4-Aug-87 12:55:33-PDT,13773;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 4-Aug-87 12:43:21 Date: Sun 2 Aug 1987 20:40-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@STRIPE.SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #193 - Natural Kinds (Philosophy) To: AIList@STRIPE.SRI.COM AIList Digest Monday, 3 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 193 Today's Topics: Philosophy - Natural Kinds ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 30 Jul 87 16:25:29 GMT From: aweinste@bbn.com (Anders Weinstein) Reply-to: aweinste@bbn.com (Anders Weinstein) Subject: Re: Natural Kinds (Re: AIList Digest V5 #186) In article MINSKY@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU writes: > >My conclusion - and, I'd bet, Ken Laws would agree - is that the >concept of "natural kind" has an illusory generality. It seems to me >that, rather than good philosophy, it is merely low-grade science >contaminated by naive, traditional common sense concepts. I think there's some confusion about what natural kinds are in this discussion. Most of the talk has focussed on the alleged sharpness of the kind's boundaries. But I don't think this is what's at issue, at least in the contemporary philosophical usage. The point is that you can't do science without imposing some taxonomy on the objects under study. "Natural kinds" are simply the kinds that figure in scientific generalizations (aka Laws of Nature). Thus "bird" is perhaps a natural kind, but "thing that is either furry or made of clay" is not. Some people like to argue about whether these classification systems are "out there" in Nature waiting to be discovered (the "realist" view) or are invented by the mind and imposed on some undifferentiated reality (an "idealist" or "constructivist" picture). Happily, we can ignore this debate. What we can't ignore is the fact that a notion of natural kinds is *essential* for induction, as demonstrated by Nelson Goodman's classic "grue vs green" puzzle. Without some sense of what kinds are "natural", you're liable to go off projecting "grue", or looking for laws governing "furry or clay things". This would be the antithesis of intelligence. Of course, coming up with suitable taxonomies is an empirical matter. I once heard Kuhn emphasize that Aristotle's concept of "motion" included things like the growth of trees. Progress in physics had to await a more useful concept of motion. But this shouldn't be taken to imply that natural kinds are only relevant to sophisticated scientific theorizing -- the same principles apply to the inductions that are part of common-sense understanding. And it seems that we are blessed with pretty accurate innate intuitions about which kinds or similarities are natural (eg. "green") and which are ludicrously artificial ("grue"). The philosophy of induction thus suggests that you can't make an intelligent system without somehow building into it an equivalent sense of the naturalness of kinds. Anders Weinstein BBN Labs ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 30 Jul 87 11:39:00 n From: Paul Davis Subject: Natural Kinds As the list of different aspects important in the recognition of a natural kind grows, I'd like to throw in a comment inspired by the mention of Balans chairs, amongst other things. My experience of Balans chairs, apart from extreme comfort, is that peoples recognition of them tend to be via contextual means rather than anything else - ie; "that thing in front of the desk must be a chair" (implicitly - "chairs occur in front of desks and that thing looks sufficiently chair-like, and insufficiently anything-else-that-I've-ever-seen-like, to be an example of a chair"). Interestingly though, people do not initially know how to *use* the chair (unless they've used one before or seen it in use). This suggests to me that contextual information is at least as important as structural or functional types in identifying a `natural kind'. To support this a little further, I have my own experience of living in a country where I have a very limited grasp of the language. Although clearly language understanding could be argued to be a different case to that of natural kinds, I take my ability to deduce the 'kind' of a notice or message written in German from a very limited vocabulary but a very large `database' (yuk) of contexts to indicate, perhaps, the kind of thing thats going on. This ability arises because I know from past experience what kinds of signs and messages occur in what kind of contexts, and with a few known words, a few vague resemblances between German and English, its pretty easy to figure out a reasonable guess at the meaning. Both of these examples seem to me to point towards a more general recognition of the Dreyfus's theory of skill acquisition. Herbert and Stuart Dreyfus argue that contrary to many (most ?) current notions of skill acquisition, the move from novice (baby ?) to expert (adult ?) proceeds by moving from abstract understanding to a position reliant on having a large repetoire of specific experiences. Why should the recognition of `natural kinds' differ from this ? So far, most commentators have been focusing on an attempt to arrive at an abstract definition of a natural kind. Why should this reflect reality better than the alternative - that we recognise a natural kind, or anything else for that matter, simply by having sufficient past experience to do so. Of course, the definition-by-recognition of a natural kind will actually be a consequence of the interaction of past experiences and a pattern recognition ability, but I can see no reason to believe that the classification of natural kinds is any different to the potentially more general question of how do we recognise similarity. Natural kinds differ only in that they represent the ability to group a large number of experiences rather than just two or three. Why do I get the feeling that I've missed the point ? Paul Davis Biocomputing, EMBL, Postfach 10.2209, 6900 Heidelberg, West Germany bitnet/earn: davis@embl.bitnet arpa: davis%embl.