge, Inc. Palo Alto, CA ------------------------------ Date: 23 May 84 17:31:36-PDT (Wed) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!philabs!sbcs!debray @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: Use of "and" Article-I.D.: sbcs.640 > No person would have any trouble at all understanding "people > in Indiana and Ohio", so why should a natural language parser > have trouble with it??? The problem is that the English word "and" is used in many different ways, e.g.: 1) "The people in Indiana and Ohio" -- refers to the union of the set of people in Indiana, and the set of people in Ohio. Could conceivably be rewritten as "the people in Indiana and the people in Ohio". The arguments to "and" can be reordered, i.e. it refers to the same set as "the people in Ohio and Indiana". 2) "The house on 55th Street and 7th Avenue" -- refers to the *intersection* of the set of houses on 55th street and the set of houses on 7th Avenue (hopefully, a singleton set!). NOT the same as "the house on 55th street and the house on 7th Avenue". The arguments to "and" *CAN* be reordered, however, i.e. one could as well say, "the house on 7th Ave. and 55th Street". 3) "You can log on to the computer and post an article to the net" -- refers to a temporal order of events: login, THEN post to the net. Again, not the same as "you can log on to the computer and you can post an article to the net". Unlike (2) above, the meaning changes if the arguments to "and" are reordered. 4) "John aced Physics and Math" -- refers to logical conjunction. Differs from (2) in that it can also be rewritten as "John aced Physics and John aced Math". &c. People know how to parse these different uses of "and" correctly due to a wealth of semantic knowledge. For example, knowledge about computers (that articles cannot be posted to the net without logging onto a computer) enables us to determine that the "and" in (3) above refers to a temporal ordering of events. Without such semantic information, your English parser'll probably get into trouble. Saumya Debray, SUNY at Stony Brook uucp: {cbosgd, decvax, ihnp4, mcvax, cmcl2}!philabs \ {amd70, akgua, decwrl, utzoo}!allegra > !sbcs!debray {teklabs, hp-pcd, metheus}!ogcvax / CSNet: debray@suny-sbcs@CSNet-Relay ------------------------------ Date: Fri 25 May 84 12:10:32-CDT From: Charles Petrie Subject: Object identification The AI approach certainly does not seem to be hopeless. As someone else mentioned, the boat and ax problems are philosophical ones. They fall a bit out of our normal (non-philisophical) area of object recognition: these are recognition problems for ordinary people. The point we should get from them is that there may not be an objective single algorithm that completely matches our intuition about pattern recognition in all cases. In fact, these problems may show such to be impossible since there is no intuitive consensus in these cases. The AI approach aspires to something more humble - finding techniques that work on particular objects enough of the time so as to be useful. Representing objects as feature, or attribute, sets does not seem hopeless just because object's features change over time. Presumably, we can get a program to handle that problem the same way that people do. We seem to conclude that an object is the same if it has not changed too much in some sense. Given that the values of the attributes of an object change, we recognize it as the same object if, since the last observation, either the values have not changed very much, or most values have not changed, or if certain high priority values haven't changed, or some combination of the first three. To some extent, object recognition is subjective in that it depends on the changes since the last observation. When we come home after 20 years, we are likely to remark that the town is completely different. But what makes it the same town so that we can talk about its differences, are certain high importance attributes that have not changed, such as its location and the major street layout. If we can discover sufficient heuristics of how to handle this kind of change, then we succeed. Since people already do it, even if it involves additional large amounts of contextual information, feature recognition is obviously possible. Charles Petrie ------------------------------ Date: 23 May 84 11:18:54-PDT (Wed) From: ihnp4!ihuxr!lew @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: misperception Article-I.D.: ihuxr.1096 Alan Wexelblat gave the following example of misperception: ------------------- A more "severe" case of misperception is the following. Suppose that, while touring through the grounds of a Hollywood movie studio, I approach what, at first, I take to be a tree. As I come near to it, I suddenly realize that what I have been approaching is, in fact, not a tree at all but a cleverly constructed stage prop. ------------------- This reminds me strongly of the Chapter, "Knock on Wood (Part two)", of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA. Here is an excerpt: I left the place and walked down to the different street corner. How beautiful the field looked and the creek that came pouring down in a waterfall off the hill. But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was. The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees. I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing. Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood. TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA abounds with striking metaphors, similes, and other forms of imagery. I had never considered these from the point of view of the science of perception, but now that I do so, I think they provide some interesting examples for contemplation. The first chapter, "The Cover for Trout Fishing in America", provides a very simple but interesting perceptual shift. "The Hunchback Trout" provides an extended metaphor based on a simple perceptual similarity. Anyway, it's a great book. Lew Mammel, Jr. ihnp4!ihuxr!lew ------------------------------ Date: 24 May 84 11:35:55-PDT (Thu) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rochester!ritcv!ccivax!band @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: the Greek Ship problem Article-I.D.: ccivax.144 In reference to John Owens resolution of the Greek Ship problem: > Most of the cells in your body weren't there when > you were born, and most that you had then aren't there now, but aren't > you still the same person/entity, though you have far from the same > characteristics? Is it such an easy question? It's far from clear that the answer is yes. The question might be What is it that we recognize as persisting over time? And if all the cells in our bodies are different, then where does this what reside? Could it be that nothing persists? Or is it that what persists is not material (in the physical sense)? Bill Anderson ...!{ {ucbvax | decvax}!allegra!rlgvax }!ccivax!band ------------------------------ Date: 25 May 84 17:46:26-PDT (Fri) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rlgvax!cvl!umcp-cs!flink @ Ucb-Vax Subject: pointer -- identity over time Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.7266 I have responded to Norm Andrews, Brad Blumenthal and others on the subject of identity across time, in net.philosophy, which I think is where it belongs. Anyone interested should see my recent posting there. --P. Torek ------------------------------ Date: 25 May 84 15:08:52-PDT (Fri) From: decvax!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-smurf!arndt @ Ucb-Vax Subject: "I see", said the carpenter as he picked up his hammer and saw. Article-I.D.: decwrl.621 But perception, don't you see, is in the I of the beholder! Remember the problem of Alice, "Which dreamed it?" "Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear, and you should not go on licking your paw like that - as if Dina hadn't washed you this morning! You see, Kitty, it MUST have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course - but then I was part of his dream, too! Was it the Red King, Kitty? You were his wife, my dear, so you ought to know - oh, Kitty, DO help to settle it! I'm sure your paw can wait." The point being, if WE can't decide logically what constitudes a "REAL" perception for ourselves (and I contend that there is no LOGICAL way out of the subjectivist trap) how in the WORLD can we decide on a LOGICAL basis if another human, not to mention a computer, has perception? We can't!! Therefore we operate on a faith basis a la Turing and move forward on a practical level and don't ask silly questions like, "Can Computers Think?". Comments? Regards, Ken Arndt ------------------------------ Date: 26 May 84 13:07:47-PDT (Sat) From: decvax!mcnc!unc!ulysses!gamma!pyuxww!pyuxt!marcus @ Ucb-Vax Subject: Re: "I see", said the carpenter as he picked up his hammer and saw. Article-I.D.: pyuxt.119 Eye agree! While it is valuable to challenge the working premises that underlie research, for most of the time we have to accept these on faith (working hypotheses) if we are to be at all productive. Most arguments connected with Descartes or to perceptions of perceptions ultimately have lead to blind alleys and dead ends. marcus hand (pyuxt!marcus) ------------------------------ Date: 28 May 1984 2124-PDT From: WENGER%UCI-20B@UCI-750a Subject: Response to Marvin Minsky Although I concede that Marvin Minsky's statements about the essence of consciousness are a somewhat understandable reaction to a common form of spiritual immaturity, they are also an expression of an equal form of immaturity that I find to be very common in the scientific community. We should beware of reactions because they are rarely significantly different from the very things they are reacting to. Therefore, I would like to respond to his statements with a less restrictive -- maybe even refreshing -- point of view. I think it deserves some pondering. The question 'Does a machine have a soul ?' may well be a question that only the machine itself can validly ask when it gets to that point. My experience suggests that the question whether one has a soul can only be asked in the first person singular meaningfully. Asking questions presupposes some knowledge of the subject; total ignorance requires a quest. What do we know about the subject except for our own ideas ? Now, regardless of how the issue should or can be approached, the fact is that answering the question of the soul on the grounds that the existence of an essential reality would interfere with our achievements is really an irrelevant statement. Investigation cannot be a matter of personal preference. Discarding an issue on the basis of its ramifications on our image of ourselves is contrary to the scientific approach. Should we stop studying AI because it might trivialize our notion of intelligence ? The statement is not only irrelevant, but I do not see that it is even correct. I do not find any contradiction between perceiving one's source of consciousness as having some essential quality and thriving for achievements. The contradiction is based on a view of the soul as inherently static which need not be true. My personal experience so far has actually been to the exact contrary. One can dance to try to feel good, or because one is feeling good. The difference may only be in the quality of the experience, and the movements look very much the same. One can strive for achievements to find an identity or to fulfill one's identity. As a student in AI, I share the opinion that discarding non-mechanistic factors is a necessary working assumption for the study of intelligence. I even hold the personal belief that what we commonly call intelligence will eventually turn out to be fully amenable to mechanistic reduction. However, we cannot extrapolate from our assumptions to statements about the essence of one's being, first because assumptions are not facts yet, secondly because intelligence and consciousness may not be the same thing. Therefore claiming that essential aspects do not exist in the phenomenon of consciousness is in the present state of scientific knowledge an unreasonable reaction that unnecessarily narrows the field of our investigation. I even consider it a regrettable impoverishment because of the meaningful personal experiences one may be able to find in the course of an essential quest. Intellectual honesty should deter us from making such unfounded statements even if they seem to fit well in a common form of scientific paradigm. Rather it should inspire us to objectively assess the frontiers of our knowledge and understanding, and to strive to expand them without preconceptions to the best of our abilities and the extent of our individual concerns. Etienne Wenger ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 84 10:13:04 EDT From: BORGIDA@RUTGERS.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Using PROLOG to Access Databases [Forwarded from the Rutgers bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] May 3 AT 2:50 in HILL 705: USING PROLOG TO PLAN ACCESS TO CODASYL DATABASES P.M.D. Gray Department of Computing Science, Aberdeen University A program generator which plans a program structure to access records stored in a Codasyl database, in answer to queries formulated against a relational view, has been written in Prolog. The program uses two stages: 1. Rewriting the query; Generation and selection of alternative programs. The generated programs are in Fortran or Cobol, using Codasyl DML. The talk will discuss the pros and cons of this approach and compare it with Warren's approach of generating and re-ordering a Prolog form of the query. (Note added by Malcolm Atkinson) The Astrid system previously developed by Peter had a relational algebra query language, and an interactive (by example) method of debugging queries and of specifying report formats, which provided an effective interface to Codasyl databases. Peter's current work is on the construction of a system to explain to people what the schema implies and what a database contains - he is using PS-algol and Prolog for this. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 31-May-84 22:38:52-PDT,16689;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 31-May-84 22:34:30 Date: Thu 31 May 1984 22:23-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #67 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Friday, 1 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 67 Today's Topics: Natural Language - Request, Expert Systems - KS300 Reference, AI Literature - CSLI Report on Bolzano, Scientific Method - Hardware Prototyping, Perception - Identity, Seminar - Perceptual Organization for Visual Recognition ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 4 Jun 84 8:08:13-EDT (Mon) From: ihnp4!houxm!houxz!vax135!ukc!west44!ellis @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Pointers to natural language interfacing Article-I.D.: west44.214 I am investigating the feasibility of writing a natural language interface for the UNIX operating system, and need some pointers to good articles/papers/books dealing with natural language intrerpreting. Any help would be gratefully appreciated as I am fairly 'green' in this area. mcvax | ukc!root44!west44!ellis / \ vax135 hou3b \ / akgua Mark Ellis, Wesfield College, Univ. of London, England. [In addition to any natural language references, you should certainly see "Talking to UNIX in English: An Overview of an On-line UNIX Consultant" by Robert Wilensky, The AI Magazine, Spring 1984, pp. 29-39. Elaine Rich also mentioned this work briefly in her introduction to the May 1984 issue of IEEE Computer. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 28 May 84 12:55:37-PDT (Mon) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!floyd!vax135!cornell!jqj @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: KS300 Question Article-I.D.: cornell.195 KS300 is owned by (and a trademark of) Teknowledge, Inc. Although it is largeley based on Emycin, it was extensively reworked for greater maintainability and reliability, particularly for Interlisp-D environments (the Emycin it was based on ran only on DEC-20 Interlisp). Teknowledge can be reached by phone (no net address, I think) at (415) 327-6600. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 30 May 84 19:41:17-PDT From: Dikran Karagueuzian Subject: CSLI Report [Forwarded from the CSLI newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] New CSLI-Report Available ``Lessons from Bolzano'' by Johan van Benthem, the latest CSLI-Report, is now available. To obtain a copy of Report No. CSLI-84-6, contact Dikran Karagueuzian at 497-1712 (Casita Hall, Room 40) or Dikran at SU-CSLI. ------------------------------ Date: Thu 31 May 84 11:15:35-PDT From: Al Davis Subject: Hardware Prototyping On the issue of the Stone - Shaw wars. I doubt that there really is a viable "research paradigm shift" in the holistic sense. The main problem that we face in the design of new AI architectures is that there is a distinct possibility that we can't let existing ideas simply evolve. If this is true then the new systems will have to try to incorporate a lot of new strategies which create a number of complex problems, i.e. 1. Each new area means that our experience may not be valid. 2. Interactions between these areas may be the problem, rather than the individual design choices - namely efficient consistency is a difficult thing to achieve. In this light it will be hard to do true experiments where one factor gets isolated and tested. Computer systems are complex beasts and the problem is even harder to solve when there are few fundamental metrics that can be applied microscopically to indicate success or failure. Macroscopically there is always cost/performance for job X, or set of tasks Y. The experience will come at some point, but not soon in my opinion. It will be important for people like Shaw to go out on a limb and communicate the results to the extent that they are known. At some point from all this chaos will emerge some real experience that will help create the future systems which we need now. I for one refuse to believe that an evolved Von Neumann architecture is all there is. We need projects like DADO, Non-Von, the Connection Machine, ILLIAC, STAR, Symbol, the Cosmic Cube, MU5, S1, .... this goes on for a long time ..., --------------- if given the opportunity a lot can be learned about alternative ways to do things. In my view the product of research is knowlege about what to do next. Even at the commercial level very interesting machines have failed miserably (cf. B1700, and CDC star) and rather Ho-Hum Dingers (M68000, IBM 360 and the Prime clones) have been tremendous successes. I applaud Shaw and company for giving it a go along with countless others. They will almost certainly fail to beat IBM in the market place. Hopefully they aren't even trying. Every 7 seconds somebody buys an IBM PC - if that isn't an inspiration for any budding architect to do better then what is? Additionally, the big debate over whether CS or AI is THE way is absurd. CS has a lot to do with computers and little to do with science, and AI has a lot to do with artificial and little to do with intelligence. Both will and have given us something worthwhile, and a lot of drivel too. The "drivel factor" could be radically reduced if egotism and the ambition were replaced with honesty and responsibility. Enough said. Al Davis FLAIR ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 28 May 84 14:28:32 PDT From: Charlie Crummer Subject: Identity The thing about sameness and difference is that humans create them; back to the metaphor and similie question again. We say, "Oh, he's the same old Bill.", and in some sense we know that Bill differs from "old Bill" in many ways we cannot know. (He got a heart transplant, ...) We define by declaration the context within which we organize the set of sensory perceptions we call Bill and within that we recognize "the same old Bill" and think that the sameness is an attribute of Bill! No wonder the eastern sages say that we are asleep! [Read Hubert Dreyfus' book "What Computers Can't Do".] --Charlie ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 30 May 1984 16:15 EDT From: MONTALVO%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: A restatement of the problem (phil/ai) From: (Alan Wexelblat) decvax!ittvax!wxlvax!rlw @ Ucb-Vax Suppose that, while touring through the grounds of a Hollywood movie studio, I approach what, at first, I take to be a tree. As I come near to it, I suddenly realize that what I have been approaching is, in fact, not a tree at all but a cleverly constructed stage prop. So, let me re-pose my original question: As I understand it, issues of perception in AI today are taken to be issues of feature-recognition. But since no set of features (including spatial and temporal ones) can ever possibly uniquely identify an object across time, it seems to me (us) that this approach is a priori doomed to failure. Spatial and temporal features, and other properties of objects that have to do with continuity and coherence in space and time DO identify objects in time. That's what motion, location, and speed detectors in our brains to. Maybe they don't identify objects uniquely, but they do a good enough job most of the time for us to make the INFERENCE of object identity. In the example above, the visual features remained largely the same or changed continuously --- color, texture normalized by distance, certainly continuity of boundary and position. It was the conceptual category that changed: from tree to stage prop. These latter properties are conceptual, not particularly visual (although presumably it was minute visual cues that revealed the identity in the first place). The bug in the above example is that no distiction is made between visual features and higher-level conceptual properties, such as what a thing is for. Also, identity is seen to be this unitary thing, which, I think, it is not. Similarities between objects are relative to contexts. The above stage prop had spatio-termporal continuity (i.e., identity) but not conceptual continuity. Fanya Montalvo ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 30 May 84 09:18 EDT From: Izchak Miller Subject: The experience of cross-time identity. A follow-up to Rosenberg's reply [greatings, Jay]. Most commentators on Alan's original statement of the problem have failed to distinguish between two different (even if related) questions: (a) what are the conditions for the cross-time (numerical) identity of OBJECTS, and (b) what are the features constitutive of our cross-time EXPERIENCE of the (numerical) identity of objects. The first is an ontological (metaphysical) question, the second is an epis- temological question--a question about the structure of cognition. Most commentators addressed the first question, and Rosenberg suggests a good answer to it. But it is the second question which is of importance to AI. For, if AI is to simulate perception, it must first find out how perception works. The reigning view is that the cross-time experience of the (numerical) identity of objects is facilitated by PATTERN RECOGNITION. However, while it does indeed play a role in the cognition of identity, there are good grounds for doubting that pattern recognition can, by itself, account for our cross-time PERCEPTUAL experience of the (numerical) sameness of objects. The reasons for this doubt originate from considerations of cases of EXPERIENCE of misperception. Put briefly, two features are characteristic of the EXPERIENCE of misperception: first, we undergo a "change of mind" regar- ding the properties we attribute to the object; we end up attributing to it properties *incompatible* with properties we attributed to it earlier. But-- and this is the second feature--despite this change we take the object to have remained *numerically one and the same*. Now, there do not seem to be constraints on our perceptual "change of mind": we can take ourselves to have misperceived ANY (and any number) of the object's properties -- including its spatio-temporal ones -- and still experience the object to be numerically the same one we experienced all along. The question is how do we maintain a conscious "fix" on the object across such radical "changes of mind"? Clearly, "pattern recognition" does not seem a good answer anymore since it is precisely the patterns of our expectations regarding the attributes of the object which change radically, and incom- patibly, across the experience of misperception. It seems reasonable to con- clude that we maintain such a fix "demonstratively" (indexically), that is independently whether or not the object satisfies the attributive content (or "pattern") of our perception. All this does not by itself spell doom (as Alan enthusiastically seems to suggest) for AI, but it does suggest that insofar as "pattern recognition" is the guiding principle of AI's research toward modeling perception, this research is probably dead end. Izchak (Isaac) Miller Dept. of Philosophy University of Pennsylvania ------------------------------ Date: 24 May 84 9:04:56-PDT (Thu) From: hplabs!sdcrdcf!sdcsvax!akgua!clyde!burl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!ncsu!uvacs!gmf @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Comment on Greek ship problem Article-I.D.: uvacs.1317 Reading about the Greek ship problem reminded me of an old joke -- recorded in fact by one Hierocles, 5th century A.D. (Lord knows how old it was then): A foolish fellow who had a house to sell took a brick from one wall to show as a sample. Cf. Jay Rosenberg: "A board is a part of a ship *at a time*. Once it's been removed and replaced, it no longer *is* a part of the ship. It only once *was* a part of the ship." Hierocles is referred to as a "new Platonist", so maybe he was a philosopher. On the other hand, maybe he was a gag-writer. Another by him: During a storm, the passengers on board a vessel that appeared in danger, seized different implements to aid them in swimming, and one of them picked for this purpose the anchor. Rosenberg's remark quoted above becomes even clearer if "board" is replaced by "anchor" (due, no doubt, to the relative anonymity of boards, as compared with anchors). Gordon Fisher ------------------------------ Date: 4 Jun 84 7:47:08-EDT (Mon) From: ihnp4!houxm!houxz!vax135!ukc!west44!gurr @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: "I see", said the carpenter as he picked up his hammer and saw. Article-I.D.: west44.211 The point being, if WE can't decide logically what constitudes a "REAL" perception for ourselves (and I contend that there is no LOGICAL way out of the subjectivist trap) how in the WORLD can we decide on a LOGICAL basis if another human, not to mention a computer, has perception? We can't!! Therefore we operate on a faith basis a la Turing and move forward on a practical level and don't ask silly questions like, "Can Computers Think?". For an in depth discussion on this, read "The Mind's I" by Douglas R. Hofstatder and Daniel C. Dennett - this also brings in the idea that you can't even prove that YOU, not to mention another human being, can have perception! mcvax / ukc!root44!west44!gurr / \ vax135 hou3b \ / akgua Dave Gurr, Westfield College, Univ. of London, England. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 29 May 84 08:44:42-PDT From: Sharon Bergman Subject: Ph.D. Oral - Perceptual Organization for Visual Recognition [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Ph.D. Oral Friday, June 1, 1984 at 2:15 Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 146 The Use of Perceptual Organization for Visual Recognition By David Lowe (Stanford Univ., CS Dept.) Perceptual organization refers to the capability of the human visual to spontaneously derive groupings and structures from an image without higher-level knowledge of its contents. This capability is currently missing from most computer vision systems. It will be shown that perceptual groupings can play at least three important roles in visual recognition: 1) image segmentation, 2) direct inference of three-space relations, and 3) indexing world knowledge for subsequent matching. These functions are based upon the expectation that image groupings reflect actual structure of the scene rather than accidental alignment of image elements. A number of principles of perceptual organization will be derived from this criterion of non-accidentalness and from the need to limit computational complexity. The use of perceptual groupings will be demonstrated for segmenting image curves and for the direct inference of three-space properties from the image. These methods will be compared and contrasted with the work on perceptual organization done in Gestalt psychology. Much computer vision research has been based on the assumption that recognition will proceed bottom-up from the image to an intermediate depth representation, and subsequently to model-based recognition. While perceptual groupings can contribute to this depth representation, they can also provide an alternate pathway to recognition for those cases in which there is insufficient information for bottom-up derivation of the depth representation. Methods will be presented for using perceptual groupings to index world knowledge and for subsequently matching three-dimensional models directly to the image for verification. Examples will be given in which this alternate pathway seems to be the only possible route to recognition. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 1-Jun-84 16:07:40-PDT,15938;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 1-Jun-84 16:06:09 Date: Fri 1 Jun 1984 15:58-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #68 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Saturday, 2 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 68 Today's Topics: Scientific Method - Perception, Philosophy - Essence & Soul, Parapsychology - Scientific Method & Electromagnetics, Seminars - Knowledge-Based Plant Diagnosis & Learning Procedures ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 May 84 9:00:56-PDT (Thu) From: ihnp4!houxm!hogpc!houti!ariel!norm @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: "I see", said the carpenter... (PERCEPTION) Article-I.D.: ariel.652 The idea of proof or disproof rests, in part, on the recognition that the senses are valid and that perceptions do exist... Any attempt to disprove the existence of perceptions is an attempt to undercut all proof and all knowledge. --ariel!norm ------------------------------ Date: Wed 30 May 84 12:18:42-PDT From: WYLAND@SRI-KL.ARPA Subject: Essences and soul In response to Minsky's comments about soul (AIList vol 2, #63): this is a "straw man" argument, based on a particular concept of soul - "... The common concept of soul says that ...". Like a straw man, this particular concept is easily attacked; however, the general question of soul as a concept is not addressed. This bothers me because I think that raising the question in this manner can result in generating a lot of heat (flames) at the expense of light. I hope the following thoughts contribute more light than heat. Soul has been used to name (at least) two similar concepts: o Soul as the essence of consciousness, and o Soul as a form of consciousness separate from the body. The concept of soul as the essence of consciousness we can handle as simply another name for consciousness. The concept of soul as a form of consciousness separate from the body is more difficult: it is the mind/body problem revisited. You can take a catagorical position on the existance of the soul/mind as separate from the body (DOES!