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu uucp: ...!psuvax1!embl.bitnet!davis ------------------------------ Date: 30 Jul 87 18:30:32 GMT From: aweinste@bbn.com (Anders Weinstein) Reply-to: aweinste@bbn.com (Anders Weinstein) Subject: Re: Natural Kinds (The Putnam/Kripke analysis) In an earlier posting, McCarthy referred to Putnam's work on natural kinds. I think what is important about this work is not the mere notion of a "natural kind," which is ancient, but rather the new *analysis* of the semantics of natural kind terms made by Putnam and Kripke. And, as McCarthy suggested, this analysis may well be relevant to terms other than scientific kind predicates. In brief, the important point is that the marks by which we identify members of a kind are *not* in general definitive. Gold may be identified as a yellow metal, but even if we suppose that this description *uniquely* refers to gold, still "gold" is not synonymous with "yellow metal". Put another way, it is not a necessary truth that gold is yellow or that gold is a metal: it could conceivably turn out that we were mistaken on either of these points. By extending such examples, Putnam and Kripke make the claim is that there is initially *no* criterial definition of gold; neither a simple definition nor some weighted disjunctive cluster of properties will do. On the causal history view of reference, a statement like "gold is F" is not semantically equivalent to any assertion about "a yellow metal". It is rather a little bit like waving a rope in the air and saying "the stuff on the end of this rope is F", where the "rope" is a chain of reference-preserving causal links stretching back in time to the introduction of the term. A couple of other points in Putnam's analysis are also relevant. First, he claims that although definitive criteria for natural kind terms are not initially known, they may be uncovered in time by scientific investigation. Thus, today we believe we have found the "essence" of gold, namely being an element with a certain atomic number. This is information the Greeks didn't have; nevertheless, we generally regard our word "gold" as having the same meaning as the ancients' word for it. But even after a criterial definition is discovered, still there is a "division of linguistic labor" -- the precise definition may only be known by experts. Lay members of the language community are judged to be competent users of the concept as long as they possess certain (non-definitive) stereotypical information about the kind in question. Knowing that an elm is some kind of deciduous tree is enough to be credited with understanding "elm", even if you can't distinguish elms from beeches or any other trees. Well, what is the significance of all this for cognitive science? At first, it seems to demonstrate that meanings are partly extra-psychological, because of the role of the causal history in fixing the reference of a term. As Putnam puts it, "meanings just ain't in the head." And this might suggest that apart from the demand for stereotypes, Putnam's points are just irrelevant to the psychology of concept understanding, insofar as psychology is limited to dealing with what *is* in the head. Nevertheless, the theory does have *some* implications for psychological theories. Broadly speaking, it implies that a cognitive system must be prepared to deal appropriately with the phenomena that Putnam describes. That is, it must "understand" that the marks by which it identifies things need not constitute a *definition*, so it can make sense of the possibility of, say, a blue lemon. This suggests that there is more to knowing the meaning of a term than merely having an inner criterion of application -- one must also be able to make sense of situations where the criterion fails. Also, the system must understand that relevant experts may know more about the term than it does, and that a truly essential criterion may yet be discovered. In a good paper on this subject by Georges Rey (I will dig up the citation when I get a chance), Rey puts the point in AI-style language: the representation of a concept must have a "slot" for the definitive criterion which may initially be unfilled. Although this formulation seems to me to involve a vast (but typical) over-simplification of understanding, it does indicate how the Putnam analysis is relevant to cognitive theories. Anders Weinstein BBN Labs ------------------------------ Date: 30 Jul 87 18:49:24 GMT From: aweinste@bbn.com (Anders Weinstein) Reply-to: aweinste@bbn.com (Anders Weinstein) Subject: Natural Kinds (The Putnam/Kripke analysis) BTW, I just reread McCarthy's original posting on kinds and it seems that the consequences of the Putnam analysis that I gave are substantially the same as the points McCarthy was making. However, subsequent respondants seem to have concentrated exclusively on the supposed sharpness of kind boundaries. Although this is alluded to in McCarthy's message, I don't think it's germane to the main points about concept understanding and definitions. Anders Weinstein ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1987 22:43 EDT From: MINSKY%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU Subject: AIList Digest V5 #190 - Msc. Stan Shebs asks "how *can* these hypotheses be tested?" and suggests that many of the ideas in Society of Mind follow human thinking rather than minds in general. Yes, I focussed on trying to make a large scale theory of human psychology. As for testing it, "implementation" in a computer model is one possibility, but for the near future at least, as Stan says, "that would probably be handicapped by being too small and simple to be recognizably human-like in its behavior." My answer is simple and direct: we must work toward building instruments to help us see what is happening in the brain! In a few decades I hope we shall see, for example, SQUID quantum-based magnetic scanners that can map current flow, at least in the cerebral cortex, to a resolution of better than a millimeter. That will tell us a great deal about activities during thinking. Ultimately, we need probes that smap down to better than that, at least in a significant region. My point is that we ought not assume that we shall always be limited to the crude psychological-response methods presently available, or low resolution brain-wave or PETT-scan instruments. ------------------------------ Date: 31 Jul 87 20:48:51 GMT From: aweinste@bbn.com (Anders Weinstein) Reply-to: aweinste@bbn.com (Anders Weinstein) Subject: Reference on concepts & natural kinds For those interested in the implications of the Putnam/Kripke philosophy of natural kinds for the psychology of concepts, I recommend the article I alluded to in a previous message, Georges Rey's "Concepts and Stereotypes", Cognition 15:1-3 (1983). This piece is a philosophically informed critique of Smith & Medin's book "Categories and Concepts" (1981). Medin & Smith offer a reply in Cognition 17:3 (1984), and Rey answers their reply in Cognition 19:3 (1985). Naturally the bibliographies of these articles point to many other relevant papers; I won't list them here. Anders Weinstein BBN Laboratories ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 4-Aug-87 22:33:13-PDT,16941;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 4-Aug-87 22:22:03 Date: Tue 4 Aug 1987 22:17-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #194 - Msc., Image Tracking, Seminars To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Wednesday, 5 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 194 Today's Topics: Administrivia - New Host Computer, Queries - Request for Bibliographic Data & Common Lisp OPS5 & Kyoto Common Lisp & Image Feature Tracking, AI Tools - NLP Front-Ends to INGRES, Journal - Journal of Automated Reasoning, Seminars - Comparative Analysis (SRI) & Uncertainties in Robot Planning (SU), Conference - Logic in Computer Science ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue 4 Aug 87 21:27:51-PDT From: Ken Laws Subject: New Host Computer SRI has moved AIList from STRIPE.SRI.COM to a new computer, now known as SRI.COM. The old address will continue to work, but you may use the shorter form if you prefer. It took me a couple of days to get the hang of the new system, but the mailer seems to be working for me again. Let me know if any new problems show up at your end. -- Ken ------------------------------ Date: 30 Jul 87 13:39:42 GMT From: mcvax!dnlunx!lippolt@seismo.css.gov (Ben Lippolt) Subject: Request for bibliographic data Does anyone know where I could get files with bibliographic data (in "refer" format) of the following proceedings: IJCAI '79 '81 '83 '85 (and '87) AAAI '80 '82 '83 '84 '86 and '87 Just the titles, authors and pagenumbers would be enough (although keywords and abstracts would also be nice). ---- Ben Lippolt, tel: +31 70 435439 PTT - Dr. Neher Labs, telex: 31236 dnl nl P.O. Box 421, telefax: +31 70 436477 2260 AK Leidschendam, UUCP: ..!mcvax!dnlunx!lippolt Netherlands. ------------------------------ Date: Thu 30 Jul 87 08:32:07-EDT From: John C. Akbari Subject: request for cl ops5 anyone know of, or willing to give out, a reasonably good (fast) common lisp interpreter [for OPS5]? an efficient version for symbolics (release 7.1) would be ideal. ad...THANKS...vance! -*- Mode: Text -*- John C. Akbari 380 Riverside Drive, No. 7D New York, New York 10025 Tele. 212.662.2476 ARPANET & Internet akbari@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU BITnet akbari%CS.COLUMBIA.EDU@WISCVM.WISC.EDU UUCP columbia!cs.columbia.edu!akbari ------------------------------ Date: 3 Aug 87 14:52:51 GMT From: astroatc!murphy@rsch.wisc.edu (Kathy Murphy) Subject: Kyoto Common Lisp We are in the process of selecting a Lisp package to port to a new computer system (target market is NOT the AI community but we would like to have a Lisp compiler and interpreter available on the system). At the moment our choice is limited to either Kyoto Common Lisp or the pd version of FRANZ LISP. KCL appears to be much simpler to port and maintain but we have no idea how potential users view KCL vs pd FRANZ. I would appreciate comments on the following: General experience with KCL. KCL vs pd FRANZ LISP. The importance of Lisp compiler speed - KCL's compiler is very slow. Please mail replies directly to me. If there is enough interest I can summarize results. Thank you. -- Kathleen Murphy ...!uwvax!astroatc!murphy Astronautics Technology Center 5800 Cottage Grove Rd. (608) 221-9001, x137 Madison, WI 53716 ------------------------------ Date: 1 Aug 87 19:18:48 GMT From: jbn@glacier.stanford.edu (John B. Nagle) Subject: Low-level feature extraction and interframe matching software wanted Does software exist for following moving objects from frame to frame in video images? I'm looking for something that works by finding low-level features such as edges and corners and matches them from one frame to the next. I'm aware of "optical flow" calculation, but the usual numeric method for doing this is differentiation-oriented and too noise-sensitive to be useful on real-world images, I am told by someone who has tried it. So I'd like something that finds many low-level features and tries to match them up. The intended application is a vision system for a robot vehicle. But it is possible that techniques used for colorizing B/W films would be useful for this purpose. So I'd like to hear from people who know how colorizing is done. Software, algorithms, hardware, or indications of research activity would be useful. John Nagle Center for Design Research, Stanford ------------------------------ Date: Tue 4 Aug 87 22:00:54-PDT From: Ken Laws Subject: Feature Tracking John Nagle asked about image processing systems for tracking scene features. Such systems do exist, but are often tied to specific applications. A system for tracking missiles or stars against a simple background will be quite different from one for tracking vehicles in a street scene. Robotic applications can be anywhere in between, depending on the robot's environment and function. SRI currently has a robot vehicle that can navigate hallways by detecting the door frames and other simple linear features. We also have more elaborate systems for doing edge matching or correlation matching in stereo pairs. I'm working combined segmentation/classification/tracking. Others here are doing matching in range imagery, including model-based matching of the type useful in industrial inspection and bin picking. Similar work has been done at Stanford, where Tom Binford would be a good contact, and at CMU and most vision labs. The work of Hans-Hellmut Nagel and of Moravec come to mind for the tracking of low-level features, but there are many relevant papers in any conference on computer vision or robotics. -- Ken ------------------------------ Date: 31 Jul 87 07:06:54 GMT From: ihnp4!lll-lcc!esl.ESL.COM!ssh@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Sam) Reply-to: ssh@esl.UUCP (Sam) Subject: Re: NLP Front-Ends to INGRES ->vor!cris@esosun.UUCP (Cris Kobryn) sez -> ->I am interested in developing an NLP front-end to INGRES. Lest I ->reinvent: Is there any "stock" software which already does this? ->(INTELLECT does not *currently* accommodate INGRES; I've heard "DataTalker" ->mentioned as a possibility, but have no details--capabilities, company name, ->phone#, etc.) ->-- Cris Kobryn Datatalker is from Natural Language, Incorporated. Their phone number is 415-841-3500, and I believe their address is 1759 Fifth Street, Berkeley. Founders are Jerrold Ginsparg and John Manferdelli. Product is good, and accommodates Ingres. Tell 'em Sam sent you -- Sam ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 30 Jul 87 22:07:29 cdt From: stevens@anl-mcs.ARPA (Rick L. Stevens) Subject: Journal of Automated Reasoning Because of the rapidly growing interest in the interconnected fields of automated reasoning, automated theorem proving, logic programming, and artificial intelligence, the following information might be of particular interest. The Journal of Automated Reasoning, which is very inexpensive compared to most computer science journals, now includes in each issue two interesting columns: The Problem Corner, which presents test problems from the world of puzzles, from mathematics, and from various applications; and Basic Research Problems, which presents open problems for research in automated reasoning. The journal is published quarterly, each issue containing approximately 110 pages. Beginning next year, each issue will contain approximately 20% more material. Subscription costs are lower for individuals that are members of the Association of Automated Reasoning. The Journal of Automated Reasoning published its first issue in February, 1985. It is an interdisciplinary journal that maintains a balance between theory and application. The spectrum of material ranges from the presentation of a new inference rule with proofs of its logical properties to a detailed description of a computer program designed to solve some problem from industry. The papers published in this journal are from, among others, the fields of automated