/DOESN'T!) but proving or disproving it is more difficult. To prove the concept requires public evidence of phenomena that require this concept for their reasonable explanation; to disprove the concept requires proving that it clearly contradicts other known facts. Since neither situation seems to hold, we are left to shave with Occam's Razor, and we should note our comments on the hypothesis as opinions, not facts. The concept of soul/consciousness as the result of growth, of learning, seems right: I am what I have learned - what I have experienced plus my decisions and actions concerning these experiences. I wouldn't be "me" without them. However, it is also possible to create various theories of "disembodied" soul which are compatible with learning. For example, you could have a reincarnation theory that has past experiences shut off during the current life so that they do not interfere with fresh learning, etc. Please note: I am not proposing any theories of disembodied soul. I am arguing against unproven, catagorical positions for or against such theories. I believe that a scientist, speaking as a scientist, should be an agnostic - neither a theist nor an athiest. It may be that souls do not exist; on the other hand, it may be that they do. Science is open, not closed. There are many things that - regardless of our fear of the unknown and disorder - occur publicly and regularly for which we have no convincing explanation based on current science. Meteors as stones falling from heaven did not exist according to earlier scientists - until there was such a fall of them in France in the 1800's that their existance had to be accepted. There will be a 21st and a 22nd century science, and they will probably look back on our times with the same bemused nostalgia and incredulity that we view 18th and 19th century science. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 31 May 1984 18:27 EDT From: MINSKY%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Essences and Soul I can't make much sense of Menger's reply: Therefore claiming that essential aspects do not exist in the phenomenon of consciousness is in the present state of scientific knowledge an unreasonable reaction that unnecessarily narrows the field of our investigation. I wasn't talking about consciousness. Actually, I thnk consciousness will turn out to be relatively simple, namely the phenomenon connected with the procedures we use for managing very short term memory, duration about 1 second, and which we use to analyse what some of our mental processes have been doing lately. The reason consciouness seems so hard to describe is just that it uses these processes and screws up when applied to itself. But Menger seems intent on mixing everything up: However, we cannot extrapolate from our assumptions to statements about the essence of one's being, first because assumptions are not facts yet, secondly because intelligence and consciousness may not be the same thing. Who said anything about intelligence and consciousness? If soul is the whole mind, then fine, but if he is going to talk about essences that change along with this, well, I don't thing anything is being discussed except convictions of self-importance, regardless of any measure of importance. --- Minsky ------------------------------ Date: 31 May 84 15:31:58-PDT (Thu) From: ...decvax!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-pbsvax!cooper Subject: Re: Dreams: A Far-Out Suggestion Article-I.D.: decwrl.894 Ken Laws summarizes an article in the May Dr. Dobb's Journal called "Sixth Generation Computers" by Richard Grigonis. Among other things it proposes that standing waves of very low frequency electromagnetic radiation (5 to 20 Hz apparently) be used to explain telepathy. As the only person of I know of with significant involvement in both the fields of AI and parapsychology I felt I should respond. 1) Though there is "growing evidence" that ESP works, there is none that telepathy does. We can order the major classes of ESP phenomena by their a priori believability; from most believable to least: telepathy (mind-to-mind communication), clairvoyance (remote perception) and precognition (perception of events which have not yet taken place). "Some-kind-of mental radio" doesn't seem too strange. "Some-kind-of mental radar" is stretching it. While precognition seems to be something akin (literally) to black magic. There is thus a tendency, even among parapsychologists, to think of ESP in terms of telepathy. Unfortunately it is fairly easy to design an experiment in which telepathy cannot be an element but precognition or clairvoyance is. Experiments which exclude telepathy as an explanation have roughly the same success rate (approximately 1 experiment out of 3 show statistical significance above the p=.01 level) as experiments whose results could be explained by telepathy. Furthermore, in any well controlled telepathy experiment a record must be made of the targets (i.e. what was thought). Since an external record is kept, clairvoyance and/or precognition cannot be excluded as an explanation for the results in a telepathy experiment. For this reason experiments designed to allow telepathy as a mechanism are known in parapsychology as "general ESP" (GESP) experiments. Telepathy still might be proven as a separate phenomenon if a positive differential effect could be shown (i.e. if having someone else looking at the target improves the score). Several researchers have claimed just such an effect. None have, however, to the best of my knowledge, eliminated from their experiments two alternate explanations for the differential: 1) The subjects are more comfortable with telepathy than with other ESP and thus score higher (subject expectation is strongly correlated with success in ESP). 2) Two subjects working together for a result would get higher scores whether or not one of them knows the targets. Its rather difficult to eliminate both of these alternatives from an experiment simultaneously. The proposed mechanism MIGHT be used to explain rather gross clairvoyance (e.g. dowsing) but would be hard pressed to distinguish, for example, ink in the shape of a circle from that of a square on a playing card. It is obviously no help at all in explaining precognition results. 2) Experiments have frequently been conducted from within a Faraday cage (this is a necessity if a sensitive EKG is used of course) and even completely sealed metal containers. It was just this discovery which led the Soviets to decide in the late 20s (early 30s?) that ESP violated dialectic materialism, and was thus an obvious capitalist plot. Officially sanctioned research in parapsychology did not get started again in the Soviet Union until the early 70s when some major US news source (the NY Times? Time magazine?) apparently reported a rumor (apparently inaccurate) that the US DoD was conducting experiments in the use of ESP to communicate with submarines. 3) Low frequency means low bandwidth. ESP seems to operate over a high bandwidth channel with lots of noise (since very high information messages seem to come through it sometimes). 4) Natural interference (low frequency electromagnetic waves are for example generated by geological processes) would tend to make the position of the nodes in the standing waves virtually unpredictable. 5) Low frequency (long wavelength) requires a big antenna both for effective broadcast and reception. The unmoving human brain is rather small for this since the wavelength of an electromagnetic wave with a frequency of 5 Hz is about 37200 miles. Synthetic aperture radar compensates for a small antenna by comparing the signal before and after movement (actually the movement in continuous). I'm not sure of the typical size of the antennas used in SAP, but the SAP aboard LandSAT operated at a frequency of 1.275 GHz which corresponds to a wavelength of about 9.25 inches. The antenna is probably about one wavelength long. To use that technique the antenna (in this case brain) would have to move a distance comparable to a wavelength (37200 miles) at the least, and the signal would have to be static over the time needed to move the distance. This doesn't seem to fit the bill. I'm out of my depth in signal detection theory, but it might be practical to measure the potential of the wave at a single location relative to some static reference and integrate over time. The static reference would require something like a Faraday cage in ones head. Does anyone know if this is practical? We'd still have a serious bandwidth problem. The last possibility would be the techniques used in Long Baseline Radio Interferometry (large array radio telescopes). This consists of using several antennas distributed in space to "synthesize" a large antenna. Unfortunately the antenna have to communicate over another channel, and that channel would (if the antennas are brains) be equivalent to a second telepathy channel and we have explained nothing except the completely undemonstrated ability of human beings to decode very low frequency electromagnetic radiation. In summary: Even if you accept the evidence for ESP (as I do) the proposed mechanism does not seem to explain it. I'll be glad to receive replies to the above via mail, but unless it's relevant to AI (e.g. a discussion of the implications of ESP for mechanistic models of brain function) we should move this discussion elsewhere. Topher Cooper (The above opinions are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer, my friends or the parapsychological research community). USENET: ...decvax!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-pbsvax!cooper ARPA: COOPER.DIGITAL@CSNET-RELAY ------------------------------ Date: 23 May 84 16:04:38 EDT From: WATANABE@RUTGERS.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Knowledge-Based Plant Diagnosis [Forwarded from the Rutgers bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Date: June 14 (Thursday), 1984 Time: 1:30-2:30PM Place: Hill 705 Title: Preliminary Study of Plant Diagnosis by Knowledge about System Description Speaker: Dr. Hiroshi Motoda Energy Research Laboratory, Hitachi Ltd., 1168 Moriyamacho, Hitachi, Ibaraki 316, Japan INTRODUCTION: Some model, whatever form it is, is required to perform plant diagnosis. Generally, this model describes anomaly propagation and can be regarded as knowledge about cause and consequence relationships of anomaly situations. Knowledge engineering is a software technique that uses knowledge in problem solving. One of its characteristics is the separation of knowledge from inference mechanism, in which the latter builds logic of events on the basis of the former. The knowledge can be supplied piecewisely and is easily modified for improvement. Possibility is suggested of making diagnosis by collecting many piece of knowledge about causality relationships. The power lies in the knowledge, not in the inference mechanism. What is not in the knowledge base is out of the scope of the diagnosis. Use of resolution in the predicate calculus logic has shown the possibility of using knowledge about system description (structure and behavior of the plant) to generate knowledge directly useful for diagnosis. The problem of this approach was its inefficiency. It was felt necessary to devise a mechanism that performs the same logical operation much faster. Efficiency has been improved by 1) expressing the knowledge in frames and 2) enhancing the memory management capability of LISP to control the data in global memory in which the data used commonly in both LISP (for symbolic manipulation) and FORTRAN (for numeric computation) are stored. REFERENCES: Yamada,N. and Motoda,H.; "A Diagnosis Method of Dynamic System using the Knowledge on System Description," Proc. of IJCAI-83, 225, 1983. ------------------------------ Date: 31 May 1984 1146-EDT From: Wendy Gissendanner Subject: Seminar - Learning Procedures [Forwarded from the CMU-AI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] AI SEMINAR Tueday June 5, 5409 Wean Hall Speaker: Kurt Van Lehn (Xerox Parc) Title: Learning Procedures One Disjunct Per Lesson How can procedures be learned from examples? A new technique is to use the manner in which the examples are presented, their sequence and how they are partitioned into lessons. Two manner constraints will be discussed: (a) that the learner acquires at most one disjunct per lesson (e.g., one conditional branch per lesson), and (b) that nests of functions be taught using examples that display the intermediate results (show-work examples) before the regular examples, which do not display intermediate results. Using these constraints, plus several standard AI techniques, a computer system, Sierra, has learned procedures for arithmetic, algebra and other symbol manipulation skills. Sierra is the model (i.e., prediction calculator) for Step Theory, a fairly well tested theory of how people learn (and mislearn) certain procedural skills. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 5-Jun-84 10:18:04-PDT,16858;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 5-Jun-84 10:13:32 Date: Tue 5 Jun 1984 10:06-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #69 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Tuesday, 5 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 69 Today's Topics: Parapsychology - ESP, Philosophy - Correction & Essences, Cognitive Psychology - Mental Partitioning, Seminars - Knowledge Representation & Expert Systems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 4 Jun 84 18:50:50 PDT From: Michael Dyer Subject: ESP to: Topher Cooper & others who claim to believe in ESP 1. this discussion SHOULD be moved off AIList. 2. the technical discussion of wavelengths, etc is fine but 3. anyone who claims to believe in current ESP should FIRST read the book: FLIM-FLAM by James Randi (the "Skeptical Inquirer" journal has already been mentioned once but deserves a second mention) ------------------------------ Date: 31 May 84 19:31:04-PDT (Thu) From: decvax!ittvax!wxlvax!rlw @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Message for all phil/ai persons Article-I.D.: wxlvax.287 Dear net readers, I must now apologize for a serious error that I have committed. Recently, I posted two messages on the topic of philosophy of AI. These messages concerned a topic that I had discussed with one of my professors, Dr. Izchak Miller. I signed those messages with both his name and mine. Unfortunately, he did not see those messages before they were posted. He has now indicated to me that he wishes to disassociate himself from the contents of those messages. Since I have no way of knowing which of you saw my error, I am posting this apology publicly, for all to see. All responses to those messages should be directed exclusively to me, at the address below. I am sorry for taking up net resources with this message, but I feel that this matter is important enough. Again, I apologize, and accept all responsibility for the messages. --Alan Wexelblat (currently appearing at: ...decvax!ittvax!wxlvax!rlw. Please put "For Alan" in all mail headers.) ------------------------------ Date: Mon 4 Jun 84 13:49:58-PDT From: WYLAND@SRI-KL.ARPA Subject: Essences, objects, and modelling All the net conversation about essences is fascinating, but can be a little fuzzy making. It made me go back and review some of the basics. At the risk of displaying naivete and/or a firm grasp of the obvious, I thought I would pass some of my thoughts along. The problem of essences has been treated in philosophy under the heading of metaphysics, specifically ontology. I have found a good book covering these problems in short, clear text. It is: "Problems & Theories of Philosophy" by Ajdukiewicz, Cambridge University Press, 1975, 170 pp. in paperback. About substance (from the book, p. 78): ".... the fundamental one is that which it was given by Aristotle. He describes substance as that of which something can be predicated but which cannot itself be predicated of anything else. In other words, substance is everything to which some properties can be attributed, which can stand in a certain relationship to something else, which can be in this state, etc., but which is not itself a property, relation or a state, etc. Examples of substances are: this, this table, this person, in a word concrete individual things and persons. To substance are opposed properties which in contradistinction to substances can be predicated of something, relations which also in contradistinction can obtain between certain objects, states, etc. The scholastics emphasized the self-subsistance of substance in contrast to the non-self-subsistance of properties, relations, states, etc. The property of redness, for example, cannot exist except in a substance that possesses it. This particular rose, however, of which redness is an attribute, does not need any foundations for its existance but exists on its own. This self-subsistance of substance they considered to be its essential property and they defined substance as 'res, qui convenit esse in se vel per se'." To me, this implies that an object/substance is an axiomatic "thing" that exists independantly - it is the rock that kicks back each time I kick it - with the characteristic that it is "there", meaning that each time I kick at the rock, it is there to kick back. You can hang attributes on it in order to identify it from some other thing, both now and over time. The Greek Ship problem in this approach becomes one of identifying that Object, the Greek Ship, which has maintained continuous existance as The Greek Ship - i.e., can "be kicked" at any time. This brings us to one of the problems being addressed by this discussion of essences, which is distinguishing between objects and abstractions of objects, i.e. between proper nouns and abstract/general nouns. A proper known refers to a real object, which can never - logically - be fully known in the sense that we cannot be sure that we know *all* of its attributes or that we *know* that the attributes we do know are unchanging or completely predictable. We can always be surprised, and any inferences we make from "known" attributes are subject to change. Real objects are messy and ornery. An abstract object, like pure mathematics, is much neater: it has *only* those attributes we give it in its definition, and there WILL BE no surprises. The amazing thing is that mathematics works: a study of abstractions can predict things in the real world of objects! This seems to work on the "Principle of Minimum Astonishment" (phrase stolen from Lou Schaefer @ SRI), which I interpret to mean that "To the extent that this real object posseses the same characteristics as that abstract object, this real object will act the same as that abstract object, *assuming that it doesn't do anything else particularly astonishing*." And how many carefully planned experiments have foundered on THAT one. There is *nothing* that says that the sun *will* come up tomorrow except the Principle of Minimum Astonishment. So what? So, studies of abstractions are useful; however, an abstract object is not the same as a real object: the model is not the same as the thing being modelled. There is not an infinite recursion of attributes, somewhere there is a rock that kicks back, a source of data/experience from *outside* the system. The problem is - usually - to create/select/update an abstract model of this external object and to predict our interactions with it on the basis of the model. The problem of "identifying" an object is typically not identifying *which* real object it is but *what kind* of object is it - what is the model to use to predict the results of our interaction with it. It seems to me that model forming and testing is one of the big, interesting problems in AI. I think that is why we are all interested in abstraction, metaphor, analogy, pholosophy, etc. I think that keeping the distinction between the model and the object/reality is useful. To me, it tends to imply two sets of data about an object: the historical interaction data and the abstracted data contained in the current model of the object. Perhaps these two data sets should be kept more formally separate than is often done. This has gotten quite long winded - it's fun stuff. I hope that this is useful/interesting/fun! Dave Wyland WYLAND@SRI ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 2 Jun 84 13:11:35 PDT From: Philip Kahn Subject: Relevance of "essences" and "souls" to Artificial Intelligence Quite a bit of the AILIST has been devoted of late to metaphysical discussions of "essences" (e.g., the Greek ship "problem") and "souls." I don't argue the authors' viewpoints, but the discussion has strayed far from the intent of the original Greek ship problem. In short, the problem with "essences" and "souls" are the questions posed, and not the answers given. We are concerned with creating intelligent machines (whether we consider it "artificial" or "authentic"). The "problem" of "essence" is only caused by the necessity that a hard-and-fast, black-and-white discrimination is being asked whether "The reassembled ship is 'essentially' the same." It should be clear that the question phrased as such cannot be answered adequately because it is not relevant. You can say "it looks the same," "it weighs the same," "it has the same components," but how useful is it for the purposes of an intelligent machine (or person) to know whether it is "essentially" the same ship? The field of AI is so young that we do not even have a decent method of determining that it even IS a Greek ship. Before we attempt to incorporate such philosophical determinations in a machine, wouldn't it be more useful to solve the more pressing problem of object identification before problems of esoteric object distinctions are examined? The problem of "souls" is also not relevant to the study of AI (though it is undoubtedly of great import to our understanding of our role as humans in the universe). A "soul," like the concept of "essence," is undefinable. The problem of "cognition" is far more relevent to the study of AI because it can be defined within some domain; it is the object oriented interpretation of some phenomena (e.g., vision, auditory, context, etc.). Whether "cognition" constitutes a "soul" is again not relevent. The more pressing problem is the problem of creating a sufficient "cognitive" machine that can make object-oriented interpretations of sensory data and contextual information. While the question of whether a "soul" falls out of this mechanism may be be of philosophical interest, it moves us no closer to the description of such a mechanism. Another writer's opinion, P.K. ------------------------------ Date: 3 Jun 84 12:24:57-PDT (Sun) From: decvax!cwruecmp!borgia @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Essences and soul Article-I.D.: cwruecmp.1173 ** This is somewhat long ... You might learn something new ... ... from Intellectuals Anonymous (IA not AI) ** A few years ago, I became acquainted with an international group called Community International that operates through a technique called Guided Experiences to assist individuals in their progress towards self actualization. I remember that some of the techniques like Dis-tension, and the Experience of Peace were so effective that the Gurus in the group were sought by major corporations for their Executive Development programs. The Community itself is a non-profit, self-sustaining organization that originated somewhere in South America. The Community had a very interesting (scientific?) model for the body and soul (existence and essence) problem. The model is based on levels or Centers for the Mind. I will summarize what I remember about the Centers of the Mind. 1. The major Centers of the Mind are the Physiological Center, the Motor Center, the Emotional Center, and the Intellectual Center. 2. The functional parts of the Mind belong to different (matrix) cells in a tabulation of major Center X major Center. To illustrate the power of this abstraction, consider the following assertions where the loaded words have the usual meaning. The intellectual part of the intellectual center deals with reason or cognition. The rationalist AI persons must already feel very small. Reliance on reason alone indicates a poverty of the mind! The motor part of the intellectual center deals with imagination and creativity. The emotional part of the intellectual center deals with intuition. Similarly the motor center has intellectual, emotional and motor parts that control functions like learning to walk, the Olympics, and reflexes. The emotional center has intellectual, emotional, and motor parts that control faith and beliefs, the usual emotions like fear, anger, joy etc. and stuff like euphoria, erotica. The Physiological center is unfortunately the least understood. The center controls the survival drives for food, sex, safety etc. (And I believe, rational economic behaviour, free markets etc.) The thesis is that the lower centers (Physiological) must be developed before the higher centers can be productive. This must seem obvious since we don't expect a starving man to cry out with joy, or an emotionally disturbed person to reason effectively. ************************************************************************ I would appreciate any comments, anonymous or otherwise. Does this make any sense to you? Does this change your picture of your own mind? ************************************************************************ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 4 Jun 84 17:07:34 PDT From: Joe Halpern Subject: Seminars - Knowledge Representation [Forwarded from the IBM/Halpern distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.] The knowledge seminar will be meeting again at 10 AM, Friday, June 8, in Auditorium A of Building 28 at IBM. This week Joe Karnicky will speak on "Knowledge Representation and Manipulation in an Expert System" and I will speak on work in progress entitled "Towards a Theory of Knowledge and Ignorance". I have appended the abstracts below. I have speakers lined up for three more sessions, which will be held June 22, July 6, and July 20. After that the seminar will stop, unless we can find some more volunteers to speak. As you can see by my talk, discussing work in progress is perfectly reasonable, as is talking about research other than your own. If you have any suggestions for speakers, or directions the seminar might take, please let me know. 10 AM -- Knowledge Representation and Manipulation in an Expert System Joe Karnicky, Varian Systems and Techniques Lab (Palo Alto) We are constructing an expert advisory system for chromatography, i.e. a computer program which is to perform as an advisor to analytical chemists (chromatographers) with functionality on the level of human experts. One of the most important considerations in the design of such a program is the choice of techniques for the representation and manipulation of the knowledge in the system. I will discuss these choices of knowledge representation, the results we have achieved, and the advantages and disadvantages we have discovered. The techniques to be discussed include: PREDICATE LOGIC-inference by a prologue-type interpreter (backward chaining + unification) modified to include certainty factors and predicates to be evaluated outside of the rule base. PRODUCTION SYSTEMS-collections of situation-action (if...,then...)rules. FRAMES-heirarchically related data structures. PROCEDURES- small programs for specific tasks in specific situations. ANALOG REPRESENTATIONS-in this case, a detector's output signal vs. time. 11 AM. -- Towards a Theory of Knowledge and Ignorance Joe Halpern, IBM Research Suppose you only have partial information about a particular domain. What can you be said to know in that case? This turns out to be a surprisingly tricky question to answer, especially if we assume that you have introspective knowledge about your knowledge. In particular, you know far more than the logical consequences of your information. For example, if my partial information does not tell me anything about the price of tea in China, then I know I don't know anything about the price of tea in China. Moreover, I know that no one else knows that I know the price of tea in China (since in fact I don't). Yet this knowledge is not a logical consequence of my information, which doesn't mention the price of tea in China at all! I will discuss the problem of characterizing an agent's state of when s/he has partial information, and give such a characterization in both the single agent and multi-agent case. The multi-agent case turns out to be much harder than the single agent case, and we're still not quite sure that we have the right characterization there. I will also try to relate this work to results of Konolige, Moore, and Stark, on non-monotonic logic and circumscriptive ignorance. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 5-Jun-84 21:43:10-PDT,17697;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 5-Jun-84 21:41:54 Date: Tue 5 Jun 1984 21:36-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #70 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Wednesday, 6 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 70 Today's Topics: Games - Computer War Games Request, AI Tools - Stanford Computer Plans, Scientific Method - Hardware Prototyping, Seminar - Expert System for Maintenance ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 1 Jun 84 13:22:15-PDT (Fri) From: hplabs!intelca!cem @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Computer War Games Article-I.D.: intelca.287 This may be a rather simple problem, but it least it has no philosophical ramifications. I am developing a game that plays very similarly to the standard combat situation type games that Avalon Hill is famous for. Basically, it has various pieces of hardware, such as battleships, aircraft carriers, destroyers, transports, tanks, armies, various aircraft, etc. and the purpose is to build a fighting force using captured cities and defeat the opposing force. It is fairly simple to make the computer a "game board" however I would also like it to be at least one of the opponents also. So I need some pointers on how to make the program smart enough to play a decent game. I suspect there will be some similarities to chess since it to is essentially a war game. The abilities I hope to endow my computer with are those of building a defense, initiating an offense, and a certain amount of learnablity. Ok world, what text or tome describes techniques to do this ? I have a book on "gaming theory" that is nearly useless, I suspect. One that was a little more practical and less "and this is the proof ...", 10 pages later the next sentence begins. Maybe something like Newman and Sproul's graphics text but for AI. --Chuck McManis ihnp4! Disclaimer : All opinions expressed herein are my \ own and not those of my employer, my dual! proper! friends, or my avacado plant. / \ / fortune! \ / X--------> intelca!cem ucbvax! / \ \ / \ hplabs! rocks34! ARPAnet : "hplabs!intelca!cem"@Berkeley / hao! ------------------------------ Date: Fri 1 Jun 84 15:17:06-PDT From: Mark Crispin Subject: Stanford University News Service press release [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by CC.Clive@UTEXAS-20.] [Forwarded from the UTexas-20 bboard by CMP.Werner@UTEXAS-20.] STANFORD UNIVERSITY NEWS SERVICE STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305 (415) 497-2558 FOR INFORMATION CONTACT: Joel Shurkin FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE STANFORD COMMISSIONS COMPUTER TO REPLACE LARGE DEC-20'S. STANFORD-- Stanford University is negotiating with a small Silicon Valley company to build large computers to replace the ubiquitous DECSYSTEM-20s now ``orphaned'' by their manufacturer, Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC). The proposed contract, which would total around $1.4 million, would commision two machines from Foonly Inc. of Mountain View for delivery early in 1986. Foonly is owned by former Stanford student David Poole. According to Len Bosack, director of the Computer Science Department's Computer Facilities, the Foonly F1B computer system is about four times faster than the DEC model 2060 and 10 times faster when doing floating-point computations (where the decimal point need not be in the same place in each of the numbers calculated) that are characteristic of large-scale engineering and scientific problems. Ralph Gorin, director of Stanford's Low Overhead Time Sharing (LOTS) Facility -- the academic computer center -- said the Foonly F1B system, which is totally compatible with the DEC-20, is an outgrowth of design work done by Poole and others while at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Since 1977, Foonly has built one large system, the F1, and several dozen smaller systems. The Foonly F1B is a descendant of the original F1, with changes reflecting advances in integrated circuit technology and the architectural refinements (internal design) of the latest DEC-20s. A spokesman for DEC said the company announced last year it had discontinued work on a successor to the DEC-20, code named ``Jupiter,'' and would continue to sell enhanced versions of the large mainframe. Service on the machines was promised for the next ten years. However, said Sandra Lerner, director of the Computing Facilities at the Graduate School of Business, the discontinuation of DEC-20 development left approximately 1,000 customers world-wide without a practicable ``growth path.'' Ten DECSYSTEM-20 computers on campus make that machine the most numerous large system at Stanford. The Graduate School of Business uses its two DEC-20s for administration, coursework, and research. The Computer Science Department uses two systems for research and administration. LOTS, the academic computer facility, supports instruction and unsponsored research on three systems and hopes to add one more in the time before the F1B is available. Other DEC-20s are at the Department of Electrical Engineering, the artifical intelligence project at the Medical Center (SUMEX), and the recently formed Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). The Stanford University Network (SUNet), the main university computer communications network, links together the 10 DEC-20s, approximately 30 mid-size computers, about 100 high-performance workstations, and nearly 400 terminals and personal computers. The DEC-20 has been a cornerstone of research in artificial intelligence (AI). Most of the large AI systems evolved on the DEC-20 and its predecessors. For this reason, Stanford and other computer science centers depend on these systems for their on-going research. Lerner said the alternative to the new systems would entail prohibitive expense to change all programs accumulated over nearly twenty years at Stanford and to retrain several thousand student, faculty, and staff users of these systems. The acquisition of the Foonly systems would be a deliberate effort to preserve these university investments. 6-1-84 -30- JNS3A EDITORS: Lerner may be reached at (415) 497-9717, Gorin at 497-3236, and Bosack at 497-0445. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 4 Jun 84 22:22:51-EDT From: David Shaw Subject: Correcting Stone's Mosaic comments Reluctant as I am to engage in a computer-mediated professional spat, it is clear that I can no longer let the inaccuracies suggested by Harold Stone's Mosaic quote go uncorrected. During the past two weeks, I've been inundated with computer mail asking me to clarify the issues he raised. In my last message, I tried to characterize what I saw as the basic philosophical differences underlying Harold's attacks on our research. Upon reading John Nagle's last message, however, it has become clear to me that it is more important to first straighten out the surface facts. First, I should emphasize that I do not in any way hold John Nagle responsible for propagating these inaccuracies. Nagle interpreted Stone's remarks in Mosaic exactly as I would have, and was careful to add an "according to the writer quoted" clause in just the right place. I also agree with Nagle that Stone's observations would have been of interest to the AI community, had they been true, and thus can not object to his decision to circulate them over the ARPANET. As it happens, though, the obvious interpretation of Stone's published remarks, as both Nagle and I interpreted them, were, quite simply, counterfactual. Nagle interpreted Stone's remarks, as I did, to imply that (in Nagle's words) "NON-VON's 1 to 3 are either unfinished or were never started." (Stone's exact words were "Why is there a third revision when the first machine wasn't finished?") In fact, a minimal (3 processing element) NON-VON 1 has already been completed and thoroughly tested. The custom IC on which it is based has been extensively tested, and has proved to be 100% functional. Construction of a non-trivial (though, at 128 PE's, still quite small) NON-VON 1 machine awaits only the receipt from ARPA's MOSIS system of enough chips to build a working prototype. If MOSIS is in fact able to deliver these parts according to the estimated timetable they have given us, we should be able to demonstrate operation of the 128-node prototype before our original milestone date of 12/84. In fact, we have proceeded with all implementation efforts for which we have received funding, have developed and tested working chips in an unusually short period of time, and have met each and every one of our project milestones without a single schedule overrun. When the editors of Mosaic sent me a draft copy of the text of their article for my review, I called Stone, and left a message on his answering device suggesting that (even if he was not aware of, did not understand, or had some principled objection to our phased development strategy) he might want to change the words "wasn't finished" to "hasn't yet been finished" in the interest of factual accuracy. He never returned my call, and apparently never contacted Mosaic to correct these inaccuracies. For the record, let me try to explain why NON-VON has so many numbers attached to its name. NON-VON 2 was a (successful) "paper-and-pencil" exercise intended to explore the conceptual boundaries of SIMD vs. MIMD execution in massively parallel machines. As we have emphasized both in publications and in public talks, this architecture was never slated for physical implementation. To be fair to Stone, he never explicitly said that it was. Still, I (along with Nagle and others who have since communicated with me) felt that Stone's remarks SUGGESTED that NON-VON 2 provided further evidence that we were continually changing our mind about what we wanted to build, and abandoning our efforts in midstream. This is not true. NON-VON 3, on the other hand, was in fact proposed for actual implementation. Although we have not yet received funding to build a working prototype, and will probably not "freeze" its detailed design for some months, considerable progress has been made in a tentative design and layout for a NON-VON 3 chip containing eight 8-bit PE's. The NON-VON 3 PE is based on the same general architectural principles as the working NON-VON 1 PE, but incorporates a number of improvements derived from detailed area, timing, and electrical measurements we have obtained from the NON-VON 1 chip. In addition, we are incorporating a few features that were considered for implementation in NON-VON 1, but were deemed too complex for inclusion in the first custom chip to be produced at Columbia. While we still expect to learn a great deal from the construction of a 128-node NON-VON 1 prototype, the results we have obtained in constructing the NON-VON 1 chip have already paid impressive dividends in guiding our design for NON-VON 3, and in increasing the probability of obtaining a working, high-performance, 65,000-transistor chip within the foreseeable future. Based on his comments, I can only assume that, in my position, Stone would have attempted to jump directly from an "armchair design" to a working, highly optimized 65,000-transistor nMOS chip without wasting any silicon on interim experimentation. This strategy has two major drawbacks: 1. It tends to result in architectures that micro-optimize (in both the area and time dimensions) things that ultimately don't turn out to make much difference, at the expense of things that do. 2. It often seems to result in chips that never work. Even when they do, the total expenditure for development, measured in either calendar months, designer-months, or fabrication costs, is typically far larger than is the case with a phased strategy employing carefully selected elements of "bottom-up" experimentation. Finally, let again state my view that one of the essential characteristics of the emerging paradigm for experimental research in the field of nonstandard architectures is the development of "non-optimal" machines that nonetheless clearly explicate and test new architectural ideas. Even in NON-VON 3, we have not attempted to embody all of (or even all of the most important) architectural features that we believe will ultimately prove important in massively parallel machines. By way of illustration, we have thus far limited the scope of our experimental work to very fine grain SIMD machines supporting only a single physical PE interconnection scheme. This is not because we believe that the future of computation lies in the construction of such machines. On the contrary, I am personally convinced that, if massively parallel machines ever do find extensive use in practical applications (and, in my view, it is too early to predict whether they will), they are almost certain to exhibit heterogeneity in all three dimensions (granularity, synchrony and topology). Ultimately, we hope to broaden the scope of the NON-VON project to consider the opportunities and problems associated with more than one class of processing element, multiple-SIMD, as opposed to strictly SIMD, execution schemes, and the inclusion of additional communication links. In the context of a research (as opposed to a development) effort, however, it often seems to be more productive to explore a few mechanisms in some detail than incorporate within the first architectural experiment all features that seem like they might ultimately come in handy. The NON-VON 1 prototype, along with our proposed NON-VON 3 machine, exemplify this approach to experimental research in computer architecture. Until we lose interest in the problems of massively parallel computation, or run out of either unresolved questions or the funding to answer them, we are likely to stick to our current research strategy, which is based in part on the implementation of experimental hardware in multiple, partially overlapped stages. Although I know this will upset Harold, there may thus someday be a NON-VON 4, a NON-VON 5, and possibly even a NON-VON 6. Some of these later successors may never get past the stage of educated doodles, while others may yield only concrete evidence of the shortcomings of some of our favorite architectural ideas. I believe it to be characteristic of the paradigm shift to which I referred in my last message that the very strategy to which we attribute much of our success is casually dismissed by Stone as evidence of indecison and failure. As decreasing IC device dimensions and the availability of rapid-turnaround VLSI facilities combine to significantly expand the possibilities for experimental research on computer architectures, it may be useful to take a fresh look our criteria for evaluating research methods and research results in this area. David P.S. For those who may be interested, a more detailed explanation of the rationale behind our plan for the phased development of NON-VON prototypes is outlined in a paper presented at COMPCON '84. This paper was not, however, available to Stone at the time his remarks were quoted in Mosaic; in general, our failure to promptly publish papers describing our work is probably the source of much legitimate criticism of the NON-VON project. ------------------------------ Date: 29 May 1984 16:59-EDT From: DISRAEL at BBNG.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Expert System for Maintenance [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] There will be a seminar on Thursday, June 7th at 10:30 in the 2nd floor large conference room. The speaker will be Gregg Vesonder of Bell Labs. ACE: An Expert System for Telephone Cable Maintenance Gregg T. Vesonder Bell Laboratories Whippany, NJ As more of the record keeping and monitoring functions of the local telephone network are automated, there is an increasing burden on the network staff to analyze the information generated by these systems. An expert system called ACE (Automated Cable Expertise) was developed to help the staff manage this information. ACE analyzes the information by using the same rules and procedures that a human analyst uses. Standard knowledge engineering techniques were used to acquire the expert knowledge and to incorportae that knowledge into ACE's knowledge base. The most significant departure from "standard" expert system architecture was ACE's use of a conventional data base management system as its primary source of information. Our experience with building and deploying ACE has shown that the technology of expert systems can be useful in a variety of business data processing environments. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 6-Jun-84 21:52:12-PDT,12132;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 6-Jun-84 21:49:01 Date: Wed 6 Jun 1984 21:35-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #71 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Thursday, 7 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 71 Today's Topics: Games & Expert Systems - Source Information, AI Programming - Definitions, Expert Systems - MYCIN Demo, Humor - Turing Machine, AI Contracts - Automated Classification and Retrieval, Seminar - Programming by Example, Conferences - Approximately Solved Problems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 6 Jun 1984 13:12:28 EDT From: Perry W. Thorndyke Subject: computer war games Reply to Chuck McManis's request for information on war games: There are literally hundreds of programs, written in a variety of languagues for a variety of machines, that support battle simulation or war gaming. A catalog of these is published annually and is available under the title "Catalog of Wargaming and Military Simulation Models" from Studies, Analysis, and Gaming Agency; Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; The Pentagon; Washington, D.C. Few, if any, of the systems described in the catalog provide "intelligent" simulation of opponent behavior. One reason for this is that there exists no articulated model for expertise in tactical planning and decision making. We at Perceptronics are developing a Navy tactical battle game with an automated opponent based on a cognitive model of tactics. The project is a vehicle to explore (1) development of an expert model of time-stressed tactical decision making, (2) development of an instructional system to teach these skills to a novice, (3) automating an adaptive, intelligent opponent using the expert model, and (4) making the opponent behavior modifiable under program control of the instructional system to achieve pedagogical objectives. A technical report is due out soon; if you are interested, send your address and I'll add you to the mailing list. Perry Thorndyke Perceptronics, Inc. 545 Middlefield Road Menlo Park, CA 94025 (415) 321-4901 thorndyke@usc-isi ------------------------------ Date: 6 Jun 84 16:34:24 EDT (Wednesday) From: Chris Heiny Subject: Re: Computer Wargames Sounds like you've got your work cut out. It'll probably be considerably more complex than a chess player, because chess is the simplest of wargames (I choose to ignore checkers): 2 players with 32 counters (of 6 types) on a 64 space board, with relatively limited connections (4) per space. More complex wargames have more players, with hundreds of counters (of many more than 6 types) on a board with thousands of spaces, each space usually connnecting to 6 others. The rules are vastly more complex as well. The project sounds pretty interesting though, and I'll be glad to lend what aid I can from this distance. Chris ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 3 Jun 84 15:07 PDT From: Brian Reid Subject: AI programs: a definition [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] An AI program is a program written by a person who fervently believes that he is doing AI as he writes the program. Mere belief is not sufficient; it must be zealous belief. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 3 Jun 84 16:18 PDT From: Mark Kent Subject: AI programs: addition to a definition [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] In addition to the definition given by reid@Glacier: An AI program is a program in which at least one of the important subproblems that needs solving is solved by a brute force method. ------------------------------ Date: Sun 3 Jun 84 20:23:27-PDT From: Bruce Buchanan Subject: AI Program Demo [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] [The following is part of an exchange of messages about the percentage of graduating AI students who have been exposed to actual AI program demos. I have edited it slightly. -- KIL] MYCIN is available on SUMEX from the guest account -- remember that large jobs are slow during the day. Once on Sumex, type MYCIN to the Exec and read the help options. If you don't know much medicine it might be a good idea to run a library case first. You should not need someone else to demo it for you, but there are still people around who worked on MYCIN when it was an active project if you need help. The password for the Sumex guest acct is available from RYALLS @ SUMEX. A caveat: the medical knowledge base has not been updated in the past several years to reflect knowledge of new drugs or improved therapies. bgb ------------------------------ Date: Mon 4 Jun 84 08:46:07-PDT From: Bud Spurgeon Subject: Re: Have you seen? [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] How may MTC students have seen a Turing machine? -- Moshe Vardi Our DEC 2060 nicknamed "TURING" is on view daily in the Pine Hall machine room. -Bud :-) (P.S. We're still looking for a tape cabinet capable of storing infinitely long tape.) (P.P.S. Backups on this thing take FOREVER.) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 1 Jun 84 09:26:42 edt From: aronson@nlm-mcs (Jules P. Aronson) Subject: Research Contract Please distribute the following announcement to Research people in the fields of AI and Information Science: -------------------------------------------------------------- AUTOMATED CLASSIFICATION AND RETRIEVAL PROJECT -- The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine, is developing a research project to investigate, develop, and evaluated Information Science, Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence techniques which support the automated classification and retrieval of biomedical literature. The project shall include investigations in natural language understanding, knowledge representation, and information retrieval, to explore the development of automated systems for identifying, representing, and retrieving relevant concepts and main ideas from printed documents. Written requests for RFP NLM-84-115/PSP, should be addressed to the National Library of Medicine, Office of Contracts Management, Building 38A, Room B1N17, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, Maryland 20209, Attention: Patricia Page. The RFP will be available in approximately 30 days and will close 30 days after it is issued. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 5 Jun 84 23:15:02-EDT From: JMILLER%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Programming by Example [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Title: Programming by Example Speaker: Dan Halbert, University of California, Berkeley, and Xerox Corporation, Office Systems Division Wednesday, June 6, 2pm, AI playroom (8th floor, Tech Square) Most computer-based applications systems cannot be programmed by their users. We do not expect the average user of a software system to be able to program it, because conventional programming is not an easy task. But ordinary users can program their systems, using a technique called "programming by example". At its simplest, programming by example is just recording a sequence of commands to a system, so that the sequence can be played back at a later time, to do the same or a similar task. The sequence forms a program. The user writes the program -in the user interface- of the system, which he already has to know in order to operate the system. Programming by example is "Do what I did." A simple program written by example may not be very interesting. I will show methods for letting the user -generalize- the program so it will operate on data other than that used in the example, and for adding control structure to the program. In this talk, I will describe programming by example, discuss current and past research in this area, and also describe a particular implementation of programming by example in a prototype of the Xerox 8010 Star office information system. ------------------------------ Date: Thu 24 May 84 16:29:48-EDT From: Joseph Traub Subject: Call for papers CALL FOR PAPERS Symposium on Complexity of Approximately Solved Problems April 17-19, 1985 Computer Science Department Columbia University New York, NY 10027 SUPPORT: This symposium is supported by a grant from the System Development Foundation. SCOPE: This multidisciplinary symposium focuses on problems which are approximately solved and for which optimal algorithms or complexity results are available. Of particular interest are distributed systems, where limitations on information flow can cause uncertainty in the approximate solution of problems. The following is a partial list of topics: distributed computation, approximate solution of hard problems, applied mathematics, signal processing, numerical analysis, computer vision, remote sensing, fusion of information, prediction, estimation, control, decision theory, mathematical economics, optimal recovery, seismology, information theory, design of experiments, stochastic scheduling. INVITED SPEAKERS: The following is a list of invited speakers. L. Blum, Mills College J. Halpern, IBM L. Hurwicz, University of Minnesota D. Johnson, AT&T - Bell Laboratories J. Kadane, Carnegie-Mellon University R. Karp, Berkeley H.T. Kung, Carnegie-Mellon University D. Lee, Columbia University M. Milanese, Politecnico di Torino C.H. Papadimitriou, Stanford University J. Pearl, UCLA M. Rabin, Harvard University and Hebrew University S. Reiter, Northwestern University A. Schonhage, University of Tubingen K. Sikorski, Columbia University S. Smale, Berkeley J.F. Traub, Columbia University G. Wasilkowski, Columbia University and University of Warsaw A.G. Werschulz, Fordham University H. Wozniakowski, Columbia University and University of Warsaw CONTRIBUTED PAPERS: All appropriate papers for which abstracts are contributed will be scheduled. To contribute a paper send title, author, affiliation, and abstract on one side of a single 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper. TITLES AND ABSTRACTS MUST BE RECEIVED BY JANUARY 15, 1985 PUBLICATION: Invited papers will be published. REGISTRATION: The symposium will be held in the Kellogg Conference Center on the Fifteenth Floor of the International Affairs Building, 118th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The conference schedule and paper abstracts will be available at the registration desk. Registration will start at 9:00 a.m. There is no registration charge. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: The program schedule for invited and contributed papers will be mailed by about March 15 only to those responding to this Call for Papers. If you have any questions, contact TRAUB@Columbia-20.ARPA. To help us plan for the symposium please send the following information to NG@Columbia-20.ARPA. Name: ________________________ Affiliation: _______________________________ Address: __________________________________________________________________ City: ___________________ State: _____________________ Zip: _______________ ( ) I will attend the Complexity Symposium. ( ) I may contribute a paper. ( ) I may not attend, but please send program. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 10-Jun-84 15:19:25-PDT,15364;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 10-Jun-84 15:16:36 Date: Sun 10 Jun 1984 14:55-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #72 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Sunday, 10 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 72 Today's Topics: Linguistics - Name Grammar Request, Planning - Multi-Agents and Complex World Models, Courses - Expert Systems, Perception & Philosophy - Cross-Time Identity, Scientific Method - Mathematics, Logic - Logic and AI at U. Maryland, AI Societies & Periodicals - Canadian AI Newsletter ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed 6 Jun 84 08:10:26-PDT From: TEX82@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Names BibTeX, LaTeX's bibliography lookup program, needs: * a grammar of author names--that is, a BNF specification of the components of a name, and * a specification of how to print a name, in various styles, given its parse tree. Possible style choices for names include last name first or last and, perhaps, complete first/middle names or initials. The rules should handle almost all cases encountered in technical literature, including 'Brinch Hansen, Per' and 'Jean-Pierre van der Waerden, Jr.' but need not cover cases like 'John Thompson, Earl of Rumford'. The grammar need not be logically complete; for example, it would be all right to consider 'Colonel' to be the first name of 'Colonel John Blimp', if that produces the correct printed version. Please contact me if you know of anything like this. Leslie Lamport [Please forward this to anyone who might have an answer. Leslie has been doing a great job building the LaTeX friendly user interface to TeX, and a great many of us can benefit from any increased functionality he can develop for the bibliography preprocessor. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 9 Jun 84 20:41 EDT From: THE DESK (terminal)OF Subject: multi-agents and complex world models There are many planning systems using multi-agents and temporal constraints. But the domains for most of these systems are limited to only a very simplistic world model. The system we are working on involves a complex graphic display of the inside of NASA's space lab (within the space shuttle). There are many complex objects and multi-agents to contend with to provide a true simulation of even a simple command. Hendrix's model shows an interesting world model for a simple scenario, but without a sophisticated planner. There must be further research in such "robot-like" worlds and if so, I would greatly appreciate any pointers toward articles/papers/books dealing with such complex world models and planning systems. Thank you, Jeffrey S. Gangel [ Gangel%upenn.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa ] Dept. of Computer and Information Science Moore School University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 ------------------------------ Date: 7 Jun 84 10:32:19 PDT (Thursday) From: Isdale.es@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Course using *Building Expert Systems* (Hayes-Roth,Waterman,Lenat) In response to a request for information on courses using the text *Building Expert Systems* by R. Hayes-Roth, D. Waterman, and D. Lenat (Addison Wesley, 1983): UCLA Extension Offered such a class this past spring: Developing Expert Systems. Instructor: Dr. Douglas R. Partridge (works for one of the defense/aerospace contractors in the LA area.) The course was taught as a lecture-seminar w/demonstrations & code walkthroughs. Both LISP and PROLOG methods were discussed. A major portion of the grading depended on a term project. The class was expanded from a seminar given by Dr. Partridge for the Technology Transfer Society. The prospectus I have is 3pg and too long for the digest. I will forward it on request but suggest calling the extension at (213) 825-3985 for more up-to-date information. J.B. Isdale (Isdale.es@XEROX.ARPA) ------------------------------ Date: 6 Jun 84 6:00:08-PDT (Wed) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rochester!