theorem proving, logic programming, expert systems, program synthesis and validation, artificial intelligence, computational logic, robotics, and various industrial applications. The papers share the common feature of focusing on some aspect of automated reasoning. The journal provides a forum and a means for exchanging information for those interested in theory, in implementation, and in specific industrial or commercial applications. For subscription information write to Kluwer Academic PO Box 358, Accord Station Hingham, MA 02018-0358 For outside the U.S. and Canada: Kluwer Academic Publishers Distribution Center PO Box 322 3300 AH Dordrecht The Netherlands $97 for institutions, $39 for private non-members of AAR, $29.50 for members of AAR AAR, Association for Automated Reasoning The Association for Automated Reasoning is an organization for disseminating and exchanging information. It is international in form, and publishes a newsletter acyclically to announce workshops, discuss software advances, present problem sets, etc. To Join send a $5 check to Larry Henschen 780 S. Warrington Road Des Plaines, IL 60016 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Aug 87 15:42:27 PDT From: Amy Lansky Subject: Seminar - Comparative Analysis (SRI) VISITORS: Please arrive 5 minutes early so that you can be escorted up from the E-building receptionist's desk. Thanks! Note: Change in day of week and location. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS Dan Weld (WELD@XEROX.ARPA) MIT and Xerox PARC 11:00 AM, WEDNESDAY, August 5 SRI International, Building E, Room EK242 Comparative analysis is the problem of predicting how a system will react to perturbations in its parameters, and why. For example, comparative analysis could be asked to explain why the period of an oscillating spring/block system would increase if the mass of the block were larger. This talk formalizes the problem of comparative analysis and presents a technique, differential qualitative (DQ) analysis, which solves the task. DQ analysis uses inference rules to deduce qualitative information about the relative change of system parameters. Multiple perspectives are used to represent relative change values over intervals of time. Differential analysis has been implemented, tested on a dozen examples, and proven sound. Unfortunately, the technique is incomplete; it always terminates, but does not always return an answer. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 30 Jul 87 10:39:47 PDT From: Jutta McCormick Subject: Seminar - Uncertainties in Robot Planning (SU) Thursday, August 6, 2:30 p.m. Robotics Lab Conference Room, Cedar Hall, A6. DEALING WITH UNCERTAINTIES IN ROBOT PLANNING USING PROGRAM PROVING TECHNIQUES Dr. Jocelyne Pertin-Troccaz LIFIA Laboratory - INPG 46, Avenue Felix Viallet 38031. Grenoble Cedex - France (uucp: lifia!jocelyne@seismo.css.gov) Abstract: A global approach for dealing with uncertainties using program proving in Robotics is presented. We consider a manipulation program automatically generated by a planner according to spatial and geometric criteria and ignoring uncertainties. Such a program is correct only if, at each step, uncertainties are smaller than the tolerances imposed by the assembly task. We propose an approach which consists in verifying the correctness of the program with respect to uncertainties in position and possibly modifying it by adding operations in order to reduce uncertainties. These two steps based on a forward and a backward propagation borrowed from formal program proving techniques are described in a general framework suitable for robotics environments. Forward propagation consists in computing successive states of the robot world from the initial state and in checking for the satisfaction of constraints. If a constraint is not satisfied, backward propagation infers new constraints on previous states. These new constraints are used for patching the program. The approach is described in technical details in the case of a simple manipulation language and of a relational model of the world including a representation of uncertainties. Thanks. -Jutta ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 31 Jul 87 11:58:02 +0300 From: Moshe Vardi Subject: Conference - Logic in Computer Science CALL FOR PAPERS THIRD ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM ON LOGIC IN COMPUTER SCIENCE 5-8 July 1988 University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland Concepts and methods from Logic are influential throughout Computer Science. The Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS) aims to attract broad participation of Computer Scientists, whose design or research activities involve Logic, and Logicians interested in Computer Science. Suggested (but not exclusive) topics of interest include: abstract data types, computer theorem proving, concurrency, data base theory, knowledge representation, finite model theory, lambda and combinatory calculi, logic programming, modal and temporal logics, program logic and semantics, software specification, types and categories, constructive mathematics, verification. PROGRAM COMMITTEE: M. Dezani, Y. Gurevich (chair), J. Halpern, C.A.R. Hoare, G. Huet, P. Kanellakis, J.-L.Lassez, J. Mitchell, R. Platek, G. Plotkin, S. Rosenschein, P. Sistla, J. Tiuryn, M. Wand PAPER SUBMISSION: Send 14 copies of an extended abstract to the program chairman: Yuri Gurevich - LICS (313) 971-2652 Electrical Engineering and Yuri_Gurevich@um.cc.umich.edu Computer Science Department University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-2122 The package must be airmail postmarked by 27 NOVEMBER 1987 or received by 4 DECEMBER 1987. The abstract should be clearly written and provide sufficient detail to allow the program committee to assess the merits of the paper. References and comparisons with related work should be included where appropriate. The entire extended abstract should not exceed 10 double-spaced pages in 10 or 12-point font. Late abstracts or those departing significantly from these guidelines run a high risk of not being considered. If a copier is not available to the author, a single copy of the abstract will do. The authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by 27 JANUARY 1988. Accepted papers, typed on special forms for inclusion in the symposium proceedings, will be due 14 MARCH 1988. The symposium is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing , and the University of Edinburgh, in cooperation with ACM SIGACT, ASL, and EATCS. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: J. Barwise, W. Bledsoe, A. Chandra (chair), E. Dijkstra, E. Engeler, J. Goguen, D. Gries, D. Kozen, Z. Manna, A. Meyer, R. Parikh, G. Plotkin, D. Scott GENERAL CHAIRMAN: LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS: Ashok K. Chandra George Cleland IBM T. J. Watson Research Center Department of Computer Science P.O. Box 218 The King's Buildings Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 University of Edinburgh (914) 945-1752 Edinburgh EH9 3JZ, SCOTLAND ashok@ibm.com 011 44 31 667 1081 ext. 2775 glc%lfcs.edinburgh.ac.uk@ucl-cs.arpa ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 9-Aug-87 22:37:43-PDT,18716;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 9-Aug-87 22:37:04 Date: Sun 9 Aug 1987 22:34-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #195 - Macsyma, FBRL, Philosophy To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Monday, 10 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 195 Today's Topics: Queries - Reviews of Dreyfus and Dreyfus? & Natural Language Inc. & Multiple Copies of a Clause & Macsyma Sources, AI Tools - Macsyma Sources & FBRL in Prolog, Philosophy - Natural Kinds & AI and Science ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 5 Aug 87 09:20 EDT From: WAnderson.wbst@Xerox.COM Subject: Reviews of Dreyfus & Dreyfus? I am looking for reviews of the Dreyfus & Dreyfus book "Mind Over Machines." Any and all references appreciated. Thanks, Bill Anderson [There was, of course, the preview by the brothers Dreyfus themselves in the January 1986 Technology Review; that has been discussed at length in AIList. Another review by Theodore Roszak appeared in the April 3, 1986, New Scientist, pp. 46-47. Roszak doesn't add much personal perspective, but views the book favorably: "AI's record of barefaced public deception is unparalleled in the annals of academic study." -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 5 Aug 87 09:49:05 EDT From: Bruce Nevin Subject: Nat Lg Inc A colleague asks me by Email about an outfit called Natural Language Inc. He hears they claim to process `virtually unrestricted English text' to create a relational database for query systems. He says they are located in Berkeley. Anybody know more? ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 7 Aug 87 09:54:13 EDT From: tim@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Tim Finin) Subject: multiple copies of a clause in the DB I'm studying various ways to extend Prolog's simple model of the database (e.g. a flat, global collections of clauses) to a richer hierarchical one with inheritance. I am trying to decide whether to allow multiple instances of a clause in a resulting database view. Most Prolog implementations, at least those descendant from DEC-10 Prolog, do allow the database to contain two identical clauses. Most of the non-Prolog logic programming languages that I am familiar with do not. I am interested in discovering what use, if any, people have made of the ability to assert multiple copies of a clause into the database. I, for one, have never found a use for this in practice. In fact, it has only effected my life by being a source of bugs. It is easy enough to accidentally get multiple copies of a clause in the database by consulting a file instead of reconsulting it or by defining the same predicate in two different files. This can easily mess up your program unless you use a rather pure logic programming style which doen't depend on the order in which the clauses are stored in the database. Has anyone out there found a good use for this Prolog "feature"? Tim ------------------------------ Date: 4 Aug 87 01:44:25 GMT From: amdahl!meccts!cimcor!mike@ames.arpa (Michael Grenier) Subject: Macsyma Sources I'm looking for any PD or commercial sources or binaries of Macsyma that will run on this Microport Unix System on the 286. Any ideas? -Mike ihnp4!meccts!cimcor!mike ------------------------------ Date: 5 Aug 87 17:55:52 GMT From: jbn@glacier.stanford.edu (John B. Nagle) Subject: Re: Macsyma Sources A competing package is MuMath, from Soft Warehouse 3615 Harding Av Honolulu Hawaii 96816 808-734-5801 This is a symbolic math package written in a quaint but charming dialect of LISP, for which an interpreter is provided. There are versions for the Apple II and IBM PC, and recently a modern version for the PC has been released. I've used the older version on some messy vector calculus problems in my solid modelling work, and found it quite useful in dealing with the grunt work of algebra and calculus. The heuristics aren't very powerful, but the algorithms for the standard solution methods all seem to work. Microsoft resells this package, when they remember it is in their product line, but the developers are in Hawaii and one may as well deal directly with them. Sometimes one of the developers answers the phone. John Nagle ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 8 Aug 87 23:21:33 EDT From: tim@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Tim Finin) Subject: FBRL in Prolog Date: Wed, 5 Aug 87 12:18 EDT From: The Mad Debugger Subject: FBRL in Prolog Does anyone know of any FBRL's written in Prolog or that support logical inference? I know HSRL (from Carnegie-Mellon) and KRYPTON (from XEROX PARC) have a logical basis to them, but both are written in LISP. I am currently writing a FBRL interpreter embedded in C-Prolog, and would like to ''compare notes'' with other such systems, if they're out there. I would also appreciate any thoughts on the implementation of frame theory in Prolog. Thanks in advance, Tom E. You may want to start by looking at Pat Hay's paper "The Logic of Frames" from the mid to late seventies. He gives a logical account for the semantics underlying the basic ideas in FBRL's. The paper is reprinted in Brachman and Levesque's book "Readings in Knowledge Representation" published by Morgan Kaufmann (1985). I can point you toward three things involving FBRLs in Prolog that you may want to look at: [1] WIth a group from RCA, I built a frame-based representation language in prolog called PINE. We used it to build an expert system for diagnosing faults in ATE equipment. It is described in: FOREST - An Expert System for Automatic Test Equipment; Tim Finin, Pamela Kleinosky and John McAdams; Proceedings of the First Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications; (IEEE), Denver, Colorado, 1984. A somewhat longer version is available as technical report MS-CIS-84-09, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA 19104 [2] Arity Corp offers an expert systems building toolkit (written by David Drager) which is based on a FBRL. It's written in Arity Prolog, of course. It is really quite powerful. I'd characterize it as a cross between EMYCIN and KEE. [3] The AI research group at UNISYS's Paoli Research Lab has been using a FBRL implemented in Prolog to build many of their expert systems for quite some time. There system is called KNET and is similar to KL-ONE. An early reference is: KNET - A logic Based Associative Network Framework for Expert Systems"; Freeman, M., L. Hirschman and D. McKay; SDC, A Burroughs Company; technical memo LBS 12; Sept. 1983. I believe that there are several descriptions of it in the open literature, but I'm not sure where they can be found. Tim ------------------------------ Date: 30 Jul 87 00:34:27 GMT From: uunet!mnetor!utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!cognos!roberts@seismo.css.gov (Robert Stanley) Subject: Re: natural kinds In article <1526@botter.cs.vu.nl> hansw@cs.vu.nl (Hans Weigand) writes: > (3) anthropic/functional kinds, existing by virtue of readiness_to_hand > Examples: chair, cup, house, knife, game >.... Thus we may recognize an Eskimo iglo, and an African pile-dwelling both >as "houses". I think it is not so much the form (iconicity) that matters, >but rather that we feel that, when we would live in Greenland >(resp. the jungle), we would naturally appreciate or use these things >as houses too (to protect us against cold, dangers).... This raises some very interesting points, most particularly the fact that anthropic kinds cannot generally have simple definitions. A very young child gets away with calling a crude drawing or sand castle a 'house', but an architect or construction engineer sees a house in much more specific terms. In fact, we are entering the realms of the working vocabulary, and what is the lowest common denominator which allows for completely successful transfer between two disparate working sets. Perhaps a strong example will serve. Kenya became an independent nation in 1964, and was faced with the problem of codifying laws, and deciding on official languages. The two numerically superior tribal groupings were the Luo and the Kikuyu, each with their own language, but colonial administration had been exclusively English (at least in writing), and the standard interlingua of the whole East African coast was Swahili (an Arabic-based patois). To further complicate the issue, the very powerful, nomadic tribe of the Masai (with their own language) had do be taken into account. English and Swahili both were adopted as official languages, and a determined effort made to create a formal body of law in both. In the Swahili version is a formal definition of house which runs to some 96 pages of text! Why? Because the term house has a whole slew of legal meanings in English common law, on which Kenya's laws are based, which are totally alien to many of the Kenyan tribes, especially the nomadic Masai. Therefore, each and every such legal referent has to be precisely defined. I leave as an exercise to the reader....... I am not sure that house or any other cultural artifact can be called a natural object unless its cultural matrix is expressly defined as part of the object's name. Or that all objects in a given grouping are stated to exist within an explicitly defined cultural context. I am absolutely sure that when I say house and an Eskimo says igloo we are not talking about the same thing at all. In fact the only common denominator appears to be shelter from the elements in the winter months, albeit those are different for the two of us. -- Robert Stanley Compuserve: 76174,3024 Cognos Incorporated uucp: decvax!utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!cognos!roberts 3755 Riverside Drive or ...nrcaer!uottawa!robs Ottawa, Ontario Voice: (613) 738-1440 - Tuesdays only (don't ask) CANADA K1G 3N3 ------------------------------ Date: 3 Aug 87 20:29:44 GMT From: smadar@jarre.rutgers.edu (Cabelli) Subject: Structure, Function and Intention in Natural Kinds Ken Laws writes: >Semantic classification thus requires at least three viewpoints: >structure, intended function, and perceived or implemented function. There has been alot of research recently in machine learning on formulating concepts with these viewpoints in mind. I am amazed at the omittion of any relevant AI work in this discussion on natural kinds! For example, no mention was made of Winston's work on learning structural descriptions from functional definitions (AAAI-83), (I was surprised Minsky omitted that work). My work on "Formulating Concepts According to Purpose" (AAAI-87) presents a prototype system which formulates definitions of a "cup" based on the purpose for which an agent intends to use it (one specialized notion of intention). If the agent intends to use a cup to drink hot liquids from, one definition is automatically generated. If on the other hand, the cup has an ornamental purpose, a different definition can be formed. The key idea of the technique is to simulate the plan of actions the agent will go through in drinking hot liquids from a cup, (say POUR, GRASP, PICKUP, DRINK). Then, computing the (weakest) preconditions of this plan derives a functional description (must contain hot liquids, must be graspable by agent with hot liquid, must be liftable, and so on). A technique like Winston's is then used to compute the structural description from the functional one. Smadar Kedar-Cabelli Rutgers University ------------------------------ Date: 02 Aug 87 2159 PDT From: John McCarthy Subject: AI and science Like mathematics, philosophy and engineering, AI differs from the (other) sciences. Whether it fits someone's definition of a science or not, it has need of scientific methods including controlled experimentation. First of all, it seems to me that AI is properly part of computer science. It concerns procedures for achieving goals under certain conditions of information and possibility for action. We can even consider it analogous to linear programming. Indeed if achieving one's goals always consisted finding the values of a collection of real variables that would minimize a linear function of these variables subject to a collection of linear inequalities, then AI would coincide with linear programming. However, the relation between goals, available actions, the information initially available and that can later be acquired is sometimes more complex than in any of the branches of computer sciences the main character of whose scientific treatment consists of mathematical theorems. We don't have a mathematical formalization of the general problem faced in AI let alone general mathematical methods for their solution. Indeed what we know of human intelligence doesn't suggest that a conventional mathematical formalization of the problems intelligence is used to solve even exists. For this reason AI is to a substantial degree an experimental science. The fact that a general mathematical formalization of the problems intelligence solves is unlikely doesn't make mathematics useless in AI. Many aspects of intelligence are formalizable, and languages of mathematical logic are useful for expressing facts about the common sense world, and logical reasoning, especially as extended by non-monotonic reasoning is useful for drawing conclusions. In my view a large part of AI research should consist of the identification and study of intellectual mechanisms, e.g. pattern matching and learning. The problems whose computer solution exhibits these mechanisms should be chosen for reasons of scientific perspicuousness analogously to the fact that genetics uses fruit flies and bacteria. A. S. Kronrod once said that chess is the {\it Drosophila} of artificial intelligence. He might have been right, but the organizations that support research have taken the view that problems should be chosen for their practical importance. Sometimes it is as if the geneticists were required to do their work with elephants on the grounds that elephants are useful and fruit flies are not. Anyway