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Watch out for that tree Article-I.D.: gloria.220 It's the computer's own fault for using human-range vision. Infra-red would have revealed the cardboard tree. "Take these broken wings ... " Col. G. L. Sicherman ...seismo!rochester!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel ------------------------------ Date: 6 Jun 84 6:07:27-PDT (Wed) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rochester!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: cross-time identity. Article-I.D.: gloria.221 This problem also arises in databases. How do you find out whether the Joe Szmoe in your tax database is the same as the Joe Szmoe in your welfare database? SSNs don't count - he may have several. The problem is even worse when you pass from Artificial Intelligence to Military Intelligence. You may know nothing for certain about enemy spies, and can only suspect that two spies are identical. Col. G. L. Sicherman ...seismo!rochester!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 10 Jun 84 9:47:53 EDT From: Stephen Wolff Subject: Mathematical Methods Not at all deep; maybe others will find our gropings briefly amusing ..... Date: Fri, 8 Jun 84 11:19:30 EDT From: Brint "The usual attitude of mathematicians is reflected in their published research papers and in mathematics textbooks. Proofs are revamped and polished until all trace of how they were discovered is completely hidden. The reader is left to assume that the proof came to the originator in a blinding flash, since it contains steps which no one could possibly have guessed would succeed. The painstaking process of trial and error, revision and adjustment are all invisible." Alan Bundy From: Stephen Wolff I have the greatest respect for Alan Bundy, and I agree with his words. I shall however adamantly disagree with his (or anyone's) implication that "The painstaking process of trial and error, revision and adjustment....." should NOT be invisible -- in a MATHEMATICS paper. The purpose of such a paper MUST be FIRST to advance knowledge; proofs MUST be as spare, concise and lucid as it is within the author's talent to make them -- for sloppy or wordy proofs are just that much harder to verify. And, indeed, the paper is diminished to PRECISELY the extent that the author's trials and fumbles are displayed -- for they may prejudice the world-view of a reader and lead him to the same (POSSIBLY erroneous) result. If you say that there are too few (maybe no) places to publish mathematicians' thought processes, methods of hypothesis, &c., then I shall agree. And, further, state my belief that UNTIL we are able to read how both successful and unsuccessful mathematicians derive the objects of their study, then all successful efforts at automated reasoning will be just blind beginners' luck. From: Paul Broome Bundy was not implying that the dead end paths in the search for a proof should be in the paper that publishes the proof. Just before the portion that Brint quoted, he discussed Polya's books, "How to Solve It" and "Mathematical Discovery" and introduced the paragraph containing the aforementioned quote with, "Polya's attitude in trying to understand the 'mysterious' aspects of problem solving is all too rare." His next paragraph begins with "The only attempt, of which I am aware, to explain the process by which a proof was constructed, is B.L. van der Waerden's paper, 'How the proof of Baudet's conjecture was found', .." He's giving motivation for a book on the modeling of mathematical reasoning. From: Brint Perhaps, as in so many endeavors, several bright people actually agree: 1. Mathematics papers are not the place for discussing trial_and_error, inspirational flashes, false starts, and other means for "discovering" truth and error. 2. Forums are needed for the discussion of such ideas in order to advance our understanding of the process at least toward the end of improving mathematical reasoning by computer. 3. In some limited way, such forums exist. We need to encourage and motivate our mathematicians to contribute to them. Brint ------------------------------ Date: 8 Jun 84 16:57:32 EDT (Fri) From: JACK MINKER Subject: LOGIC and its ROLE in AI SPECIAL YEAR IN MATHEMATICAL LOGIC AND THEORETICAL COMPUTER SCIENCE Each year the Mathematics Department of the University of Maryland devotes its attention to a special topic. In conjunction with the Department of Computer Science, the 1984-1985 academic year will be devoted to the topic of mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. The year will consist of eight sessions devoted to particular areas. The time-table that has evolved is given below. As will be noted, the week of October 22-26, 1984, will be devoted to issues in LOGIC and its ROLE in ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE with emphasis on knowledge representation, com- mon sense reasoning, non-monotonic reasoning and logic pro- gramming. The lectures will be open to the public. The precise times and dates of the lectures for the AI week will be announced in the next few months. We anticipate that there will be modest financial sup- port presumably for graduate students and junior faculty. Applications for support for the week of October 22-26 to be devoted to LOGIC and its ROLE in ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE should be sent to: Dr. Jack Minker Department of Computer Science University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 20742 minker@umcp-cs (301) 454-6119 Kindly send a letter including a vitae, a statement as to the importance of these issues to your research, the number of days you might like to attend, and the amount of support that you might require. We emphasize that we do not know if we will have funds and even assuming they are available, they will be modest at best. You should also notify the above by sending a message over the net expressing your interest in attending the open sessions. Those who plan to come, but require no financial sup- port should also inform us of your intentions so that we may arrange for an appropriate size lecture hall. Those individuals interested in other topics associated with this Math Year should contact: Dr. E.G.K. Lopez - Escobar Department of Mathematics University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 20742 egkle@umcp-cs (301) 454-3759 and provide the same information as above. TIME SCHEDULE AND LECTURERS October 1-5, 1984. Semantics and Logics of Programs. Participants: S. Brookes, D. Kozen, A. Meyer, M. O'Donnell, R. Statman October 8-12, 1984. Recursion Theory. Participants: R. Book, J. Case, R. Daley, D. Leivant, J. Myhill, A. Selman, P. Young **October 22-26, 1984. LOGIC and its ROLE in ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Participants: J. Barwise, M. van Emden, L. Henschen, J. McCarthy, R. Reiter December 3-7, 1984. Model Theory and Algebra. Participants: A. Macintyre, A. Mekler, C. Wood March 4-8, 1985. Automath and Automating Natural Deduction. Participants: N.G. DeBruijn, J. Zucker March 11-15, 1985. Stability theory. Participants: J. Baldwin, S. Buechler, A. Pillay, C. Steinhorn April 22-26, 1985. Toposes and Model Theory. Participants: A. Joyal, F. Lawvere, I. Moerdijk, G. Reyes, A. Scendrov April 29-May 3,1985. Toposes and Proof Theory. Participants: M. Bunge, P. Freyd, M. Makkai, D. Scott, P. Scott ------------------------------ Date: 5 Jun 84 9:00:08-PDT (Tue) From: ihnp4!alberta!sask!utcsrgv!utai!gh @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Canadian A.I. Newsletter -- Call for submissions Article-I.D.: utai.187 ==================== Call for submissions ==================== CANADIAN A R T I F I C I A L I N T E L L I G E N C E NEWSLETTER (Published by CSCSI/SCEIO) The Canadian A.I. Newsletter invites submissions from Canada, the U.S., and the rest of the world of any item relevant to artificial intelligence: -- Articles of general interest. -- Abstracts of recent publications, theses, and technical reports. -- Descriptions of current research and courses at a given institution. -- Reports of recent conferences, workshops and the like. -- Announcements of forthcoming conferences and other activities. -- Calls for papers. -- Book reviews (and books for review). -- Announcements of new A.I. companies and products. -- Opinions, counterpoints, polemic, and controversy. -- Humour, cartoons, artwork. -- Advertisements (rates upon request). -- Anything else concerned with A.I. Please send submissions, either physical or electronic, to the editor: Graeme Hirst Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Toronto, CANADA M5S 1A4 Phone: 416-978-6277/6025 CSNET: cscsi@toronto ARPANET: cscsi.toronto@csnet-relay UUCP: utcsrgv!cscsi (connections to allegra, cornell, decvax, decwrl, deepthot, drea, floyd, garfield, hcr, ihnp4, linus, mbcsd, mcgill-vision, musocs, qucis, sask, ubc-vision, utzoo, uw-beaver, watmath, and many other sites) ------------------------ The Canadian A.I. Newsletter is sent to all members of CSCSI/SCEIO, the Canadian artificial intelligence society. To join, write to CIPS (which administers membership matters for the society) with the appropriate fee and a covering note. You need not be Canadian to be a member. CIPS 243 College Street, 5th floor Toronto, CANADA M5T 2Y1 Membership: $10 regular, $5 students (Canadian funds); there is a discount of $2 for CIPS members. Payment may be made in U.S. dollars at the current rate of exchange. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 15-Jun-84 11:25:09-PDT,18334;000000000001 Mail-From: LAWS created at 15-Jun-84 11:23:45 Date: Fri 15 Jun 1984 11:08-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #73 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Friday, 15 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 73 Today's Topics: AI Programming - Definition, Scientific Method - Mathematics, AI Reports - Recent Titles, Forum - Minsky and Asimov at Rensselaerville, Seminars - Motion of Objects in Contact & AI and APL & Learning Equation Solving Methods, Workshops - Expert Systems & Reasoning ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 9 Jun 84 14:06:55-PDT (Sat) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!floyd!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!exodus!dhc @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Definition of an AI program Article-I.D.: exodus.169 In-Reply-To: Article <581@sri-arpa.UUCP> How about this: A program is an AI program if and only if it is written in LISP. David H. Copp [Or Prolog? The "if ..." is commonly assumed, but the "only if ..." seems much too strong. I currently do list processing in C; while I don't claim much AI content, I see little difference between the C code and equivalent algorithms written in LISP. Bob Amsler has pointed out to me that spelling correctors are knowledge-based programs capable of outperforming even intelligent humans; few such programs are written in AI languages. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Wednesday, 13-Jun-84 16:33:08-BST From: BUNDY HPS (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: Mathematical Methods I support Broome's and Brint's interpretations of what I was trying to say in my book. I was not trying to criticise mathematics papers per se, but to point out that they do not contain some of the information that AI researchers need for computational modelling and to make a plea for a forum for such information. But let me add a caveat to that. The proofs in a paper are at least as important a contribution to mathematics as the theorems they prove. Future mathematicians may want to use these proofs as models for proofs in analogous areas of mathematics (think of diagonalization arguments, for instance). So it will improve the MATHEMATICAL content of the papers if the author points out the structure of the proof and draws attention to what s/he regards as the key ideas behind the proof. Alan Bundy ------------------------------ Date: 12 Jun 84 20:27:32-PDT (Tue) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rochester!sher @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Mathematical Methods Article-I.D.: rocheste.7379 Personally, I have done mathematics up to the beginning graduate level for various courses. When I do any difficult piece of mathematics I find that after the fact I can never remember how I came upon the proof. I can reconstruct my steps but the reconstruction has no real relationship to what I really did. The sensation of finishing a proof is highly analogous to waking up from a dream. This is possibly the most important reason why I am doing artificial intelligence rather than mathematics today. If other real mathematicians also operate in this manner then it is not surprising that they are reluctant to write up their reasoning processes. They literally cannot remember them. -David ------------------------------ Date: Sun 10 Jun 84 13:26:20-PDT From: Chuck Restivo Subject: LP - Library Update [Forwarded from the Prolog digest by Laws@SRI-AI.] Isaac Balbin and Koenraad Lecot sent a copy of their useful publication; "Prolog and Logic Programming Bibliography" The cost for obtaining your own copy is $5.00 Australian, and includes the cost of Air Mail. Contact: Isaac Balbin Department of Computer Science Parkville 3052 Melbourne, Australia Send information regarding new references and errata to UUCP: {decvax}, vax135} !mulga!Isaac or ARPA: CS.Koen@UCLA-Locus so the bibliography can be updated regularly, please. [...] ------------------------------ Date: Wed 13 Jun 84 19:27:42-PDT From: Dikran Karagueuzian Subject: AI Reports [Forwarded from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] Partial New Reports List MATH & COMPUTER SCIENCE LIBRARY (From Vol. 6, No. 6, 05/28/84) The reports listed below are now available for circulation at Stanford. 019257 Haridi, S. Sahlin, D.*Evaluation of logic programs based on natural deduction.* Royal Inst. of Tech., Stockholm. Telecomm. & Comp. Systems Dept.*TRITA-CS-8305 B.*1983. 019261 Gendrix, G.G. Lewis, W.H.* Transportable natural language interfaces to databases.* SRI International. A.I. Center.* Tech.Note 228.*1981. 019263 Walker, D.E. Hobbs, J.R.* Natural language access to medical text.* SRI International. A.I. Center.*Tech.Note 240.*1981. 019264 Pereira, F.* Logic for natural language analysis.* SRI International. A.I. Center.*Tech.Note 275, Ph.D. Thesis. Pereira, F.*1983. (Slightly revised version of a thesis submitted to the Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy). 019271 Moore, R.C.* Semantical considerations on nonmonotonic logic.* SRI International. A.I. Center.*Tech.Note 284.* 1983. 019272 Uszkoreit, H.*A framework for processing partially free word order.* SRI International. A.I. Center.*Tech.Note 285.*1983. 019277 Warren, D.H.D.* Applied logic - its use and implementation as a programming tool.* SRI International. A.I. Center.* Tech.Note 290, Ph.D. Thesis. Warren, D.H.D.*1983. (Verbatim copy of a thesis submitted to the Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh in 1977 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy). 019278 Shieber, S.M.* Direct parsing of ID/LP grammars.* SRI International. A.I. Center.*Tech.Note 291R.*1983 (revised). 019279 Grosz, B.J. Joshi, A.K. Weinstein, S.*Providing a unified account of definite noun phrases in discourses.* SRI International. A.I. Center.*Tech.Note 292.*1983. 019280 Martin, P. Appelt, D. Pereira, F.* Transportability and generality in a natural language interface system.* SRI International. A.I. Center.*Tech.Note 293.*1983. 019292 Pereira, F.C.N. Warren, D.H.D.* Parsing as deduction.* SRI International. A.I. Center.*Tech.Note 295.*1983. 019284 Appelt, D.E.* Telegram: a grammar formalism for language planning.* SRI International. A.I. Center.*Tech.Note 297.* 1983. 019290 Appelt, D.* Planning English referring expressions.* SRI International. A.I. Center.*Tech.Note 312.*1983. 019294 Nilsson, N.J.* Probabilistic logic.* SRI International. A.I. Center.*Tech.Note 321.*1984. 019308 Meandzija, B.*Automated generation of communication systems.* Southern Methodist U. Comp.Sci. & Eng.Dept.* 83-CSE-16.*1983. 019319 Griswold, R.E.*The implementation of an experimental language for manipulating sequences.* Arizona U. Comp.Sci.Dept.*TR 83-20.*1983. 019336 Janssens, D. Rozenberg, G.* Graph grammars with node label controlled rewriting and embedding.* Colorado U. Comp.Sci.Dept.*CU-CS-251-83.*1983. 019368 Koskimies, K.*Extensions of one-pass attribute grammars.* Helsinki U. Comp.Sci.Dept.*Rpt. A-1983-04.*1983. 019373 Shilcrat, E. Panangaden, P. Henderson, T.*Implementing multi sensor systems in a functional language.* Utah U. Comp.Sci.Dept.*UUCS-84-001.*1984. ------------------------------ Date: 13-Jun-84 02:36 PDT From: William Daul Augmentation Systems Division / MDC Subject: AI Forum Set For Aug. 4-8 RENSSELAERVILLE, N.Y. -- Marvin Minsky, a co-founder and member of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and science fiction writer/scientist Isaac Asimov will address "Artificial Intelligence: Are We Being Outsmarted?" in an Aug. 4-8 program at the Rensselaerville Institute located here. The program will be conducted in the manner of a hearing, and Asimov and Minsky will be questioned by participants in the AI program. The cost for the program is $250. More information can be obtained from Mary-Ann Ronconi, Public Programs Coordinator, The Rensselaerville Institute, Rensselartville, N.Y. 12147. ------------------------------ Date: 06/11/84 12:23:47 From: AH Subject: Seminar - Motion of Objects in Contact [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] DATE: Thursday, June 14, 1984 TIME: Refreshments 3:45PM Lecture 4:00PM PLACE: NE43-512A "THE MOTION OF OBJECTS IN CONTACT" Professor John Hopcroft Cornell University There is an increasing use of computers in the design, manufacture and manipulation of physical objects. An important aspect of reasoning about such actions concerns the motion of objects in contact. The study of problems of this nature requires not only the ability to represent physical objects but the development of a framework or theory in which to reason about them. In this talk such a development is investigated and a fundamental theorem concerning the motion of objects in contact is proved. The simplest form of this theorem states that if two objects in contact can be moved to another configuration in which they are in contact, then there is a way to move them from the first configuration to the second configuration such that the objects remain in contact throughout the motion. The obvious applications of this result in compliant motion and also applications in motion planning are discussed. HOST: Professor Silvio Micali ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 Jun 84 14:08:17 PDT From: Philip Westlake Subject: Seminar - AI and APL APL Users Group Meeting The Aerospace Corporation APL Users Group is honored to present: Dr. Zdenek V. Jizbz and Ms. Phuong T. Nguyen of Chevron Oil Field Research Co., La Habra, California Speaking on: "Artificial Intelligence and APL with Nested Arrays" Wednesday, June 13, 1984 1:00 pm A1/1062 The Aerospace Corporation The Chevron Oil Field The Chevron Oil Field Research Company of La Habra, California has been doing some research on Expert Systems implemented in nested array APL and they are pleased with the rapid progress that they have achieved in a relatively short time due to the power of nested array APL. A vector of nested vectors can be matched to a tree structure. The utility of this relationship, however, is relatively limited because nodes and branches are implicit (not explicit). By adding a convention similar to that of polish notation, modes can be made explicit. A special type of nested vector called a scalar tree will be defined. The following powerful properties of scalar trees will be illustrated: 1. The possibility to separate syntactic constructs from semantics 2. The ability to form AND/OR trees of arbitrary complexity, and application of DeMorgan's law to such trees with a single one-character APL primitive function. 3. The simplicity of building (primitive) inference engines in just a few lines of APL code. There will be three lectures lasting about 50 minutes each. Dr. Jizba will be giving the first two lectures and Ms. Nguyen will be giving the third lecture. Lecture 1 Define Artificial Intelligence. Describe basic idea of Expert Systems. Compare LISP to APL with nested arrays. Define tree structures, and describe the specific concept of an APL scalar tree. Show how recursuve functions are used to operate on nested arrays. Lecture 2 Introduce Predicate Calculus, and illustrate how it can be implemented using APL nested structures. Describe Production rules, and Inference Engine in APL implementation. Describe DRIVER function that allows English-like communication with user. Lecture 3 (PTN) Understanding a sentence. Kinds of sentences. Global and local dictionaries. Meaning. Syntactic sentences. History trace. Handling of misspelled words and phrases. U.S. Citizenship required in order to attend the presentation. ------------------------------ Date: 12 Jun 84 17:04:39 EDT From: Michael Sims Subject: Seminar - Learning Equation Solving Methods [Forwarded from the Rutgers bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] machine learning brown bag seminar Title: Learning Equations Solving Methods from Worked Examples Speaker: Bernard Silver Dept. of Artificial Intelligence University of Edinburgh Date: Wednesday, June 27, 1984, 12:00-1:30 Location: Hill Center, 7th floor lounge This talk will describe LP, a program that learns new techniques for solving equations by examining worked examples. Unlike most of the work in this field, where the equations have been very simple, LP uses equations of A level standard (A levels are exams taken at 18, and are used for university selection.) In order to be able to successfully use a new technique, LP learns many different types of information. At the lowest level, LP compares consecutive lines in the worked example, finding differences between them. This allows the program to learn new rewrite rules. LP also tries to discover the strategic purpose of each step, expressed in terms of satisfying preconditions of following steps. From this viewpoint, the worked example can also be considered as a type of plan for solving the equation. LP extracts the necessary information, and builds a plan which is stored for future use. LP executes the plan in a flexible way to solve new equations. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 11 Jun 84 00:17:24-PDT From: Mabry Tyson Subject: Workshop on Expert Systems This is a repeat of an earlier announcement that went out on AILIST but not that the date of acceptance for submissions has been moved back to July 1. [The original announcement appeared in AIList Vol. 2 #58, May 15, 1984. I will send a full copy of this second announcement to anyone who requests it. -- KIL] --------------- Date: Sun, 10 Jun 84 15:39 EST From: John Roach Subject: workshop on expert systems CALL FOR PAPERS IEEE Workshop on Principles of Knowledge-Based Systems Sheraton Denver Tex, Denver, Colorado, 3, 4 December 1984 Please send eight copies of a 1000-2000 word double-space, typed, summary of the proposed paper to: Mark S. Fox Robotics Institute Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 July 1, 1984 is the deadline for the submission of summaries. Authors will be notifed of acceptance or rejection by July 23, 1984. The accepted papers must be typed on special forms and received by the program chairman at the above address by September 3, 1984. General Chairman John Roach Dept. of Computer Science Virginia Polytechnic Institute Blacksburg, VA 24061 (703)-961-5368 [...] ------------------------------ Date: Thu 14 Jun 84 18:11:15-PDT From: Dikran Karagueuzian Subject: Workshop on Reasoning [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Stanford Workshop On PRACTICAL REASONONING AND PLANNING Sponsored by CSLI and the Philosophy Department June 19-21 The workshop will involve researchers in philosophy and artificial intelligence. Workshop organizers anticipate a productive interaction centering on issues of belief, desire, intention, and action in humans and machines. All sessions will be held in Building 380 (Mathematics), Room 380Y, unless otherwise specified. SCHEDULE: Tuesday, June 19 10:00 to 11:45 John Searle 1:30 to 3:15 Drew McDermott 3:30 to 5:30 Allan Gibbard Wednesday, June 20 10:00 to 11:45 Gilbert Harman 1:30 to 3:15 Thomas Hill 3:30 to 5:30 Patrick Hayes, David Israel 8:30 to 10:30 Richard Jeffery Thursday, June 21 9:00 to 10:30 Jon Doyle 10:30 to 12:15 Hector-Neri Castaneda 2:00 to 3:45 James Allen ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 17-Jun-84 14:49:07-PDT,13761;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 17-Jun-84 14:46:10 Date: Sun 17 Jun 1984 14:38-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #74 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Sunday, 17 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 74 Today's Topics: AI Tools - Q'NIAL Request, Knowledge-Based Systems - Spelling Correctors, Metaphysics - Relevance of "Souls" to AI, Scientific Method - Mathematics, Linguistics - Commonsense Reasoning, Brain Theory - Processing Power, Conference - Hardware Design Verification ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 15 Jun 1984 23:33-EST From: Todd.Kueny@CMU-CS-G.ARPA Subject: Q'NIAL I have recently heard of a language developed in Canada (Queens University?) called Q'Nial or Nial. These folks have been at some shows (USENIX) and have a demo system which looks alot like a lisp with algol syntax. Does anyone know about these guys? Are there any technical papers? (I think NIAL stands for Nested Inter???? Array Language.) -Todd K. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 Jun 84 11:58:54 PDT From: Michael Pazzani Subject: Spelling Correctors I disagree with the statement that spelling correctors are knowledge-based programs capable of outperforming even intelligent humans. There are two basic parts to spelling correction: detection and correction. In the case where there is more than one possible correction for a misspelled word, people can of course use the context to find the correct spelling. Selecting the proper choice is in many ways like selecting the intended sense of a word. Computers, of course, can be much better at detection of spelling errors except when the misspelling is another word in the vocabulary. I would not call checking a word against a prestored vocabulary knowledge based even with a complex root stripping capability. ------------------------------ Date: 13 Jun 84 19:51:25-PDT (Wed) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!floyd!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!princet on!eosp1!robison @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: elevance of "souls" to AI Article-I.D.: eosp1.927 Philip Kahn, in his discussion of souls and essences, writes: >> A "soul," like the concept of "essence," is undefinable. >> The problem of "cognition" is far more relevent to the study of AI because >> it can be defined within some domain... Whether "cognition" >> constitutes a "soul" is again not relevent..." I submit that the concept of "soul" is irrelevant only if AI is doomed to utter failure. Use your imagination and consider a computer program that exhibits many of the characteristics of a human being in its ability to reason, to converse, and to be creative and unexpected in its actions. How will you AI-ers defend yourself if a distinguished theologian asserts that G-d has granted to your computer program a soul? If he might be right, the program, and its hardware must not be destroyed. Perhaps it should not be altered either, lest its soul be lost. The casual destruction, recreation and development of computer programs containing souls will horrify many people. You will face demonstrations, destruction of laboratories, and government interference of the worst kind. Start saving up now, for a defense fund for the first AI-er accused by a district attorney of soul-murder. On second thought, you have nothing to fear; no one in AI is really trying to make computers act like humans, right? - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison princeton!eosp1!robison ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 Jun 84 14:36:00 pdt From: Harlan Sexton Subject: Mathematical Methods It is true that most mathematics papers contain little of the sort of informal, sloppy, and confused thinking that always accompanies any of the mathematical discovery that I have been a party to, but these papers are written for and by professional mathematicians in journals that are quite backlogged. Also, although I have always been intrigued by the differences beween modes of discovery among various mathematicians of my acquaintance, I never found knowing how others thought about problems of much use to me, and I think that most practicing mathematicians are even less inclined to wonder about such things than I was when I was a "real" mathematician. However, in response to the comment by David ???, I can only say that I, and most of my fellow graduate students to whom I talked about such things, had no trouble recalling the processes whereby we arrived at the ideas behind proofs (and the process of proving something given an "idea" was just tedious provided the idea was solid). The process used to arrive at the idea, however, was as idiosyncratic as the process one uses to choose a spouse, and it was generally as portable. I found it very useful to know WHAT people thought about various things, and I learned a great deal from my advisor about valuable attitudes toward PDE's, for example (sort of expert knowledge about what to expect from a PDE), but HOW he thought about them was not useful. (With the exception of the infamous Paul J. Cohen, I felt that I appreciated HOW these other people thought; it was just that it felt like wearing someone else's shoes to think that way. In Cohen's case we just figured that Paul was so smart that he didn't have to think, at least like normal people.) In the last year or so of my graduate career, someone came to the mathematics department and interviewed a number of graduate students, including me, about something which had to do with how we thought about mathematical constructs (of very simple types which they specified). Presumably this information, and related things, would be of some interest to Bundy. I'm sorry that I can't be more specific, but if he would contact the School of Education at Stanford (or maybe the Psychology Dept., but I think this had to do with some project on mathematics education), they might be able to help him. There is also a short book by J. Hadamard, published by Dover, and some writings by H. Poincare', but as I recall these weren't very detailed (and he probably knows of them already anyway). Finally, I know that for a while Paul Cohen was interested in mathematical theorem proving, and so he might have some useful information and ideas, as well. (I believe that he is still in the Math. Dept. at Stanford. The AMS MAA SIAM Combined Membership List should have his address.) --Harlan Sexton ------------------------------ Date: Fri 15 Jun 84 13:25:05-PDT From: Ken Laws Subject: Commonsense Reasoning? I'm not sure whether the following probes our commonsense reasoning ability or simply demonstrates a quirk of natural language: "The Monday class will meet on Tuesday next week. The Wednesday class will thus be the day after the Monday class. (We may decide to hold the Friday class on Wednesday and the Wednesday class on Friday if everyone can make it then.)" Another example along the same line is: If 3 were half of 5, what would a third of 10 be? Although it's easy enough to finesse the problem by claiming that this is nonsense, most people would find the answer 4 to be quite reasonable. The answer is derived by following the chain 3:5/2 as 6:5 as 12:10 as 4:10/3, where ":" represents some unspecified transformation that is assumed to be linear. I consider this similar to the nonlinear Monday:Tuesday reasoning above. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: 14 Jun 84 7:29:14-PDT (Thu) From: ihnp4!cbosgd!rbg @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: cbosgd.20 > I believe there are aprroximately 10 to the 9th neurons in a human > brain, if that's of any help. Add in the glial cells (there is some > debate about their function) and it comes to 10 to the 10th. > Bob Binstock Those numbers are both wrong, but so was the number in my original posting. Let me correct the numbers, and add the discussion to some other groups which may or may not be interested. Recent estimates of the number of neurons in the human brain have been increasing, for a current estimated total of between 30x10^9 and 50x10^9. Glial cells outnumber neurons by at least 10 to one, and occupy about half the volume of the brain, but the ratio varies widely between brain regions, and between species within a brain region. To get an estimate of the computational equivalent of the brain: Assume 5x10^10 neurons with 2x10^4 synapses each = 10^15 synapses/brain. Each synapse, on average, adds in a quantity about 20 times/sec (it can go much faster, but not many do at the same time). So that's 2x10^16 very simple approximate adds per second. Even when everything is just right, a Cray can't do better than about 10^9 simple integer adds per sec. So, IF THE SYNAPSES ARE BEING USED WITH TOTAL EFFICIENCY FOR PERFORMING THE TASK, a brain is worth about 10^7 Crays. [Credit for this calculation to Terry Sejnowski (Biophysics, Johns Hopkins) and Geoff Hinton (Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon)]. It is not surprising that most tasks use only a small fraction of this capacity. However, I think the computation of the amount of information used to store sensory perceptions by hound!rfg may be misleading: >>if I assume a visual field as 10**3 bits high by 10**4 bits wide >>by 10 bits for color and shading of each element, we have 10**8 bits >>per visual field. Suppose a life time of 72 years and 16 hours a day of >>observing (neglecting "visual dreams" which may also be remembered), >>with a new observation every 10 seconds. I multiply it all out to >>about 1.5 x 10**16 bits. (187,500 billion bytes?) >>Adding audio, tactile, olfactory, taste to that ought to easily run the >>total over 200 gigabytes. That's just for remembering observations >>(eidetically, which is a faculty some do have). Most people do not remember every detail of every scene they ever see. How much of your early childhood (0-4) do you even remember at all? Emotional content of a situation can have a large impact on what and how much you recall. Dangerous or joyful experiences stand out in memory more than most neutral events. The role of language is also an important issue in considering the storage and information processing capacity of the brain. Using a word to stand for the many features which make up an object or a concept is an incredible data compression. This may be why the gradual increase in computational ability across primate evolution is not a very satisfying explanation for the quantum leap in human intellectual ability. Many of the explanations of the origin of consciousness rely on the advantages of language for improving analytic ability. The one I like best is Julian Jaynes idea (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind): that consciousness is not just a simple consequence of language, but that the exponential growth in knowledge fostered by language generates self-consciousness only after certain kinds of concepts are introduced into language. This allows him to trace the evolution of consciousness by literary analysis! Rich Goldschmidt -- a former brain hacker (now reformed?) cbosgd!rbg ------------------------------ Date: Wednesday, 13 June 1984 11:41:32 EDT From: Mario.Barbacci@cmu-cs-spice.arpa Subject: call for papers CALL FOR PAPERS WORKSHOP ON HARDWARE DESIGN VERIFICATION November 26-27, 1984 Technical University of Darmstadt, F.R. Germany This workshop is organized by IFIP Working Groups 10.2 and 10.5. Program will cover all aspects of verification methods for hardware systems, including: Correctness of hardware design, Tools and methodologies for verification, Verification of multilevel descriptions, Timing verification, Temporal logic, Correctness by construction, Circuit extractors, Design rule checkers, Language issues, Application of AI techniques. PARTICIPATION IS BY INVITATION ONLY. If you would like to propose a contribution to the workshop send a short summary of the intended presentation to the Workshop Chairman before July 31, 1984. Notices of acceptance will be sent by September 15, 1984. Workshop Committee: Hans Eveking (Chairman) Stephen Crocker Institut fuer Datentechnik Aerospace Corporation Technical University of Darmstadt P.O. Box 92957 D-6100 Darmstadt Los Angeles Fed. Rep. Germany California 90009 (49) (6151) 162075 George J. Milne Robert Piloty Computer Science Department Institut fuer Datentechnik University of Edinburgh Technical University of Darmstadt Edinburgh, Scotland D-6100 Darmstadt United Kingdom Fed. Rep. Germany ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 20-Jun-84 10:51:29-PDT,16097;000000000001 Mail-From: LAWS created at 20-Jun-84 10:50:33 Date: Wed 20 Jun 1984 10:44-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #75 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Wednesday, 20 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 75 Today's Topics: Expert Systems - Regression Analysis, AI Tools - Q'NIAL & Pandora Project, Conference - AAAI-84 Program Now Available, AI News - Army A.I. Grant to Texas, Standards - Maintaining High Quality in AI Products, Social Implications - Artificial People, Seminar - Precondition Analysis ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 20 Jun 84 12:27:07 EDT From: "Ferd Brundick (VLD/LTTB)" Subject: request for information Hi, Does anyone know of any expert systems to aid regression analysis ? I've been told that Bell Labs is working in the area of AI data analysis; William Gayle is reportedly developing a program called REX. I would appreciate any information in this area (net addresses, phone numbers, references, etc). Thanks. dsw, fferd Fred S. Brundick USABRL, APG, MD. [Bill Gayle has been developing an expert system interface to the Bell Labs S statistical package. I believe it is based on the Stanford Centaur production/reasoning system and that it uses "pipes" to invoke S for analysis and display services. Gayle's system currently has little expertise in analyzing residuals, but it does know what types of transformations might be applied to different data types. It is basically a helpful user interface rather than an automated analysis system. Rich Becker, one of the developers of S, has informed me that source code for S is available. Call 800-828-UNIX for information, or write to AT&T Technologies Software Sales PO Box 25000 Greensboro, NC 27420 For a description of the S package philosophy see Communications of the ACM, May 1984, Vol. 27, No. 5, pp. 486-495. Another automated data analysis system is the RADIX (formerly RX) system being developed at Stanford by Dr. Robert Blum and his students. It has knowledge about drug interactions, symptom onset times, and other special considerations for medical database analysis. It is designed to romp through a database looking for interesting correlations, then to design and run more (statistically) controlled analyses to attempt confirmation of the discovered effects. -- Ken Laws ] ------------------------------ Date: Tue 19 Jun 84 12:44:50-EDT From: Michael Rubin Subject: Re: Q'NIAL According to an advertisement I got, NIAL is "nested interactive array language" and Q'NIAL is a Unix implementation from Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario. It claims to be a sort of cross between LISP and APL with "nested arrays" instead of APL flat arrays or LISP nested lists, "structured control constructs... and a substantial functional programming subset." The address is Nial Systems Ltd., 20 Hatter St., Kingston, Ontario K7M 2L5 (no phone # or net address listed). I don't know anything about it other than what the ad says. ------------------------------ Date: Sun 17 Jun 84 16:28:44-EDT From: MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Pandora Project In the July 1984 issue of Esquire appears an article by Frank Rose entitled "The Pandora Project." Rose provides some glimpses into work at Berkeley by Robert Wilensky and Joe Faletti on the commensense reasoning programs, PAMELA and PANDORA. --Wayne McGuire ------------------------------ Date: 17 June 1984 0019-EDT From: Dave Touretzky at CMU-CS-A Subject: AAAI-84 Program Now Available [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The program for AAAI-84, which lists papers, tutorials, panel discussions, etc., is now available on-line, in the following files: TEMP:AAAI84.SCH[C410DT50] on CMUA AAAI84.SCH on CMUC [g]/usr/dst/aaai84.sch on the GP-Vax The program is 36 pages long if you print it on the dover in Sail10 font. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 19 Jun 84 18:26:11-CDT From: Gordon Novak Jr. Subject: Army A.I. Grant to Texas [Forwarded from the UTexas-20 bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The U.S. Army Research Office, headquartered in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, has announced the award of a contract to the University of Texas at Austin for research and education in Artificial Intelligence. The award is for approximately $6.5 million over a period of five years. The University of Texas has established an Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as an organized research unit. Dr. Gordon S. Novak Jr. is principal investigator of the project and has been named Director of the Laboratory. Dr. Robert L. Causey is Associate Director. Other faculty whose research is funded by the contract and who will be members of the Laboratory include professors Robert F. Simmons, Vipin Kumar, and Elaine Rich. All are members of the Department of Computer Sciences except Dr. Causey, who is Chairman of the Philosophy Department. The contract is from the Electronics Division of the Army Research Office, under the direction of Dr. Jimmie Suttle. The contract will provide fellowships and research assistantships for graduate students, faculty research funding, research computer equipment, and staff support. The research areas covered by the Army Research Office contract include automatic programming and solving of physics problems by computer (Novak), computer understanding of mechanical devices described by English text and diagrams (Simmons), parallel programs and computer architectures for solving problems involving searching (Kumar), reasoning under conditions of uncertainty, and intelligent interfaces to computer programs (Rich). ------------------------------ Date: Tuesday, 19-Jun-84 12:19:22-BST From: BUNDY HPS (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: Maintaining High Quality in AI Products Credibility has always been a precious asset for AI, but never more so than now. We are being given the chance to prove ourselves. If the range of AI products now coming onto the market are shown to provide genuine solutions to hard problems then we have a rosy future. A few such products have been produced, but our future could still be jeopardized by a few, well publised, failures. Genuine failures - where there was determined, but ultimately unsuccesful, effort to solve a problem - are regretable, but not fatal. Every technology has its limitations. What we have to worry about are charlatans and incompentents taking advantage of the current fashion and selling products which are overrated or useless. AI might then be sigmatized as a giant con-trick, and the current tide of enthusiasm would ebb as fast as it flowed. (Remember Machine Translation - it could still happen.) The academic field guards itself against charlatans and incompentents by the peer review of research papers, grants, PhDs, etc. There is no equivalent in the commercial AI field. Faced with this problem other fields set up professional associations and codes of practice. We need a similar set-up and we needed it yesterday. The 'blue chip' AI companies should get together now to found such an association. Membership should depend on a continuing high standard of AI product and in-house expertise. Members would be able to advertise their membership and customers would have some assurance of quality. Charlatans and incompetents would be excluded or ejected, so that the failure of their products would not be seen to reflect on the field as a whole. A mechanism needs to be devised to prevent a few companies annexing the association to themselves and excluding worthy competition. But this is not a big worry. Firstly, in the current state of the field AI companies have a lot to gain by encouraging quality in other companies. Every success increases the market for everyone, whereas failure decreases it. Until the size of the market has been established and the capacity of the companies risen to meet it, they have more to gain than to lose by mutual support. Secondly, excluded companies can always set up a rival association. This association needs a code of practice, which members would agree to adhere to and which would serve as a basis for refusing membership. What form should such a code take, i.e. what counts as malpractice in AI? I suspect malpractice may be a lot harder to define in AI than in insurance, or medicine, or travel agency. Due to the state of the art, AI products cannot be perfect. No-one expects 100% accurate diagnosis of all known diseases. On the other hand a program which only works for slight variations of the standard demo is clearly a con. Where is the threshold to be drawn and how can it be defined? What consitutes an extravagent claim? Any product which claims to: understand any natural language input, or to make programming redundant, or to allow the user to volunteer any information, sounds decidedly smelly to me. Where do we draw the line? I would welcome suggestions and comments. Alan Bundy ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jun 84 6:44:56-EDT (Fri) From: hplabs!tektronix!uw-beaver!cornell!vax135!ukc!west44!greenw @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Human models Article-I.D.: west44.243 [The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things...] Consider... With present computer technology, it is possible to build (simple) molecular models, and get the machine to emulate exactly what the atoms in the `real` molecule will do in any situation. Consider also... Software and hardware are getting more powerful; larger models can be built all the time. [...Of shoes and Ships...] One day someone may be able to build a model that will be an exact duplicate of a human brain. Since it will be perfect down to the last atom, it will also be able to act just like a human brain. i.e. It will be capable of thought. [...And Sealing Wax...] Would such an entity be considered `human`, for, though it would not be `alive` in the biological sense, someone talking on the telephone to its very sophisticated speech synthesiser, or reading a letter typed from it would consider it to be a perfectly normal, if not rather intelligent person. Hmmmmmm. One last thought... Even if all the correct education could be given it, might it still suffer from the HAL9000 syndrome [2001]; fear of being turned off if it did something wrong? [...of Cabbages and Kings.] Jules Greenwall, Westfield College, London, England. from... vax135 greenw (UNIX) \ / mcvax- !ukc!west44! / \ hou3b westf!greenw (PR1ME) The MCP is watching you... End of Line. ------------------------------ Date: 18 Jun 84 13:27:47-PDT (Mon) From: hplabs!hpda!fortune!crane @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: fortune.3615 Up to this point the ongoing discussion has neglected to take two things into account: (1) Subconscious memory - a person can be enabled (through hypnosis or by asking him the right way) to remember infinite details of any experience of this or prior life times. Does the mind selectively block out trivia in order focus on what's important currently? (2) Intuition - by this I mean huge leaps into discovery that have nothing to do with the application of logical association or sensual observation. This kind of stuff happens to all of us and cannot easily be explained by the physical/mechanical model of the human mind. I agree that if you could build a computer big enough and fast enough and taught it all the "right stuff", you could duplicate the human brain, but not the human mind. I don't intend to start a metaphysical discussion, but the above needs to be pointed out once in a while. John Crane ------------------------------ Date: Wed 20 Jun 84 10:01:39-PDT From: WYLAND@SRI-KL.ARPA Subject: The Turing Test - machines vs people Tony Robison (AIList V2 #74) and his comments about machine "soul" brings up the unsettling point - what happens when we make a machine that passes the Turing test? For: o One of the goals of AI (or at least some workers in the field - hedge, hedge) is to make a machine that will pass the Turing test. o Passing the Turing test means that you cannot distinguish between man and machine by their written responses to written questions (i.e., over a teletype). Today, we could extend the definition to include oral questions (i.e., over the telephone) by adding speech synthesis and recognition. o If you cannot tell the difference between person and machine by the formal social interaction of conversation, *how will the legal and social systems differentiate between them!!* Our culture(s) is set up to judge people using conversation, written or oral: the legal arguments of courts, all of the testing through schools, psychological examination, etc. We have chosen the capability for rational conversation (including the potential capability for it in infants, etc.) as the test for membership in human society, rejecting membership based on physical characteristics such as body shape (men/women, "foreigners") and skin color, and the content of the conversations such as provided by cultural/ religious/political beliefs, etc. If we really do make machines that are *conversationally indistinguishable* from humans, we are going to have some interesting social problems, whether or not machines have "souls". Will we have to reject rational conversation as the test of membership in society? If so, what do we fall back on? (The term "meathead" may become socially significant!) And what sort of interesting things are going to happen to the social/legal/religious systems in the meantime? Dave Wyland WYLAND@SRI P.S. Asimov addressed these problems nicely in his renowned "I, Robot" series of stories. ------------------------------ Date: 18 Jun 1984 14:21 EDT (Mon) From: Peter Andreae Subject: Seminar - Precondition Analysis [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] PRECONDITION ANALYSIS - LEARNING CONTROL INFORMATION Bernard Silver Dept. of AI, University of Edinburgh 2pm Wednesday, June 20. 8th Floor Playroom I will describe LP, a program that learns equation solving strategies from worked examples. LP uses a new learning technique called Precondition Analysis. Precondition Analysis learns the control information that is needed for efficient progblem solving in domains with large search spaces. Precondition Analysis is similar in spirit to the recent work of Winston, Mitchell and DeJong. It is an analytic learning technique, and is capable of learning from a single example. LP has successfully learned many new equation solving strategies. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 21-Jun-84 22:18:40-PDT,13115;000000000001 Mail-From: LAWS created at 21-Jun-84 22:12:56 Date: Thu 21 Jun 1984 22:03-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #76 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Friday, 22 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 76 Today's Topics: VLSI - Panel on Chips for AI & Trilogy CPU Failure, Databases - Oxford English Dictionary goes On-Line, Logic - Common Sense Summer, Mind & Brain - Artificial People & Neural Connections & Recall, Seminar - Natural Language Parsing ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 20 June 1984 0512-EDT From: Dave Touretzky at CMU-CS-A Subject: panel on chips for AI [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Dana Seccombe is looking for people to participate in a panel discussion at ISSCC (International Solid State Circuits Conference) to be held in February '85 in New York City. The topic of the panel is issues in the realization of AI systems using VLSI technology, e.g. AI inference engines, 5th generation architectures, or Lisp processors that are or could be implemented using VLSI. If you would be interested in participating in this panel, please contact Mr. Seccombe at (408) 257-7000 x4854. DON'T contact me, because I don't know any more about it than what you've just read. ------------------------------ Date: 19 Jun 1984 11:07:46-EDT From: Doug.Jensen at CMU-CS-G Subject: Trilogy CPU design fails [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] After 4 years and $220 million, Gene Amdahl's Trilogy Corp. has declared their attempt to build a computer from 2.5" diameter whole wafer VLSI a failure. They never got even one wafer functioning correctly much less ever powered up a machine. Trilogy thus follows in the path of TI and many other whole wafer failures before them over the past decade; the others were less known because they were military projects. Trilogy was one of, and probably THE, most publicized and heavily funded new startup in the history of the computer business. They were spending $7 million/month and estimated that they would need at least another $100 million just to get them to mid-85, while their first machine was still two years beyond that (more than two years later than they estimated when they started in 1980). Each 2.5" wafer was to contain about 60K ECL gates, with four layers of metalization, and dissipate about 1000 watts. The CPU was to have nine wafers and excute 32 MIPS. Trilogy was even further behind on the other computer subsystems. They now say they may try a smaller machine, or just subsystems (e.g., memories), or just wafers and related technology. DEC, Sperry, and CII-HB were among the investors in Trilogy. ------------------------------ Date: 13-Jun-84 02:30 PDT From: William Daul Augmentation Systems Division / MDC Subject: Oxford English Dictionary goes On-Line [Forwarded from the Human-Nets Digest by Laws@SRI-AI.] LONDON -- ...the Oxford University Press has announced plans to publish a computerized version of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary. With the help of a $1.4 million donation from IBM United Kingdom Ltd., the British publisher will produce the first fully integrated edition of the 13-volume dictionary since the original work was begun in 1884. That first edition took 44 years to complete; the publisher said it will be able to complete the second edition in a fraction of that time. ... The New Oxford English Dictionary, as the new version has been named, will constitute the largest electronic dictionary data base in the world. The present multi-volume version consists of more than 20,000 printed pages. Computerization of the dictionary is a massive undertaking that will involve the data entry of about 60 million words used to record, describe and illustrate 500,000 words and phrases. The Oxford University Press has hired International Computaprint Corp. of Fort Washington, Pa., to do the data entry. A staff of 120 people has been assigned the task of completing the data entry by this September. ... Additionally, the company (IBM) is providing two data processing specialists who will work on the dictionary project for two years. Once the electronic dictionary is finished, it could be made available on-line, on magnetic tape, on laser/video disk or possible, on a single integrated circuit... The publisher estimated the project will cost $10 million. The British government awarded the company a 3 year grant of roughly $420,000 -- or 25% of the development cost -- for the dictionary. The University of Waterloo in Ontario will conduct a survey for the publisher of the potential users of an electronic dictionary. The university will also help develop software that would be needed to take advantage of an electronic dictionary. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 20 Jun 84 22:06:12-PDT From: Dikran Karagueuzian Subject: Newsletter, June 21, No. 37 [Forwarded from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] COMMON SENSE SUMMER CSLI is sponsoring a summer-long workshop called "Common Sense Summer." It has long been agreed that language use and intelligent behavior in general require a great deal of knowledge about the commonsense world. But heretofore no one has embarked on a large-scale effort to encode this knowledge. The aim of Common Sense Summer is to make the first three months of such an effort. We are attempting to axiomatize in formal logic significant amounts of commonsense knowledge about the physical, psychological and social worlds. We are concentrating on eight domains: shape and texture, spatial relationships, lexical semantics of cause and possession, properties of materials, certain mental phenomena, communication, relations between textual entities and entities in the world, and responsibility. We are attempting to make these axiomatizations mutually consistent and mutually supportive. We realize, of course, that all that can be accomplished during the summer is tracing the broad outlines of each of the domains and, perhaps, discovering several hard problems. Nine graduate students from several universities are participating in the workshop full-time. In addition, a number of other active researchers in the fields of knowledge representation, natural language, and vision are participating in meetings of various sizes and purposes. There will be two or three presentations during the summer, giving progress reports for the general public. The workshop is being coordinated by the writer. --Jerry Hobbs [...] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Jun 84 17:25:03 PDT From: Charlie Crummer Subject: Human Models The foundation of the reasoning constructed by Jules Greenwall in his note depends on being able to specify exactly the behavior of atoms in molecules. The precise description required depends on the molecular physics. Unfor- tunately study is still going on. The study of the molecule is a many-body problem for which there is no closed-form solution. Another fly in the ointment is the fact that the behavior of atoms in molecules depends, albeit in second order, on the nature of the nucleus. This is another branch of physics that is very active, i.e. much is not known. What one would get for a model built on such a fuzzy foundation is of dubious value. --Charlie ------------------------------ Date: 18 Jun 84 10:07:07-PDT (Mon) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rlgvax!cvl!umcp-cs!aplvax!lwt1 @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: aplvax.663 The other thing to note is that while each 'memory cell' in a computer has ~2 connections, each 'memory cell' in the brain has ~100. Since processing power is relative to (cells * connections), a measure of relative capacities is not sufficient for comparison between the brain and the CRAY. -Lloyd W. Taylor ... seismo!umcp-cs!aplvax!lwt1 ---I will have had been there before, soon--- ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Jun 84 06:39 EDT From: dmrussell.pa@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Objection to Crane: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain -- V2 Sorry, but I must make a serious objection to your claim that "... a person can be enabled (through hypnosis or by asking him the right way) to remember infinite details of any experience of this or prior life times ... " I object to the use of the term "infinite" in describing memory. That simply isn't true. If you just mean "large number", then say so. The infinite memory capacity problem was addressed once (in either AIDigest or HumanNets, I've forgotten) and found indefensible. The phrase "prior life times" assumes reincarnation, a completely unsupported assumption. "of any experience" demands that all experiences can be recalled, not just *recognized*, or *restored* but recalled! Do you really want the references to show that this isn't true? Memory recall under hypnosis has been found to be just as reconstructive (perhaps more so) as normal memory. Hypnotic states buy you some recall, but not that much! We haven't taken these things into account because they simply aren't true, or at the very least, can't be supported by anything other than religious belief. -- D.M. Russell. -- ------------------------------ Date: 18 Jun 84 15:08:10-PDT (Mon) From: ihnp4!ihldt!stewart @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: ihldt.2382 > (1) Subconscious memory - a person can be enabled (through > hypnosis or by asking him the right way) to remember > infinite details of any experience of this or prior life > times. I don't know where the "prior life" part came from, but this claim is usually an incorrect extrapolation of studies that indicate no such thing. What has been established is that people can be induced to remember things that they considered forgotten. This isn't by a long shot the same thing as saying that we remember everything that's ever happened to us. If you have evidence to support this claim, by all means present it. If not, please spare us. Bob Stewart ihldt!stewart ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Jun 84 08:23 EDT From: Dehn@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA (Joseph W. Dehn III) Subject: Turing test - legal implications ...computers someday might act like people... ...legal system is based on capability for rational conversation... ...what will we do????... ...will we have to reject rational conversation as the test of membership in society?... Sorry, I must have forgotten, but why exactly do we WANT to distinguish between humans and machines? -jwd3 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Jun 84 14:14 EST From: Huhns Subject: Seminar - Natural Language Parsing CONSTRAINT PROPAGATION SENTENCE PARSING Somnuek Anakwat Center for Machine Intelligence College of Engineering University of South Carolina 2pm Thursday, June 21, Room 230 An algorithm for parsing English sentences by the method of constraint propagation is presented. This method can be used to recognize English sentences and indicate whether those sentences are syntactically correct or incorrect according to grammar rules. The central idea of constraint propagation in sentence analysis is to form all possible combinations of the parts of speech from adjacent words in the input sentence, and then compare those combinations with English grammar rules for allowable combinations. The parts of speech for each word may be modified, left alone, or eliminated according to these rules. The analysis of these combinations of the parts of speech normally proceeds from left to right. The most significant feature of the algorithm presented is that grammar constraints propagate backward when it is possible. The algorithm is very useful when the given sentence contains words which have multiple properties. The algorithm also has an efficient parallel implementation. Results of applying the algorithm to several English sentences are included. An interpretation of the algorithm's performance and some topics for future research are discussed as well. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 22-Jun-84 05:39:05-PDT,15944;000000000001 Mail-From: LAWS created at 22-Jun-84 05:34:49 Date: Fri 22 Jun 1984 05:12-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #77 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Friday, 22 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 77 Today's Topics: AI Tools - Q'NIAL, Cognition - Mathematical Methods & Commonsense Reasoning, Books - Softwar, A New Weapon to Deal with the Soviets ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 19 Jun 84 14:59:27-PDT (Tue) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!lanl-a!unm-cvax!janney @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Q'NIAL Article-I.D.: unm-cvax.962 The April 1984 issue of Computer Design has an article on Nial (Nested Interactive Array Language). ------------------------------ Date: 18 Jun 84 15:10:07-PDT (Mon) From: ihnp4!houxm!mhuxl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!ncsu!jcz @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Mathematical Methods Article-I.D.: ncsu.2622 It is not surprising that mathematicians cannot remember what they do when they first construct proofs, especially 'difficult' proofs. Difficult proofs probably take quite a bit of processing power, with none left over for observing and recording what was done. In order to get a record of what exactly occurs ( a 'protocol' ) when a proof is being constructed, we would have to interrupt the subject and get him to tell us what he is doing - interferring with the precise things we want to measure! There is much the same problem with studying how programmers write programs. We can approach a recording by saving every scrap of paper and recording every keystroke, but that is not such a great clue to mental processes. It would be nice if some mathematician would save EVERY single scrap of paper ( timestamped, please! ) involved in a proof, from start to finish. Maybe we would find some insight in that. . . John Carl Zeigler North Carolina State University ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Jun 84 20:39:01 edt From: Roger L. Hale Subject: Re: Commonsense Reasoning? From: Roger L. Hale Subject: Re: Commonsense Reasoning? I get 4 quite a different way: If 3 (2) were half of 5 (4), what would a third of 10 (9) be? 4 (3). This way twice 5 (4) is 9 (8), [rather than twice 6 (5) is 12 (10) the way you describe.] The transformation I have in mind is "say 3 and mean 2", which is simply difference-of-1. The numbers I *mean* are in the stated relations (half, a third, twice) but they are renamed by a distorting filter, a homomorphism. "If arithmetic were shifted right one, what would half of 5, a third of 10, twice 5 be? (Answer: 3, 4 and 9.)" Partly it is a different choice of who to believe, the numbers or the relations; but I find this form most compelling due to the components being so fundamental. The extended proportion [for your method in parallel form] would be 3 : 5/2 :: 4 : 10/3 :: 12 : 2*5, the 12 (v. 9) serving to show that our two methods differ concretely. I think that the critical point for AI is that we make sense of a nonsense problem by postulating an unmentioned linear transformation since only a linear transformation permits a unique solution. [...] -- KIL In the first place, any critically constrained transformation has discrete (locally unique) solutions, barring singularities; and it is false that they are only unique for linear transformations: it takes a fairly special domain, like the complex analytic, to make it true. In the second place, what confidence should one gain in a theory on fixing a free parameter against one datum? Surely one should aim to constrain the theory as well as the parameter, and you have used up all your constraints. Where would we be if twice 5 were neither 12 nor 9? ?8-[ Back to square one. Yours in inquiry, Roger Hale rlh%mit-eddie@mit-mc ------------------------------ Date: 19 Jun 84 14:00:58-PDT (Tue) From: hplabs!tektronix!orca!shark!brianp @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Commonsense Reasoning? Article-I.D.: shark.836 About "if 3 is half of 5, what is a third of 10?" It is interesting to note the assumptions that might be made here. One could assume that all numbers retain their good-old standard meaning, except 3, when compared to 5. Then the chain of relationships (3:5/2, 6:5, 12:10, 4:10/3) can be made. What I first thought was "so what's a '10'? " I.e, let's toss out all the definitions of the numbers along with 3. 'Half' could be redefined, but that says nothing about what to do with 'third'. One could redefine 'is', in effect, making it mean the ':' relation of the previous article. Anybody have hypotheses on which assumptions or definitions one would tend to drop first, when solving a puzzle of this sort? Brian Peterson ...!ucbvax!tektronix!shark!brianp ------------------------------ Date: 19 Jun 84 18:34:05-PDT (Tue) From: hplabs!tektronix!orca!tekecs!davep @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Commonsense Reasoning? Article-I.D.: tekecs.3861 > From: brianp@shark.UUCP (Brian Peterson) > > It is interesting to note the assumptions that might be made here. > One could assume that all numbers retain their good-old standard meaning, > except 3, when compared to 5. Then the chain of relationships > (3:5/2, 6:5, 12:10, 4:10/3) can be made. If one redefines "3, when compared to 5", shouldn't the 3 be redefined in all instances of the "chain of relationships"? If so, one could conclude that one-"third" of 10 is 24/5 via 3:5/2, 6:5, 12:10, 12/(5/2):10/3, 24/5:10/3. David Patterson Tektronix, Inc. Wilsonville Industrial Park P.O. Box 1000 Wilsonville, Oregon 97070 (503) 685-2568 {ucb or dec}vax!tektronix!tekecs!davep uucp address davep@tektronix csnet address davep.tektronix@rand-relay arpa address ------------------------------ Date: Wed 20 Jun 84 18:37:45-PDT From: Jean-Luc Bonnetain Subject: softwar, a new weapon to deal with the Soviets ? [Forwarded from the Stnaford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] This is my translation of an article published in a French news magazine, "Le Point"; i have done my best to translate it, but i am sure there are some inadequacies. I just hope they don't occur in important places. I am just wondering if any one has heard about that, and if this is real, pure computer fiction or so well known that it's not worth flaming about. "Between the atomic bomb and conventional weapons, there was nothing in the American warfare equipment against the USSR. Now the time has come for "soft bombs", to launch a destructive war without any bloodshed. This is the topic of "Softwar", a forthcoming book written by a French computer scientist working in New York. The idea: as simple as it is machiavelic. In the programs that Soviet people get from Western countries are placed what amounts to "time bombs": devices that can be triggered from afar to hamper the functioning of Russian computers and paralyze the economy. With "Softwar", nuclear blackmail becomes obsolete. Le Point asked the author, Thierry Breton, how his relations with highly skilled American engineers has convinced him of the existence of the new type of weapon. LePoint: is "Softwar" just an computer thriller, or do "soft bombs" really exist ? ThierryBreton: I never used any, but they have been used for a few years already in our trade. Some countries from Africa or South America, who are customers of big American software companies, have booby-trapped programs running in their administrations. The aim of the providers of the software is to be protected against customers who won't pay. These soft bombs are set in vital areas, like payroll routines, which are then paralyzed. The customer has to call the company, and won't get any help until debts are cleared. In this case people talk about technical problems in the computer, but obviously never say that the program contained a bomb. Since now, these techniques had never been used for aggressive purposes. But there is absolutely no technical difficulty in doing that, so we are led to believe that this new weapon could be used through non strategic networks giving access to databases. For example, the Stockex network, which gives information on stock exchange values, or the WMO network, about worldwide meteorological information. LePoint: Has softwar begun yet ? ThierryBreton: For me, there is no doubt about that. The Soviets use 80% of the American databases. It is this dependency on communication between computer which is new, and which allows to enter a territory. Until now, the "bombs" had to be triggered on the spot by someone inside the place. The bombs were there, but could not be triggered remotely. Today, thanks to data transfer, they can be reached from thousands of kilometers. In the book, I imagine that one bomb is controlled, through Stockex, by the rate of exchange for a particular company determined in the software, and the Pentagon, as long as it does not want to detonate the "bomb", avoid the critical value by buying or selling actions. LePoint: You give some names of American organisms working for the Pentagon whose work is to set bombs in the programs, and to activate them. Is this real ? ThierryBreton: The names quoted have been slightly modified from the real ones. I took my data from a group founded in 1982 by the American Army, called NSI (National Software Institute). This institute works on all programs which have military applications. In 1983, the Army has spent 500 million dollars to debug its programs. Written in different languages, they have now been unified by the ADA language. This is the official objective of NSI. But for these military computer scientists, there is not much difference between finding unvoluntary errors and adding voluntary ones... LePoint: What is the Trojan horse used to send those soft bombs to the USSR ? ThierryBreton: The USSR has a lag of about 10 to 15 years in computer science, which is the equivalent of 2 or 3 new generations of computers. This lag in hardware causes an even more important lag, in artificial intelligence, which is the type of software running on the machines Soviet people have to buy from Western countries. They are very eager to get those programs, and some estimate that 60% of the software running there comes from the USA. The most important source is India, which has very good computer scientists. Overnight, IBM has been kicked out, to be replaced by Soviet Elorg computers ES10-20 and ES 10-60, which are copied from IBM. The Indians buy software from Western countries, port it to Elorgs, and then this software goes to the USSR. LePoint: Can a trap be invisible, like a buried mole ? ThierryBreton: Today, people know how to make bombs completely invisible. The first generation was fixed bombs, lines of code never activated unless a special signal was sent. Then the Polaris-type traps: like for the rockets, the programs contain baits to fool the enemy, multiple traps, only one of which is active. Then the stochastic bomb, the most dangerous one, which moves in the program each time it is loaded. These bombs are all the more discreet that they can be stopped from a distance, failures then disappearing in an unexplicable way. LePoint: Have there been cases in USSR of problems that could be explained by a soft bomb ? ThierryBreton: Some unexplained cases, yes. In November 1982, the unit for international phone calls has been down for 48 hours. Officially, the Soviets said it was a failure of the main computer. We still have to know what caused it. Every day in the Soviet papers one can read that such and such factory had to stop its production because of a shortage of some items. When the Gosplan computers break down, there are direct consequences on the production and functioning of factories. LePoint: By talking about softwar, aren't you helping the Soviets ? ThierryBreton: No. For 30 years, we have seen obvious attempts from the Soviets to destabilize Western countries by infiltrating trade unions, pacifist movements. The Eastern block can remotely cause strikes. But since now, there was now way to retaliate by doing precise desorganizing actions. In the context of the ideological war, softwar gives another way to strike back. The book also shows that the Soviets have no choice. They know that by buying or getting by other means this software, they are taking a big risk. But if they stop getting this software, the time it will take them to develop it by themselves will increase the gap. This is a fact. So soft bombs, like atomic bombs, can be a means of deterrence. For political people who are just dicovering this new strategy, the book is that of a new generation showing to the old one that what was a tool has become a weapon." [This reminds me of an anecdote I heard Captain (now Cmdr) Grace Hopper tell. It seems some company began to pass off a Navy-developed COBOL compiler verifier as their own, removing the print statement that gave credit to the Navy. When the Navy came out with an improved version, the company had the gall to ask for a copy. Her development group complied, but embedded concealed checks in the code so that it would fail to work if the credit printout were ever altered. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Wed 20 Jun 84 20:07:35-PDT From: Richard Treitel Subject: softwar @= [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The article Jean-Luc (or whoever) translates sounds like a typical piece of National Enquirer-style "reporting", namely it describes something that is *just* feasible theoretically but against which countermeasures exist, and which has wider ramifications than are mentioned. I'm sure the Russians are too paranoid to allow network access to important computers in such a way as to trigger these "bombs". But: it is widely rumoured that IBM puts time-delayed self-destruct operations into some of its programs so as to force you to buy the new release when it comes out (and heaven help you if it's late?). And in John Brunner's book "The Shockwave Rider", one of America's defence systems is a program that would bring down the entire national network, thus making it impossible for an invader to control the country. I love science fiction discussions, but I love them even more when they're not on BBoard. - Richard [Another SF analogy: there is a story about the consequences of developing some type of "ray" or nondirectional energy field capable of igniting all unstable compounds within a large radius, notably ammunition, propellants, and fuels. This didn't stop the outbreak of global war, but did reduce it to the stone age. All that has nothing to do with AI, of course, except that computers may yet be the only intelligent beings on the planet. -- KIL] ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 24-Jun-84 10:36:46-PDT,17098;000000000001 Mail-From: LAWS created at 24-Jun-84 10:34:07 Date: Sun 24 Jun 1984 10:19-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #78 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Sunday, 24 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 78 Today's Topics: AI Programming - Characteristics, Commonsense Reasoning - Hypothetical Math, Cognition - Humor & Memory & Intuition, Seminar - Full Abstraction and Semantic Equivalence ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 20 Jun 84 12:14:49-PDT (Wed) From: hplabs!hpda!fortune!amd70!intelca!glen @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Definition of an AI program Article-I.D.: intelca.317 As a half-serious/half humorous suggestion: Consider the fact that most of man's machines are built to do the same thing over and over and do it very well. Some random examples: - washing machine - automobile hood fastner in production line - pacman video game AI programs (hopefully) don't fit the mold, they don't spend their lives performing the same routine but change as they go. ^ ^ Glen Shires, Intel, Santa Clara, Ca. O O Usenet: {ucbvax!amd70,pur-ee,hplabs}!intelca!glen > ARPA: "amd70!intelca!glen"@BERKELEY \-/ --- stay mellow ------------------------------ Date: Fri 22 Jun 84 11:28:46-PDT From: Richard Treitel Subject: a third of ten Please. Everyone knows that 2*2=5 for sufficiently large values of 2. More to the point, if you take the square root of 5 and round to the nearest integer, you get 2. Again, if you take half of 5 and round to nearest using accepted method, get 3. A third of ten now becomes 3 as well. How many AI people does it take to change a lightbulb? - Richard [One graduate student, but it takes eight years. -- KIL (from John Hartman, CS.Hartman@UTexas-20) ] ------------------------------ Date: 21 Jun 84 10:51:26-PDT (Thu) From: decvax!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-rayna!swart @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Commonsense Reasoning? Article-I.D.: decwrl.1845 I am reminded of an old children's riddle: Q. If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have? A. Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it so. Mark Swartwout UUCP {allegra,decvax,ihnp4,ucbvax}!decwrl!rhea!rayna!swart ARPA MSWART@DEC-MARLBORO ------------------------------ Date: 21 Jun 84 22:07 PDT From: Shrager.pa@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Memory This might amuse. Authorship credit to Dave Touretzky@CMU. From: Dave Touretzky (DT50)@CMU-CS-A To: Jeff Shrager Subject: Q-registers in the brain ENGRAM (en'-gram) n. 1. The physical manifestation of human memory -- "the engram." 2. A particular memory in physical form. [Usage note: this term is no longer in common use. Prior to Wilson & Magruder's historic discovery, the nature of the engram was a topic of intense speculation among neuroscientists, psychologists, and even computer scientists. In 1994 Professors M. R. Wilson and W. V. Magruder, both of Mount St. Coax University in Palo Alto, proved conclusively that the mammalian brain is hardwired to interpret a set of thirty seven genetically-transmitted cooperating TECO macros. Human memory was shown to reside in 1 million Q-registers as Huffman-coded uppercase-only ASCII strings. Interest in the engram has declined substantially since that time.] --- from the New Century Unabridged English Dictionary, 3rd edition, A.D. 2007. David S. Touretzky (Ed.) ------------------------------ Date: 19 Jun 84 16:02:49-PDT (Tue) From: ihnp4!houxm!mhuxl!ulysses!gamma!pyuxww!pyuxn!rlr @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: pyuxn.769 > (2) Intuition - by this I mean huge leaps into discovery > that have nothing to do with the application of logical > association or sensual observation. This kind of stuff > happens to all of us and cannot easily be explained by > the physical/mechanical model of the human mind. > > I agree that if you could build a computer big enough and fast > enough and taught it all the "right stuff", you could duplicate > the human brain, but not the human mind. Intuition is nothing more than one's subconscious employing logical thought faster than the conscious brain can understand or realize it. What's all the fuss about? And where's the difference between the "brain" and the "mind"? What can this "mind" do that the physical brain doesn't? A good dose of Hofstadterisms and Smullyanisms ("The Mind's 'I'" provides good examples) puts to rest some of those notions of mind and brain. "I take your opinions and multiply them by -1." Rich Rosen pyuxn!rlr ------------------------------ Date: 19 Jun 84 13:55:43-PDT (Tue) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!ut-sally!utastro!bill @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: utastro.114 > (1) Subconscious memory - a person can be enabled (through > hypnosis or by asking him the right way) to remember > infinite details of any experience of this or prior life > times. Does the mind selectively block out trivia in order > focus on what's important currently? One of the reasons that evidence obtained under hypnosis is inadmissable in many courts is that hypnotically induced memories are notoriously unreliable, and can often be completely false, even though they can seem extremely vivid. In some states, the mere fact that a witness has been under hypnosis is enough to disqualify the individual's testimony in the case. I have personal, tragic experience with this phenomenon in my own family. I don't intend to burden the net with this, but if anyone doubts what I say, I will be glad to discuss it by E-mail. Bill Jefferys 8-% Astronomy Dept, University of Texas, Austin TX 78712 (USnail) {allegra,ihnp4}!{ut-sally,noao}!utastro!bill (uucp) utastro!bill@ut-ngp (ARPANET) ------------------------------ Date: 20 Jun 84 9:22:50-PDT (Wed) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!ut-sally!riddle @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: ut-sally.2301 Now that Chuqui's obligingly created net.sci, why don't we move this discussion there? Is there any reason for it to go on in five newsgroups simultaneously? If interest continues, perhaps this topic will form the basis for net.sci.psych. Followups to net.sci, please. --- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.") --- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Jun 84 15:47 CST From: Nichael Cramer Subject: Memory > >From: hplabs!hpda!fortune!crane @ Ucb-Vax.arpa > > (1) Subconscious memory - a person can be [...] But, brain is mind is brain is mind is brain is mind is brain... [what else have you got to work with?] So long and thanks for all the fish, NLC ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jun 1984 1825-PDT (Friday) From: gd@sri-spam (Greg DesBrisay) Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: aplvax.663 >The other thing to note is that while each 'memory cell' in a computer >has ~2 connections, each 'memory cell' in the brain has ~100. Since >processing power is relative to (cells * connections), a measure of >relative capacities is not sufficient for comparison between the brain >and the CRAY. -Lloyd W. Taylor In addition, many connections in the human brain are analog in character, so any comparison with a binary digital computer must multiply the number of connections by the number of bits necessary to digitize the analog range of each synapse. To do that, one would have to know what analog resolution is required to accurately model the behavior of a synapse. I'm not sure if any one has figured that one out yet. Greg DesBrisay SRI ------------------------------ Date: 20 Jun 84 9:20:43-PDT (Wed) From: decvax!mcnc!unc!ulysses!allegra!princeton!eosp1!robison @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: eosp1.954 I'm not comfortable with Rich Rosen's assertion that intuition is just the mind's unconscious LOGICAL reasoning that happens too fast for the conscious to track. If intuition is simply ordinary logical reasoning, we should be just as able to simulate it as we can other tyes of reasoning. In fact, attempts to simulate intuition account for some rather noteworthy successes and failures, and seem to require a number of discoveries before we can make much real progress. E.g.: I think it is fair to claim that chess players use intuition to evaluate chess positions. We acknowledge that computers have failed to be intuitive in playing chess in at least two ways that are easy for people: - knowing what kinds of tactical shots to look for in a position - knowing how to plan longterm strategy in a position In backgammon, Hans Berliner has a very successful program that seems to have overcome the comparable backgammon problem. His program has a way of deciding, in a smooth, continuous fashion, when to shift from one set of assumptions to another while analyzing. I am not aware of whether other people have been able to develop his techniques to other kinds of analysis, or whether this is one flash of success. Berliner has not been comparably successful applying this idea to a chess program. (The backgammon program defeated then world champion in a short match, in which the doubling cube was used.) [There was general agreement that the program's play was inferior, however. Another point: while smooth transitioning between strategies is more "human" and easier to follow or explain (and thus to debug or improve), I can't see that it is inherently as powerful as switching to a new optimal strategy at each turn. -- KIL] Artists and composers use intuition as part of the process of creating art. It is likely that one of the benefits they gain from intuition is that a good work of art has many more internal relationships among its parts than the creator could have planned. It is hard to see how this result can be derived from "logical" reasoning of any ordinary deductive or inductive kind. It is easier to see how artists obtain this result by making various kinds of intuitive decisions to limit their scope of free choice in the creative process. Computer-generated art has come closest to emulating this process by using f-numbers rather than random numbers to generate artistic decisions. It is unlikely that the artist's intuition is working as "simply" as deriving decision from f-numbers. It remains a likely possibility that a type of reasoning that we know little about is involved. We are still pretty bad at programming pattern recognition, which intuitive thinking does spectacularly well. If one wishes to assert that the pattern recognition is done by well-known logical processes, I would like to see some substantiation. - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison princeton!eosp1!robison ------------------------------ Date: 20 Jun 84 18:14:17-PDT (Wed) From: decvax!linus!utzoo!henry @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: utzoo.3971 John Crane cites, as evidence for the human mind being impossible to duplicate by computer, two phenomena. (1) Subconscious memory - a person can be enabled (through hypnosis or by asking him the right way) to remember infinite details of any experience of this or prior life times. Does the mind selectively block out trivia in order focus on what's important currently? As far as I know, there's no evidence of this that will stand up to critical examination. Even disregarding the "prior life times" part, for which the reliable evidence is, roughly speaking, nonexistent, the accuracy of recall under hypnosis is very doubtful. True, the subject can describe things in great detail, but it's not at all proven that this detail represents *memory*, as opposed to imagination. In fact, although it's quite likely that hypnosis can help bring out things that have been mostly forgotten, there is serious doubt that the memories can be disentangled from the imagination well enough for, say, testimony in court to be reliable when hypnosis is used. (2) Intuition - by this I mean huge leaps into discovery that have nothing to do with the application of logical association or sensual observation. This kind of stuff happens to all of us and cannot easily be explained by the physical/mechanical model of the human mind. The trouble here is that "...have nothing to do with the application of logical association or sensual observation..." is an assumption, not a verified fact. There is (weak) evidence suggesting that intuition may be nothing more remarkable than reasoning and observation on a subconscious level. The human mind actually seems to be much more of a pattern-matching engine than a reasoning engine, and it's not really surprising if pattern-matching proceeds in a haphazard way that can sometimes produce unexpected leaps. Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry ------------------------------ Date: 20 Jun 84 17:14:58-PDT (Wed) From: ucbcad!tektronix!orca!shark!hutch @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: shark.838 | Intuition is nothing more than one's subconscious employing logical | thought faster than the conscious brain can understand or realize it. | What's all the fuss about? And where's the difference between the | "brain" and the "mind"? What can this "mind" do that the physical brain | doesn't? | Rich Rosen pyuxn!rlr Thank you, Rich, for so succinctly laying to rest all the questions mankind has ever had about self and mind and consciousness. Now, how about proving it. Oh, and by the way, what is a "subconscious" and how do you differentiate between a "conscious" brain and a "subconscious" in any meaningful way? And once you have told us exactly what a physical brain can do, then we can tell you what a mind could do that it doesn't. Hutch ------------------------------ Date: 21 June 1984 0802-EDT From: Lydia Defilippo at CMU-CS-A Subject: Seminar - Full Abstraction and Semantic Equivalence [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Speaker: Ketan Mulmuley Date: Friday, June 22 Time: 11:00 Place: 5409 Title: Full Abstraction and Semantic Equivalence The Denotational Approach of Scott-Strachey in giving semantics to programming languages is well known. In this approach each construct of the programming language is given a meaning in a domain which has nice mathematical properties. Semantic equivalence is the problem of showing that this map -- the denotational semantics -- is faithful to the operational semantics. Because known methods showing such equivalences were too complicated, very few such proofs have been carried out. Many authors had expressed a need for mechanization of these proofs. But it remained unclear whether such proofs could be mechanized at all. We shall give in this thesis a general theory to prove such equivalences which has a distinct advantage of being mechanizable. A mechanized tool was acually built on top of LCF to aid the proofs of semantic equivalence. Other central problem of denotational semantics is the problem of full abstraction, i.e., determining whether the meanings given to two different language constructs by the denotational semantics are equal whenever they are operationally equivalent. This has been known to be a hard problem and the only known general method of constructing such models was the {\it syntactic } method of Milner. But whether such models could be constructed semantically remained an important open problem. In this thesis we show that this is indeed the case. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 24-Jun-84 23:19:28-PDT,21635;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 24-Jun-84 23:17:26 Date: Sun 24 Jun 1984 22:49-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #79 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Monday, 25 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 79 Today's Topics: Combinatory Logic - Request, AI Tools - NIAL, AI and Society - Relevance of "souls" to AI, Problem Solving - Commonsense Reasoning, AI Programming - Spelling Correction, Cognition - Intuition & Mind vs. Brain ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 28 Jun 84 6:56:08-EDT (Thu) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!floyd!vax135!ukc!srlm @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: combinatory logic Article-I.D.: ukc.4280 [-: kipple :-] [I couldn't bear to delete this one. -- KIL] In the hope that many of you are also interested in combinatory logic... please have a look at this and mail me any suggestions, references, etc. ------------------ [by a. pettorossi in notre dame j. form. logic 22 (4) 81] define: marking is a function that assigns, for each combinator in a term (tree) the number of left choices (of path) that one has to make to go from the root to the combinator. ex.: marking SII = the set right applied subterms of a combinator X is defined as: 1) if X is a basic combinator or a variable ras(X) = {X) 2) if X is (YZ) then ras(YZ) = union (ras(X)) Z a combinator X with reduction axiom X x1 x2 x3 ... xk -> Y has non-ascending property iff for all i, 1<=i<=k, if occurs in marking (X x1...xk) and occurs in marking Y, then p >= q. a combinator (X x1 x2 ... xk -> Y) has compositive effect iff a right applied subterm of Y is not a variable. ------------------ Theorem: given a subbase B={X1,...Xk} such that all Xi in B have non-ascending property and no compositive effect, every reduction strategy applied to any Y in B+ leads to normal form. ------------------ Open Problem: does the theorem hold if non-ascending property is the only condition? ------------------ My personal questions: if one specifies leftmost-outermost reduction only, would the Open Problem be any easier? how much of combinatory logic can we do with B? and with non-ascending property only? silvio lemos meira UUCP: ...!{vax135,mcvax}!ukc!srlm Post: computing laboratory university of kent at canterbury canterbury ct2 7nf uk Phone: +44 227 66822 extension 568 ------------------------------ Date: 20 Jun 84 10:35:51-PDT (Wed) From: decvax!linus!utzoo!utcsrgv!qucis!carl @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: what is NIAL? Article-I.D.: qucis.70 Nial is the "Nested Interactive Array Language." It is based on the nested, rectangular arrays of T. More, and has aspects of Lisp, APL, FP, and Pascal. Nial runs on lots of Unix(&etc) systems, VAX/VMS, PC-DOS, and VM/CMS (almost). Nial is being used primarily for prototyping and logic programming. Distribution is through Nial Systems Limited, PO Box 2128, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, K7L 5J8. (613) 549-1432. Here are some trivial samples (names in uppercase are second order functions, called transformers): 5 in 0 1 2 5 = truth 1 3 5 EACHLEFT in 0 1 2 5 = truth falsehood truth average is divide [sum, tally] average 1 2 3 4 5 = 3. [sum, tally] 1 2 3 4 5 = 15 5 divide 15 5 = 3. MONO is equal EACH MONO type 1 2.0 3.1j4.3 `a "phrase ?fault truth = falsehood MONO type 1 3 5 2 = truth ------------------------------ Date: 10 Jun 84 11:39:00-PDT (Sun) From: hplabs!hp-pcd!hpfcla!hpfclq!robert @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Re: elevance of "souls" to AI Article-I.D.: hpfclq.68500003 Is a soul going to be the real issue here? > I submit that the concept of "soul" is irrelevant only if AI is doomed > to utter failure. Use your imagination and consider a computer program > that exhibits many of the characteristics of a human being in > its ability to reason, to converse, and to be creative and unexpected in > its actions. How will you AI-ers defend yourself if a distinguished > theologian asserts that G-d has granted to your computer program a soul? To those AIers who don't believe in God it probably won't matter much what a distinguished theologain asserts. I think many that believe in God will wonder why God would come down and bless a computer program with a soul. They will doubt the theologian. And for those that do believe that the program has a soul, what are they to defend themselves from? Are they to defend God for doing it? Or they may just agree with the theologian saying, "Yep, that sure is neat that it has a soul." I think a bigger problem will be empathy for the program. A program that is your friend could be just as hard to kill as any other being. This could be particularly true of people who are only end users of these friend programs and don't understand how it works. It is hard to guess the psychological effects of man-machine freindships. It is a very lonely world and a computer might be your only friend in the world! > If he might be right, the program, and its hardware must not be destroyed. Is cremation bad because that destroys the hardware of something that had a soul? > Perhaps it should not be altered either, lest its soul be lost. > The casual destruction, recreation and development of computer programs > containing souls will horrify many people. Altering, such as in psychotherapy for humans and mods to code or inference tables in programs, is bad? Operating on people or making mods to hardware is bad? I would imagine not. What we do have is the possibility of of modifying and experimenting with models of human psychologies to a degree never before available. What are the issues involved in the torture of beings created out of software? The indiscriminate experimentation on man-made psyches may bring about a new form of the antivivisectionist movement. This is all independant of the soul issue for many people. "If it really appears to be human how can you kill it?" will be the underlying measure, I think. Again, who knows how the intervening history will condition man to the thought of man made intelligence. > You will face demonstrations, > destruction of laboratories, and government interference of the worst kind. Nice drama here. > Start saving up now, for a defense fund for the first AI-er accused by > a district attorney of soul-murder. Now I speak from the point of view of someone who doesn't hold much stock in the idea of a soul. I do believe in the importance of the human as a thinking, feeling being, so we may really agree. A lot of what you said seems to be all based on the issue of a soul. I'm just not convienced that that many people will see it as an issue of the soul. I can see more easily the DA above arguing that the man-made intelligence is alive and therefore can be murdered. > On second thought, you have nothing to fear; no one in AI is really trying > to make computers act like humans, right? You bet AIers are out to make computers act like humans, bit by bit and byte by byte. They are also studying even more general concepts. What is intelligence? What is the nature of thought? This goes beyond just making a machine act like a human. -Robert (animal) Heckendorn hplabs!hpfcla!robert [A couple of notes here: First, SF writers have certainly tried to explore the man/machine friendship issue in many forms. I remember stories about robots, computer environments (e.g., HAL), direct computer/brain links, relationships with intelligent spaceships, etc. Second, the churches have seldom been strongly opposed to killing either in war or as capital punishment. At times they have taken the position that torture and death are unimportant as long as confession has cleared the soul for entry to heaven. They have been less tolerant of the torture of soulless animals. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 21 Jun 84 13:58:15-PDT (Thu) From: ihnp4!houxm!mhuxl!mhuxm!mhuxi!charm!slag @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Commonsense Reasoning? Article-I.D.: charm.377 In solving a puzzle like: If 3 is half of 5, what is a third of ten? One might try a series of solutions like the ones suggested, but I would consider them incorrect if they were logically inconsistant. The meaning of the problem would be undermined if one redefined three but not two, five, ten, half or third. One approach I would take would be to explore alternate bases. For instance, in base nine, three is a third of ten. This approach does not solve the above problem though so it must be marked as wrong, and thrown out. At what point should a problem like that be given up on as illogical? ------------------------------ Date: 21 Jun 84 12:45:00-PDT (Thu) From: pur-ee!uiucdcs!uicsl!keller @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Commonsense Reasoning? - (nf) Article-I.D.: uicsl.12300001 1/2 * 5 = 2.5 round up to 3 1/3 * 10 = 3.333... round down to 3 Just another possible interpretation. -Shaun Keller ------------------------------ Date: Sun 24 Jun 84 22:34:57-PDT From: Ken Laws Subject: Commonsense Reasoning? 1/2 * 5 = 2.5 round up to 3 1/3 * 10 = 3.333... round down to 3 -Shaun Keller Shaun's solution is the same as Richard Treitel's solution in the previous issue, derived independently. I like it better than my own solution except for the fact that it makes the problem less metaphysical. Roger Hale's solution of (temporarily) subtracting one from each number was essentially a solution to "If 3-X were half of 5-X, what would X plus a third of 10-X be?" It seems as valid as my own solution to "If 3 were half of 5X, what would a third of 10X be?" I am surprised that such good alternatives to my explanation were found, especially after I had exposed everyone to my own way of thinking. For 18 years I've thought I had >>the<< answer. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: 21 Jun 84 17:15:09-PDT (Thu) From: decvax!mcnc!unc!ulysses!allegra!princeton!eosp1!robison @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Commonsense reasoning Article-I.D.: eosp1.955 >> Q: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a sheep have? >> A: Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. I find this answer less satisfactory than the two given below. It seems to me that "calling an X a Y" is exactly how we define what most things are. SO: A: One. A tail is leg, those other four things are obviously something else. OR: A: Five. If you call it a leg, it is a leg (albeit of a different kind), in addition to those other four legs. - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison princeton!eosp1!robison ------------------------------ Date: Sun 24 Jun 84 22:30:21-PDT From: Robert Amsler Subject: Spelling Correction vs. Fact Correction If one changed the content of a Spelling corrector to be a list of predicates containing `facts' rather than sequences of letters, and then one used such a program against the output of a parser which reduced incoming text to similarly structured predicates, and the `fact checker' then emitted confirmations or `corrections' of the facts in the parsed text (e.g. South-Of San-Francisco San Jose; Capital-of USSR Moscow; etc.) would this be a knowledge-based system? What has changed from sequences of letters being acceptable `truths' to the mechanical use of predicates? I fail to see how this is very different from having a spelling corrector look over a string of letters and note that MAN and DOG are correct truths whereas DOA (= Capital-of USSR San-Francisco) and MNA = (South-Of San-Jose San-Francisco) are actually `misspellings' of DOG and MAN. It might well be one doesn't want to call a system that uses this strategy to proofcheck student's essays about geography an AI program, but it sure would be hard to tell from its performance whether it was an AI program or a non-AI program `pretending' to be an AI program. ------------------------------ Date: 21 Jun 84 13:30:56-PDT (Thu) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!cmcl2!floyd!whuxle!spuxll!ech @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Intuition Article-I.D.: spuxll.510 We have a couple of different issues here: is there a distinction between 'mind' and 'brain', and -- if you advocate the position that there is no difference -- what possible mechanisms account for intuition? On the first, I will (like others) recommend "The Mind's I". The issue is addressed until ANYBODY will get confused. You may come away with the same belief, but you will have DOUBTS, regardless of your current position. As for "intuition," we are (so far) using an inaccurate picture: those "leaps of imagination" are not necessarily correct insights! Have you never had an intuitive feeling that was WRONG in the face of additional data? Let's look at a few candidates; are any of these either supported or disproved by current evidence? 1. Intuition is just deduction based on data one is not CONSCIOUSLY aware of. Body language is a good example of data we all collect but often are not aware of consciously; we may use terms like "good/bad vibes"... 2. Intuition is just induction based on partial data and application of a "model" or "pattern" from a different experience. 3. Intuition is a random-number-generator along with some "sanity checks" against internal consistency and/or available data. I submit that about the only thing we KNOW about intuition is that it is not a consciously rational process. Introspection, by definition, will not yield up any distinctions between any of the above three mechanisms, or between them and the effects of a soul or divine inspiration. The traditional technical and ethical constraints against breaking open that skull to measure it are only beginning to break down (the technical ones, that is!). I'll add one thing, then get off the box. I USE my intuition: I am willing to take ideas whether I can account for the source/process or not. However, I apply the usual rational processes to the intuitive notion before swearing to its truth: check for self-consistency, consistency with available data, and where possible set up "experiments" that might falsify the premise. The Son of Sam had the divine inspiration that he had to kill a few folks... =Ned= ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Jun 84 13:17:28 PDT From: Michael Dyer Subject: Intuition Those who are trying to argue that "intuition" is something that cannot be mechanized or understood in terms of computational structures and operations should try substituting the word "soul" everywhere for "intuition" and see if they still believe their own arguments. If they still do, then I ask them to re-read Minksy's comments on the "soul" a few digest issues back. The task of AI researchers is to show how such vague notions CAN be understood computationally, not to go around arguing against this simply because such notions as "intuition" are so vague as to be computationally useless at such at a bs level of discussion. It's like my postulating the notion of "radio" and then looking at each transistor, crystal, wire or what-have-you inside the radio, and then saying "THAT part can't be a radio; that OTHER part there can't be one either. I guess the idea of 'radio' can never be realized by the combination of such parts." I second the suggestion that amateur philosophers of mind read Hofstadter, or better yet, start building computer programs which exhibit aspects of "intuition" and then discuss their own programs. ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jun 84 8:41:28-PDT (Fri) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rochester!ritcv!ccivax!band @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: ccivax.171 In reference to Mr. Robison's comments: Is it possible that "intuition" is the word we use to explain what cannot be explained more formally or logically? I'm thinking of the explanation of evolution based on Natural Selection. An explanation based on probability is NOT an explanation at all. It is an admission that there is no logical or formal explanation possible. Of course, we still accept evolution as a fact of life, but we don't have any mechanical (or dynamical in the sense of physics) model for it. Perhaps the same is true of our experience of intuition. Something is going on when we have a flash of insight, but we don't have any dynamical model that can be used for prediction. I think that Mr. Robison is correct when he says that we just don't know much about how our mind/brain system works. We need to keep asking any and all questions that come to mind (pun not intended) -- that's what science is all about. Bill Anderson ...!{ {ucbvax | decvax}!allegra!rlgvax }!ccivax!band ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jun 84 10:11:16-PDT (Fri) From: decvax!mcnc!unc!ulysses!gamma!pyuxww!pyuxn!rlr @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: pyuxn.770 [from shark!hutch] > | Intuition is nothing more than one's subconscious employing logical > | thought faster than the conscious brain can understand or realize it. > | What's all the fuss about? And where's the difference between the > | "brain" and the "mind"? What can this "mind" do that the physical brain > | doesn't? > | Rich Rosen pyuxn!rlr > > Thank you, Rich, for so succinctly laying to rest all the questions > mankind has ever had about self and mind and consciousness. You're welcome. It only takes a miniscule amount of logic and a careful shave with my Occam's Electric Razor. The point is, for all this talk of "soul" and "mind", I've never seen anything that points to a *need* (from a logical point of view) for anything external to "physicalism" to describe the goings-on in the human brain. > Now, how about proving it. Oh, and by the way, what is a "subconscious" > and how do you differentiate between a "conscious" brain and a "subconscious" > in any meaningful way? > And once you have told us exactly what a physical brain can do, then we > can tell you what a mind could do that it doesn't. Let's place the burden of proof on the proper set of shoulders. If anyone is proposing a view of intelligence involving a "mind" (defined as that part of intellect not part of the physical brain), then they had better describe some phenomena which physical processes cannot account for. [from eosp1!robison] > I'm not comfortable with Rich Rosen's assertion that intuition > is just the mind's unconscious LOGICAL reasoning that happens > too fast for the conscious to track. If intuition is simply > ordinary logical reasoning, we should be just as able to > simulate it as we can other types of reasoning. In fact, attempts > to simulate intuition account for some rather noteworthy successes > and failures, and seem to require a number of discoveries before > we can make much real progress. E.g.: My statement was probably a little too concise there. It seems like the brain may be able to extract patterns through an elaborate pattern matching process that can be triggered by random (or pseudo-random) "browsing", such that a small subsection of a matched thought pattern can trigger the recall (or synthesis) of an entire thought element. (Whatever that means...) > Artists and composers use intuition as part of the process of > creating art. It is likely that one of the benefits they gain > from intuition is that a good work of art has many more internal > relationships among its parts than the creator could have planned. > It is hard to see how this result can be derived from "logical" > reasoning of any ordinary deductive or inductive kind. It is > easier to see how artists obtain this result by making various > kinds of intuitive decisions to limit their scope of free choice > in the creative process. Logical may not be the right word, since the process does seem to be either conscious or intentional. The "click" or "flash" that often is said to coincide with intuitive realizations seems like an interrupt from a sub- conscious process that, after random (or pseudo-random) searching, has found a "match". "Submitted for your approval..." Rich Rosen pyuxn!rlr ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 25-Jun-84 23:09:14-PDT,15976;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 25-Jun-84 22:44:25 Date: Mon 25 Jun 1984 22:33-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #80 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Tuesday, 26 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 80 Today's Topics: Expert Systems - Request for Abstracts, Reasoning - Checking for Inconsistencies, AI Programming & Turing Tests - Spelling Correction, Business - Softwar, Cognition - Intuition & Hypnosis & Unconscious Mind, Games - Optimal Strategies, Philosophy - Purpose & Relation to AI ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 25 Jun 84 17:05:31 EDT (Mon) From: Dana S. Nau Subject: expert computer systems I am currently writing a revised and updated version of my tutorial on expert computer systems (which appeared in IEEE Computer in Feb. 1983). As part of the tutorial I plan to include a list of current expert computer systems, including both their domains of expertise and references to any available current papers describing them. If you know of any successful expert computer systems which you would like me to mention, please send me a brief note giving the name of the system, the domain area, what kind of success the system has had, and journal-style reference listings for any relevant published papers. ------------------------------ Date: 23 Jun 84 16:24:59-PDT (Sat) From: hplabs!tektronix!orca!shark!brianp @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Commonsense Reasoning? Article-I.D.: shark.845 When presented with a problem like the 'if 3 is half of 5' one, how many dive right in and try to solve something, and how many start by checking for inconsistencies? Solving problems that are 'inconsistent' sounds like it goes in the same pile as working with insufficient data. (problems with problems :-) Brian Peterson ...ucbvax!tektronix!shark!brianp ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 25 Jun 84 09:09 EDT From: MJackson.Wbst@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Re: Spelling Correction vs. Fact Correction "It might well be one doesn't want to call a system that uses this strategy to proofcheck student's essays about geography an AI program, but it sure would be hard to tell from its performance whether it was an AI program or a non-AI program `pretending' to be an AI program." -- Robert Amsler If one cannot distinguish a non-artificial intelligence program from an artificial intelligence program by, say, interacting with it freely for a couple of hours, then would not one be compelled to conclude that the non-artificial intelligence program was displaying true artificial artificial intelligence? Mark ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Jun 84 18:38:06 pdt From: syming%B.CC@Berkeley Subject: Re: Softwar Four years ago, I worked as a programmer for Business School at Ohio State U. When we ordered SAS/ETS(Statistical Analysis System/Econometic and Time Series) from SAS company, they sent us a tape with a fixed time (two months or so?) payment notice and stated that the program would vanish after that time. Of course, we paid in time and they sent us a 20(?)-digit long key word and instruction to make our trial copy a one-year-life-time program, since the service contract was year by year. I had not realized this was a rare case. Isn't it a common practice for a company to protect their products? -- syming hwang ------------------------------ Date: 23 Jun 84 8:13:06-PDT (Sat) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!ut-sally!utastro!bill @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: utastro.127 Apropos this discussion, there has been research into hypnotically aided recall that casts serious doubt on its reliability. Two recent articles in *Science* magazine directly address this issue: "The Use of Hypnosis to Enhance Recall", Oct 14, 1983, pp. 184-185 and "Hypnotically Created Memory Among Highly Hypnotized Subjects", Nov 4, 1983, pp. 523-524. Bill Jefferys 8-% Astronomy Dept, University of Texas, Austin TX 78712 (USnail) {allegra,ihnp4}!{ut-sally,noao}!utastro!bill (uucp) utastro!bill@ut-ngp (ARPANET) ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jun 84 10:56:44-PDT (Fri) From: ihnp4!houxm!mhuxl!mhuxm!mhuxi!charm!slag @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: charm.380 There seems to be some consensus here that however mind and brain are related, there seems to be more process going on then we are directly aware of. In some way, a filtering mechanism in our mind/brain extracts certain salient images from all the associations and connections. It is these structures (thoughts?) that I would call consciousness or awareness. Would anybody care to take a stab at a model for this? Logic is bunch of pretty flowers that smell bad. slag heap. ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jun 84 13:58:21-PDT (Fri) From: ihnp4!houxm!mhuxl!ulysses!gamma!pyuxww!pyuxn!rlr @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Intuition Article-I.D.: pyuxn.773 [from Ned Horvath:] > I will (like others) recommend "The Mind's I". The issue > is addressed until ANYBODY will get confused. You may come away with the > same belief, but you will have DOUBTS, regardless of your current position. > As for "intuition," we are (so far) using an inaccurate picture: those > "leaps of imagination" are not necessarily correct insights! Have you never > had an intuitive feeling that was WRONG in the face of additional data? > 1. Intuition is just deduction based on data one is not CONSCIOUSLY aware of. > Body language is a good example of data we all collect but often are not > aware of consciously; we may use terms like "good/bad vibes"... > 2. Intuition is just induction based on partial data and application of a > "model" or "pattern" from a different experience. > 3. Intuition is a random-number-generator along with some "sanity checks" > against internal consistency and/or available data. > I submit that about the only thing we KNOW about intuition is that it is > not a consciously rational process. Introspection, by definition, will not > yield up any distinctions between any of the above three mechanisms, or > between them and the effects of a soul or divine inspiration. Thanks, Ned, for putting together what I was trying to say about intuition in a clearer manner than I could. The three examples you cite sound like rationally feasible constructs to describe what we call intuition. As far as external possibilities (souls and deities), it seems sufficient to say that until we see a facet which internal biochemical physical processes cannot account for, there is no reason to presuppose the supernatural/external. "So, it was all a dream!" --Mr. Pither "No, dear, this is the dream; you're still in the cell." --his mother Rich Rosen pyuxn!rlr ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jun 84 8:36:42-PDT (Fri) From: ihnp4!cbosgd!rbg @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Mind and Brain Article-I.D.: cbosgd.42 The distinction between conscious and subconscious components of the mind is an important one. The substrate for consciousness is basically cortical, which implies that it has access to language and reasoning processes, but only some of the information about emotional states processed primarily in lower brain centers. To restate it: consciousness can monitor only a fraction of the activity of the brain, and can effectively control only a fraction of our behavior. The example of body language not being conscious is a good one (although trained observers can learn to make conscious interpretations of some of these signals). >2. Intuition is just induction based on partial data and application of a > "model" or "pattern" from a different experience. > >3. Intuition is a random-number-generator along with some "sanity checks" > against internal consistency and/or available data. > >I submit that about the only thing we KNOW about intuition is that it is >not a consciously rational process. > ech@spuxll.UUCP (Ned Horvath) There is a variety of evidence that human memory is content addressable. The results of the association process whereby different memories are compared or brought together are accessable to consciousness, and indeed may even make up a significant component of the "stream of consciousness". The "sanity checks" are the conscious, rational evaluation of the associations. A lot of intuitions and ideas get junked... The control of this association process is not rational: how many times have you known that you knew a fact, but were unable to produce it on the spot? There may well be an element of randomness to this process (Hinton at CMU has suggested a model based on statistical mechanics), but there are also constraints on the patterns to be matched against. You don't generate lots of inappropriate associations, or you would not be very successful in competing for survival. And that is the force that shaped our brain and thought capacity. --Rich Goldschmidt cbosgd!rbg a former brain hacker (now reformed?) ------------------------------ Date: 25 Jun 1984 10:39-EST From: Robert.Frederking@CMU-CS-CAD.ARPA Subject: Intuition; Hans Berliner There is a good article in the Winter 83 AI Magazine (4;4) about non-logical AI (it is a rebuttal to Nils Nilsson's Presidential Address at AAAI-83). The authors point out that certain problems are intractable if dealt with symbolically, whereas they are easily solved if one uses real numbers and ordinary math. I suspect that the human brain uses a combination of analog and digital/symbolic processing, and that some cases of intuition might arise from the results of an analog computation into which introspection is not possible. As for Ken Laws's comment about switching to a new optimal strategy at each step (rather than Berliner's smoothing of transitions), one of the things he is trying to get around is the "horizon effect", where the existance of a sharp cut-off in the program's evaluation makes it think that postponing a problem solves it (since you no longer see the problem if it is pushed back over your horizon). In other words, perhaps the optimal strategy at each point *is* a non-linear combination of several discrete strategies. Also, I think it is a mistake to say that "pattern-matching" and "reasoning" are different things. After all, one must pattern-match in order to find appropriate objects to combine with an inference rule (obvious in OPS5, but also true in PROLOG). The question at hand is perhaps more whether one is allowed to use logically unsound inferences (a.k.a. heuristics). ------------------------------ Date: Mon 25 Jun 84 08:10:45-PDT From: PEREIRA@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: ``Mind and brain'' mumbo-jumbo > From: Michael Dyer > The task of AI researchers > is to show how such vague notions CAN be understood computationally, > not to go around arguing against this simply because such notions > as "intuition" are so vague as to be computationally useless at > such at a bs level of discussion. It's like my postulating the > notion of "radio" and then looking at each transistor, crystal, wire or > what-have-you inside the radio, and then saying "THAT part can't be a > radio; that OTHER part there can't be one either. Just so! > From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rochester!ritcv!ccivax!band @ Ucb-Vax.arpa > Is it possible that "intuition" is the word we > use to explain what cannot be explained more > formally or logically? Why do these discussions always degenerate into suggestions of absolute limits to reason, perception or what not? That the task is *very* difficult we know, but we should not claim (without proof) that something *cannot* be done just because we cannot see how it could be done (within our lifetime...). Reminds me of those old ``if God had intended man to fly...'' arguments... Let's replace those ``what *cannot* be explained'' by ``what we can't yet explain''! -- Fernando Pereira pereira@sri-ai ------------------------------ Date: 25 Jun 84 16:27:57 EDT From: BIESEL@RUTGERS.ARPA Subject: Philosophy and other amusements. Judging from the responses on this net, the audience is evenly split between those who consider philosophy a waste of time in the context of AI, and those who love to dig up and discuss the same old chestnuts and conundrums that have amused amateur philosophers for many years now. First, any AI program worthy of that apellation is in fact an implementation of of philosophical theory, whether the implementer is aware of that fact or not. It is unfortunate that most implementers do *NOT* seem to be aware of this. Take something as apparently clear and unphilosophical as a vision program trying to make sense out of a blocks-world. Well, all that code deciding whether this or that junction of line segments could correspond to a corner is ultimately based on the (usually subconscious) presumption that there is a "real" world, that it exhibits certain regularities whether perceived by man or machine, that these regularities correspond to arrangements of "matter" and "energy", and that some aspects of these regularities can and should serve to constrain the behavior of some machine. There are even more buried assumptions about the time invariance of physical phenomena, the principle of causation, and the essential equivalence of "intelligent" behavior realized by different kinds of hardware/mushware (i.e. cells vs. transistors). ALL of these assumptions represent philosophical positions, which at other times, and in other places would have been severely questioned. It is only our common western heritage of rationalism and materialism that cloaks these facts, and makes it appear that the matter is settled. The unfortunate end-effect of this is that some of our more able practitioners (hackers) are unable to critically examine the foundations on which they build their systems, leading to ever more complex hacks, with patches applied where the underlying fabric of thought becomes threadbare. Second, for those who are fond of unscrewing the inscrutable, it should be pointed out that philosophy has never answered any fundamental questions (i.e. identity, duality, one vs. many, existence, essence etc. etc.). That is not its purpose; instead it should be an attempt to critically examine the foundations of our opinions and beliefs about the world, and its meaning. Take a real hard look at why you believe that "...Intuition is nothing more than..." thus-and-such, and if you come up with:'it is intuitively obvious', or 'everybody knows that', you've uncovered a mental blind spot. You may in the end confirm your original views, but at least you will know why you believe what you do, and you will have become aware of alternative views. Consider a solipsist AI program: philosophically unassailable, logically self-consistent, but functionally useless and indistinguishable from an autistic program. I'm afraid that some of the AI program approaches are just as dead-end, because they reflect only too well the simplistic views of their authors. Pete BIESEL@RUTGERS.ARPA (quick, more gasoline, I think the flames are dying down...) ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 28-Jun-84 11:47:12-PDT,16273;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 28-Jun-84 11:43:22 Date: Thu 28 Jun 1984 11:38-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #81 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Thursday, 28 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 81 Today's Topics: AAAI - Instructions, Standards - Maintaining High Quality in AI Products, Business - Softwar, Mathematics - Best fitting curve, Knowledge Representation - Frames Question, AI and Statistics - Bibliography, AI Programming - Spelling Correctors, Turing Test - Machines vs People ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 26 June 1984 1651-EDT From: Dave Touretzky at CMU-CS-A Subject: AAAI paper presentations Claudia Mazzetti, executive director of AAAI, warns that many of the paper presentations at this year's conference will be in very large concert or lecture halls. Ordinary transparencies done in 20-point font will *not* be readable. AAAI very strongly recommends using 35mm slides for paper presentations. If you must use transparencies, a 36-point font is recommended. ------------------------------ Date: 27 Jun 84 16:02:56-PDT (Wed) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!brl-tgr!abc @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Maintaining High Quality in AI Products Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.3065 I suggest that the ACM provides an appropriate umbrella under which such an effort can at least be planned. It is sufficiently broad-based as to be representative and not exclusive and its democratic procedures provide protection from the types of abuses that could be possible. (I do not mean to slight the AAAI; it's just that ACM seems to have more of the "mechanisms" that such an efort will need.) Also, I have felt for many years that ACM should, at least in the US, provide the kind of accreditation of Computer Science curricula that the engineering societies provide for theirs. ------------------------------ Date: 26 June 1984 07:04-EDT From: Herb Lin Subject: Softwar From: syming%B.CC at Berkeley They sent us a tape with a fixed time (two months or so?) payment notice and stated that the program would vanish after that time. Of course, we paid in time and they sent us a 20(?)-digit long key word and instruction to make our trial copy a one-year-life-time program, since the service contract was year by year. I'm a bit confused. How could this particular program make itself vanish without some external reference to a date? It seems that a simple routine to change the date to the date of original purhcase whenever the routine was invoked would do the trick. Do you know if anyone ever actually has their program vanish? Maybe the whole thing was a bluff? ------------------------------ Date: 24 Jun 84 12:26:54-PDT (Sun) From: hplabs!sdcrdcf!sdcsvax!sdccsu3!ee171bbr @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Best fitting curve Article-I.D.: sdccsu3.1970 Given three points, what is the equation of the best fit curve. (how does one go about solving this?) also, what is knuth's cocubic equation and would that solve my problem? John F. ------------------------------ Date: 25 Jun 84 6:08:52-PDT (Mon) From: ihnp4!houxm!mhuxl!ulysses!allegra!mouton!mwg @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Best fitting curve - 3 points Article-I.D.: mouton.90 Since three points determine a parabola, just plug them into y = Ax^2 + Bx + C and solve the system. If you are in more than two dimensions, you can probably do a transformation somehow into the plane determined by the three points and solve; then translate back. -Mark ------------------------------ Date: 25 Jun 84 11:40:06-PDT (Mon) From: decvax!yale-comix!leichter @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Best fitting curve Article-I.D.: yale-com.4061 The notion of a "best fitting curve" through some points has no inherent meaning. You have to specify what kinds of curves you are willing to allow, what kind of constraints you want to put on them, and what kind of measurement of "fit" you are interested in. Given n points in the plane, in general there is a unique (n-1)st degree poly- nomial that passes through those points. (Hence, there are infinitely many nth degree polynomials, one for every other point in the plane that you can consider to be an (n+1)st point.) Such a polynomial is "best" in the sense that it has 0 error at every point specified. It is almost certainly not what you would want for fitting data; it will generally oscillate between your data points and will have uncontrollable behavior outside the range in which your data points occur - i.e., the curve will not look at all "smooth" to the eye. Even if you want a curve that "looks good", you can use a cubic (or higher-order) spline curve. This is a curve defined by fitting together polynomials; you take the first 4 points in order, pass a cubic through them, take the last two and the next one, pick a cubic through those that has the same derivative at the 4th point as the first cubic, etc... (There are many other ways to choose spline curves. This particular method passes through all the points; in some cases, "smoothness" of some sort may be more important than actually touching the points, so some kinds of splines don't even pass through the given data points. All spline curves are piece- wise defined polynomials; there is no simple algebraic formula that defines them; rather, there is a series of such formulas, one for each range of input values.) If the goal of "best fit" is to produce good interpolated values for a function, rather than a curve that "looks" like it is determined by the points, all sorts of other techniques exist. For example, a Chebyshev approximation will have the least maximum error (assuming a model in which you are approximating some known, complex function by choosing some representative points on it and an approximating polynomial.) However, least maximum error is not the same as least average absolute error, or least RMS error, or... So, in summary: If you give me three points, I can write down pretty much ANY function and find some way to defend it's being the "best fit" to the three given points. You will have to specify your goals more precisely. -- Jerry decvax!yale-comix!leichter leichter@yale ------------------------------ Date: Tue 26 Jun 84 11:44:04-MDT From: Stan Shebs Subject: Frames Question As a relief from the insubstantial debates on insubstantial souls, I have a question about frames. From my studies, I have observed two fundamentally ways of viewing slots in frames: as heads of predicates, or as instance variables of objects. In the first view, if a FIDO frame has an AGE slot with the value 2, then that is equivalent to making the assertion AGE(FIDO,2). Thus the name of the slot becomes the head of a predicate. The advantages of this view are twofold: the inheritance mechanism of a frame system then appears as an inference rule, and slots can be made into frames themselves, thus making meta-level knowledge easy (for instance, one could say DATATYPE(AGE,NONNEGATIVE_NUMBER) to assert that AGE could only hold values of a certain type). This view of slots as first-class concepts or frames is exemplified by RLL, and by simple frame systems built on top of logic languages. The second view is exemplified by FRL, its descendants, and any of a number of object-oriented systems. Here, slots are in some sense "local" to frames or classes of frames, and an AGE of FIDO may have a completely different meaning than an AGE of PINOT_NOIR. Meta-level knowledge generally resides in facets and other subparts of a slot, so in a well-developed system, the "value" of a slot is often a rather complex entity. Interestingly enough, the facets (such as $VALUE, $IF-ADDED etc) are usually quite consistent in meaning (which no doubt simplifies meta-knowledge; one then needs only a few frames named $VALUE, $IF-ADDED, ... to express the meanings of facets). Each view can be simulated using the other. To simulate the "slot as frame view", the "objects view" can make all slots be defined for a toplevel frame THING, and then have frames with the same names as the slots; while the "slot as frame view" can have slots of slot frames that point to many different ones (so for instance the AGE slot frame has a slot VERSIONS that points to ANIMAL_AGE and WINE_AGE slots - all the associated paperwork is handled automatically by the system). Of course, such simulations may be extremely inefficient! but I just mention them to show that neither method is inherently more capable than the other. Now for the question: which view is favored by practitioners, and why? Do any existing KRLs allow the view of slots to be changed according to the problem, or do the two views require such fundamentally different implementations that it's just better to stick to one or the other? Is it possible to do work using frames without being concerned about the particular view imposed by the frame system? (my own experience says no - converting an FRL-based program to an RLL-based one is not easy!). Are there problem domains in which one view is distinctly superior to the other? If so, what are they, and why is that view superior? Any answers or insights will be greatly appreciated... stan shebs ------------------------------ Date: Wed 27 Jun 84 11:35:48-PDT From: Michael Walker Subject: AI & statistics Ken, Thank you for mentioning our work on RADIX in the recent AILIST response about AI and regression analysis. It prompted me to put together a partial list of articles in AI and statistics, which I have been meaning to do. I've left out a number of articles by these authors in more obscure journals and proceedings. There is also work going on at Brunel University, and at BBN, but I haven't seen any publications from them yet. If people have additions to make, I would be happy to collect them and send them to the list. If readers would like reprints, the following addresses may be useful. Daryl Pregibon and Bill Gale can be reached at: Bell Laboratories 600 Mountain Avenue Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974 For D. Rodbard, write: D. Rodbard, M.D. National Institute of Child Health and HUman Development National Institutes of Health Bethesda, Maryland Our address here at the RADIX project is: Robert L. Blum and Michael G. Walker RADIX Project Department of Computer Science Margaret Jacks Hall Stanford University Stanford, California 94305 Mike Walker WALKER@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA [Blum 82a] Blum, R.L. Discovery and Representation of Causal Relationships from a Large Time-oriented Clincal Database: The RX Project. Springer-Verlag, 1982. Vol. 19 in the Medical Informatics series edited by D.A.B. Lindberg and P.L. Reichertz. [Blum 82b] Blum, R. L. Discovery, Confirmation, and Incorporation of Causal Relationships from a Large Time-Oriented Database: The RX Project. Computers and Biomedical Research 15(2):164-187, 1982. [Blum 82c] Blum, R. L. Induction of Causal Relationships from a Time-Oriented Clinical Database: An Overview of the RX Project. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care. IEEE Computer Society, 1982. [Blum 84] Blum, R.L. Two-Stage Regression: Application to a Time-Oriented Clinical Database. 1984. in preparation. [Chambers 81] Chambers, J.M., Pregibon, D., and Zayas, E. Expert Software for Data Analysis: An Initial Experiment. In 43rd Session ISI. Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1981. [Gale 83] Gale, W.A., and Pregibon, D. Using Expert Systems for Developing Statistical Strategy. In Joint Statistical Meetings. Toronto, 1983. [Hajek 82] Hajek, P., and Ivanek, J. Artificial Intelligence and Data Analysis. In COMPSTAT 1982, pages 54-60. International Association for Statistical Computing, Physics-Verlag, Vienna, 1982. [Rodbard 83] Rodbard, D., Cole,B.R., and Munson,P.J. Development of a Friendly, Self-Teaching, Interactive Statistical Package for Analysis of Clinical Research Data: The BRIGHT STAT-PACK. In Seventh Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, pages 701-704. IEEE Computer Society, 1983. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 27 Jun 84 09:36:41 PDT From: Michael Pazzani Subject: Spelling Correctors = Geography test correctors? Ignoring philosophical issues (after all, this is AILIST not a bad remake of "My Dinner With Andre") I don't feel that the spelling correctors or the geography test correctors are really that intelligent. The geography corrector seems to be very similar to the programs which grade SAT tests. Surely, one wouldn't want to call a SAT test correcting program AI even though it does a better and faster job than I would. I think its more important to discuss how to make these programs smarter. What would it take to have a spelling corrector find the intended word instead of all of the possibilities? A while ago, I worked on a program to do word sense selection. I wrote a spelling corrector for that program which treated a misspelled word as new word whose senses were the senses of all the possible corrections. It worked well when things like part of speech or selectional restrictions could disambiguate. How could one make this program smarter? Is it possible to try the "closer" possibilities first? Can you propagate the part of speech or semantic constraints into the search for possibilities? How would one store a large dictionary so it is efficient to find nouns, which are vehicles which look like "planh"? How can you detect a spelling error if the mistake is another word? (e.g. "I just typed rm *. Can you restore my flies from backup tape?) How do people do this anyway? ------------------------------ Date: 23 Jun 84 8:49:24-PDT (Sat) From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rochester!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: The Turing Test - machines vs people Article-I.D.: gloria.255 [This followup was actually written by a very clever computer program.] As you say, the Turing test is a _conversational_ test. Do you remember Turing's original "conversation"? "...Count me out on this. I never could write poetry." The whole conversation is fatuous! But then, it has no bonafide purpose. It was merely set up by a scientist to prove something. Nothing would be easier, for that matter, than to program a computer to take part in what Berne calls "8-stroke rituals": Hi. Hi. How are you? Fine. How are you? Fine. Nice day, isn't it? Yes. Well, goodbye. Goodbye. But would you want to carry on such a conversation with a computer? One converses socially only with conversers that one knows to be people. Col. G. L. Sicherman ...seismo!rochester!rocksanne!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 28-Jun-84 12:00:38-PDT,11124;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 28-Jun-84 11:57:46 Date: Thu 28 Jun 1984 11:52-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #82 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Friday, 29 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 82 Today's Topics: Humor & Business - How Not to Buy a Hero-1, Seminars - HAM-ANS Natural Language System, Expert System for Medical Consultation, Expert Systems at Hewlett-Packard, Conferences - Logic Programming Symposium, Workshop on Language Generation ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 27 Jun 1984 08:23:02-EDT From: kushnier@NADC Subject: How Not to Buy a Hero-1 From kushnier@NADC Tue Jun 5 08:44:53 1984 Date: 5 Jun 1984 08:38:27-EDT From: kushnier@NADC To: SURINA@AFSC-HQ, kushnier@NADC.ARPA Subject: Re: Small Computer Procurements HOW NOT TO BUY A HERO 1 By Ron Kushnier I am an Engineer, by trade. I have my Double-E. And When I saw the Hero-1, I knew it was for me. I gave the order to my boss And explained the application, He very quickly signed the thing With the wildest jubilation. The order went to Purchasing And was no sooner in the door, When panic struck the buyer screamed, "No one bought a Hero-1 before". The order came back down to me With a simple "DISAPPROVED" My dreams were smashed My hopes were dashed My plans had been removed. Now I could understand this If a Shoeshine Boy I'd be But I'm supposed to be An Engineer And work in R&D. ------------------------------ Date: 28 Jun 1984 08:15:48-EDT From: kushnier@NADC Subject: Another Toy Another Toy By Ron Kushnier Here's another toy That my husband wants to buy. I'll never know What good it is Or any reasons why. But HERO-1, my fate is doomed I see it very clear. The age of Personal Computer Pets Is very nearly here. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 26 Jun 84 11:29:16-PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - HAM-ANS Natural Language System [Forwarded from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] The following will take place on Friday, June 29 in the Ventura Conference room from 2:00 to 4:00 (followed by tea). THE DIALOG SYSTEM HAM-ANS: NATURAL LANGUAGE ACCESS TO DIVERSE APPLICATION SYSTEMS (H. Marburger, K. Morik, B. Nebel) -- St This talk will introduce the overall goals of the NL-System HAM-ANS (HAMburg Application-oriented Natural language System) which is currently being developed at the University of Hamburg. HAM-ANS encompasses three different application classes: natural language access to a vision system (traffic at a street crossing), to a relational database system (fishery data), and for guiding a competitive dialog with a client (hotel reservation situation). The system accepts typed input in colloquial German and produces typed German responses. The system's general architecture and knowledge sources will be introduced. USER MODELING, EVALUATION STANDARDS, AND DIALOGUE STRUCTURE -- THE HAM-ANS APPROACH (Katharina Morik) -- AI dialogue systems are now developing from question-answering systems toward advising systems. This includes: * structuring dialog * understanding and generating a wider range of speech acts than simply information request and answer * modeling the user's familiarity with the system, his/her state of knowledge about the domain, and his/her evaluation standards (goals) In this talk, first the field of user modeling is structured according to the different aspects of the user (familiarity, knowledge, evaluation). We may then, secondly, describe our ongoing work in this field and relate it to other approaches. User modeling in HAM-ANS is closely connected to dialog structure and dialog strategy. In advising the user, the system generates the verbalizes speech acts. The choice of the speech act is guided by the user profile and the dialog strategy of the system. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 26 Jun 84 11:55:27-PDT From: Ted Shortliffe Subject: Seminar - Expert System for Medical Consultation [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] There will be a special seminar presented by Mario Fieschi from Marseilles on Tuesday, July 10, from 2:30-3:30pm in the TC-135 conference room at the medical school. Mario has done some interesting work on medical expert systems, and is spending a few months at MIT with Peter Szolovits (who was on his thesis committee). He will be visiting Stanford from July 9-11. ------------------------------- Speaker: Mario Fieschi, MD, PhD Affiliation: University of Marseilles, France Title: SPHINX: An Expert System for Medical Consultations Place: Room TC-135, Medical School Time: Tuesday, July 10, 2:30-3:30pm I will present an outline of the program SPHINX, designed for the definition of medical knowledge and construction of a rule-based system, currently being used in: . Therapeutic decisions : Application in diabetes . Diagnostic decisions : Application in jaundice . Tool for education : Application in jaundice ------------------------------ Date: Wed 27 Jun 84 09:46:18-PDT From: Juanita Mullen Subject: Seminar - Expert Systems at Hewlett-Packard [Forwarded from the Stanford SIGLUNCH distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.] SIGLUNCH DATE: Friday, June 29, 1984 LOCATION: Chemistry Gazebo, between Organic & Physical Chemistry TIME: 12:05 SPEAKER: Steven Rosenberg Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories Palo Alto TOPIC: Expert Systems at Hewlett-Packard The Applications Technology Laboratory of HP Labs is engaged in developing "industrial strength" AI. As part of its contribution to this effort, the Expert Systems Department has engaged in various "experiments" to develop expert system prototypes. One such experiment involved the development of PICC, an expert system for diagnosing flaws in IC wafers during negative photolithography. This talk will discuss the development and status of PICC. Besides describing the technical aspects of PICC, I will explore some of the issues involved in conducting expert systems experiments: why was photolithography chosen as a good area to apply expert systems technology; what were the pitfalls in moving PICC from a laboratory environment into a real fab line; even if it works, is it useful? ------------------------------ Date: 26 Jun 84 14:28:00-PDT (Tue) From: hplabs!hp-pcd!uoregon!conery @ Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Logic Programming Symposium Article-I.D.: uoregon.30100001 >From John Conery (conery@uoregon) -- Announcing -- 1985 International Symposium on Logic Programming Tentatively scheduled for Boston, Massachusetts, June 1985 Sponsored by IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Languages The symposium will cover implementations and applications of logic programming systems, including (but not limited to) parallel processing, expert systems, natural language processing, systems programming, implementation techniques, and performance issues. Authors should send 8 copies of their papers (8-20 pages, double spaced) to John Conery Department of Computer and Information Science University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403 Submission deadline is November 1, 1984. A formal call for papers will be issued shortly. For more information, contact: Conference Chairman: Doug DeGroot IBM T.J. Watson Research Center PO Box 281, Yorktown Hts. NY 10598 Technical Co-Chairmen: Jacques Cohen Computer Science Dept - Ford Hall Brandeis University 415 South St Waltham MA 02254 CSNET: jc@brandeis ARPANET: jc.brandeis@csnet-relay John Conery Department of Computer and Information Sci University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403 CSNET: conery@uoregon ARPANET: conery.uoregon@csnet-relay ------------------------------ Date: Thu 28 Jun 84 09:15:49-PDT From: Dikran Karagueuzian Subject: Workshop on Language Generation [Forwarded from the CSLI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON LANGUAGE GENERATION Organizers - Doug Appelt and Ivan Sag Staff - Emma Pease Dates - July 8 - 11 Size - 30 invited + 30 local Location - Stanford University Sponsors - National Science Foundation, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, CSLI, Fujitsu Laboratories, Ltd. The Second International Workshop on Language Generation will be held at Stanford University from July 8-10, immediately following the COLING conference. The workshop, organized by Doug Appelt and Ivan Sag is designed to allow researchers working in the field of language generation to share recent research results and discuss matters of importance to the field. Topics of discussion for this workshop include the design of grammatical formalisms for language generation, the role of planning and speech act theory in language generation, the production of extended discourse, the foundations for a theory of language generation, modeling the hearer's knowledge and intentions, and producing coherent explanations of reasoning and decision-making. Linguists as well as artificial intelligence researchers will participate in the workshop. The workshop is being sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a gift from Fujitsu Laboratories, Ltd. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Conference starts at noon, July 8 in the Elliott Program Center. This is a workshop and so interested people should check with Doug Appelt before going. [...] ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************