chess has been left to the sportsmen, most of whom only write programs, not scientific papers and compete about who can get time on the largest computers or get someone to support the construction of specialized chess computers. Donald Norman's complaints about the way AI research is conducted have some validity, but the problem of isolating intellectual mechanisms and making experiments worth repeating is yet to be solved, so it isn't just a question of deciding to be virtuous. Finally, I'll remark that AI is not the same as cognitive psychology although the two studies are allied. AI concentrates more on the necessary relations between means and ends, while cognitive psychology concentrates on how humans and animals achieve their goals. Any success in either endeavor helps the other. Methodology in AI is worth studying, but acceptance of its results should be moderated by memory of the behaviorist catastrophe in psychology. Doctrines arising from methodological studies crippled the science for half a century. Indeed psychology was only rescued by ideas arising from the invention of the computer --- and at least partly ideas originating in AI. ------------------------------ Date: 5 Aug 87 12:23:37 GMT From: Gilbert Cockton Reply-to: Gilbert Cockton Subject: Re: AI, science, and pseudo-science In article <8707270710.AA05885@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> mckee@CORWIN.CCS.NORTHEASTERN.EDU writes: a lot, but his go at describing types of not-quite-sciences is interesting. For me, AI should be one of the > >* Interdisciplinary Sciences: Materials Science, Neuroscience > (characterized by their subject matter not yielding coherently > to any single experimental technique or theoretical paradigm.) > My criticism of AI is that most of the workers I meet are pretty ignorant of the CRITICAL TRADITIONS of ESTABLISHED disciplines which can say much about AI's supposed object of study. When AI folk do stop hacking (LISP, algebra or logic - it makes no difference, logic finger and algebra wrist are just as bad as the well known 'computer-bum'), they may do so only to raid a few concepts and 'facts' from some discipline, and then go and abuse them out of sight of the folk who originally developed them and understand their context and deductive limitations. What some of them do to English is even worse :-) >(However, I can't resist throwing in my excuse: programming is fun; > science is hard, often boring, work. Science is far more rewarding, though.) I think the nail's been hit squarely on the head, but to programming we should add amateur philosophy and idealist logic/algebra as other fun pasttimes pursued instead of hard, critical, rigorous argument. I think the major turn-off of AI work can be summed up as a complete lack of candid scholarship. The same is unfortunately true for much applications-driven research in computing. Without reining in AI (or computer applications research) under proper disciplines, I can't really see any prospect for workers developing their critical faculties up to the highest standards of established disciplines. NB - yes there are uncritical, unimaginative automata and disreputable charlatans in all disciplines. But these sorts are not the type who make a DISCIPLINE. AI seems to have few folk who do want it to be a discipline. -- Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.aimmi ARPA: gilbert%aimmi.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk UUCP: ..!{backbone}!aimmi.hw.ac.uk!gilbert ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 9-Aug-87 22:47:15-PDT,15072;000000000001 Mail-From: LAWS created at 9-Aug-87 22:45:33 Date: Sun 9 Aug 1987 22:41-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #196 - Tools: Neural Nets, Image Processing, Grapher To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Monday, 10 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 196 Today's Topics: Queries - XLISP & Kyoto Common Lisp on Unix System V & Commercial Planning/Scheduling Software? & CL OPS5 & Connectionist Simulator & Neural Networks, AI Tools - Neural Network Simulators & Low-level Feature Extraction and Interframe Matching & Uncertainty and Belief & ISI Grapher Update ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 07 Aug 87 12:15:04 GMT From: Gabriel Subject: XLISP Does anyone out there know where I can get the latest version of XLISP (public domain), at least version 1.4. Thanking you in advance, Gabriel. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 9 Aug 87 13:49:32 EDT From: brant@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Brant Cheikes) Subject: Query: Kyoto Common Lisp on Unix System V Has anyone successfully ported Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL) to a Unix System V environment? Anyone trying? If so, I'd really like to hear about it! Brant Cheikes University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 9 Aug 87 13:58:36 edt From: nancy@grasp.cis.upenn.edu (Nancy Orlando) Subject: Commercial Planning/scheduling software? Can anyone give me any information about commercial planning/scheduling software that is available? I have heard names like Artemis, Plan Plus, PLANMAN by Sterling Wentwork, and material from Palladian, but would like specific names, addresses, and/or comments from people who've used any and what they think of them. Have there been any good magazine articles about this type of software, particularly any comparisons of different aspects of performance among them? I will be happy to summarize responses to AIList if there is sufficient interest. Nancy Sliwa nancy@grasp.cis.upenn.edu or nesliwa%telemail@orion.arpa ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 8 Aug 87 10:54:29 EST From: munnari!fgp.uq.oz!thor@uunet.UU.NET (A-P.Lian) Subject: Re: request for cl ops5 Re: request for cl ops5 Me too please!!!! Thanks Andrew Lian Dr A-P. Lian Director FGPCAL Unit (French/German/Philosophy Computer-Aided Learning Unit) U of Queensland, St Lucia, Q. 4067, Australia ACSnet: apl@fgp.uq.oz UUCP: ...!seismo!munnari!fgp.uq.oz!apl ARPA: apl%fgp.uq.oz@seismo CSNET: apl@fgp.uq.oz JANET: fgp.uq.oz!apl@ukc ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 7 Aug 87 08:37 EDT From: Andre Marquis Subject: Query: Connectionist Simulator I would like to experiment with connectionist inference mechanisms. Is there a publically avaialble connectionist simulator? I have a Sun-3/160 with C and Common Lisp, among other things. I'm willing to port code from other machines. Also, if you have any good references on inference using connectionist networks, please send them. Shastri's PhD thesis is the only thorough treatment I've seen so far. Thank you. Andre Marquis bodick@cis.upenn.edu ------------------------------ Date: 7 Aug 87 20:13:06 GMT From: ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!ndmath!milo@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Greg Corson) Subject: Neural Networks I am looking for some information and/or demo programs on Neural Networks and how to simulate them on a computer. Any demo programs would be greatly appreciated even if they don't do much. I've heard that someone is selling a Neural Network simulator for the Mac but I haven't heard much about it. If anyone has details on what the program can do I would be interested to hear about it. Also, I could use a few good introductory references on Nerual networks, how they can be simulated and how to use them for pattern matching type operations. Thanks for the help... Greg Corson 19141 Summers Drive South Bend, IN 46637 (219) 277-5306 (weekdays till 6 central) ------------------------------ Date: 8 Aug 87 15:14:59 GMT From: unc!hch@mcnc.org (Hong John Hsieh) Subject: Re: Neural Networks In the 1st International Conference on Neural Network held in June, there were a number of software/hardware products in exhibition. Below is a short summary. Among the Macintoch-based systems, Neuronics, inc. gave their contact phone number as 617-367-9254. _______________________________________________________________________________ organization product host functions _______________________________________________________________________________ (1) TRW Mark III coprocessor to vax hardware nn (2) U. Colorodo MacTivation Mac simulator nn (3) Nestor inc. Nestor PC-AT handwritten char rec. (4) AIWARE inc. AINET PC process control (5) Gen. Dynamics - - situation assessment, weapon control (6) HNC ANZA ANZA + PC-AT PC-AT/coprocssor (7) MEIKO Computer net of transputers TSP, Image restoration surface (8) Neural Systems AWARENESS PC nn simulation (9) Neuraltech inc. PLATO/ PC to Cray knowledge processor ARISTOTLE (10) Neuronics MacBrain Mac nn simulation (11) SAIC,AI Tech. GINNI Symbolics 3670/CM,.. nn development tool (12) SAIC,Tech. Res. Sigma-1 PC-AT nn simulation (13) TI - Explorer+Odyssey nn simulation (14) VERAC - BAMS simulation Assoc. Mem. _______________________________________________________________________________ Cheng-Hong Hsieh (hch@unc.UUCP) ------------------------------ Date: 8 Aug 87 17:54:18 GMT From: ramones.rutgers.edu!pratt@RUTGERS.EDU (Lorien Y. Pratt) Subject: Re: Neural Networks At the Neural Networks tutorial at AAAI in Seattle in July, Terry Sejnowski said that the third volume of Parallel Distributed Processing will be released this coming fall. I have confirmed this with the publisher. Sejnowski also said that the book will come with a disk containing some sort of a neural network simulator which will run under UNIX. --Lorien Pratt ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 6 Aug 87 11:37 EDT From: Roland Zito-Wolf Reply-to: Roland Zito-Wolf Subject: Low-level feature extraction and interframe matching software wanted Date: 1 Aug 87 19:18:48 GMT From: jbn@glacier.stanford.edu (John B. Nagle) Does software exist for following moving objects from frame to frame in video images? ... Software, algorithms, hardware, or indications of research activity would be useful. John Nagle Center for Design Research, Stanford There was some interesting work done on building and comparing structural descriptions by J. Connell at MIT. the reference is "Learning Shape Descriptions: Generating and Generalizing Models of Visual Objects" AI-TR-853, Sept 85. The report also discusses methods for pre-processing the visual inputs. -rjz Roland Zito-Wolf Palladian Software ------------------------------ Date: 5 Aug 87 02:15:39 GMT From: ptsfa!nonvon!apn@ames.arpa (apn) Subject: Re: Low-level feature extraction and interframe matching software wanted In article <17150@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) writes: > > Does software exist for following moving objects from frame to frame >in video images? I'm looking for something that works by finding low-level >features such as edges and corners and matches them from one frame to the > There is a company in Santa Rosa, CA that does something like this They are called MAC or motion analysis corporation. Alex P Novickis -- UUCP: {ihnp4,ames,qantel,sun,amdahl,lll-crg,pyramid}!ptsfa!nonvon!apn {* Only those who attempt the absurd ... will achieve the impossible *} {* I think... I think it's in my basement... Let me go upstairs and check. *} {* -escher *} ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 6 Aug 87 21:51:05 EDT From: PJURKAT@VAXC.STEVENS-TECH.EDU Subject: STEVENS SEMINAR IN UNCERTAINTY AND BELIEF - SPRING 1987 This message is to whoever sent me a list of references related to the subject of the seminar - I got the list from the POSTMASTER account on our VAX - node SITVXB - from one of our systems programmers - by the time I got it, the source of the list was no longer evident. This note is to express my thanks to whoever it was that was so generous with their time and effort to make the list - it contained about 80 references many of which were new to me. The list came in a format that was similar to the Leff bibliographies that appear on the net occassionally - I am totally un- familiar with how they are generated, where they come from, and what the various first letters (%A, %T, etc.) mean, although I can guess - If anyoune would send me a tutorial on what the Leff lists are all about I would appreciate it - if it is not convenient to do so through the network, my address is M. Peter Jurkat Department of Management Stevens Insitute of Technology Castle Point Station Hoboken, NJ 07030 201-420-5371 pjurkat@sitvxa.bitnet thanks again - peter J. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 07 Aug 87 19:27:34 PDT From: Gabriel Robins Subject: The ISI Grapher: an Update -------- ============================================================================ AI/Graphics tool announcement: "The ISI Grapher: a Portable Tool for Displaying Graphs Pictorially" ============================================================================ Greetings, Due to the considerable interest drawn by the ISI Grapher so far, I am posting this abstract summarizing its function and current status, as well as some new information regarding same. This posting is also for the benefit of those who missed the first announcement or who are new to the AIList. We are now able to satisfy European and other foreign requests, so even if you are not a U.S.-based researcher or company, you may now have the sources. I will be giving an invited talk on the ISI Grapher in Symboliikka '87, Helsinki, Finland, August 17, 1987. The paper describing this effort is now available (for free) to all: it is entitled: "The ISI Grapher: a Portable Tool for Displaying Graphs Pictorially." The CommonLisp sources are also available (for free to all entities who receive DARPA funds, and for a small fee to all others). It currently runs on Symbolics versions 6, 7, and 7.1, and on TI Explorers versions 2 & 3. Efforts are currently underway to port it to other machines. If you would like the paper and/or the sources, please forward your postal address to "gabriel@vaxa.isi.edu" or to: Gabriel Robins Intelligent Systems Division Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Marina Del Rey, Ca 90292-6695 U.S.A. ============================================================================ The ISI Grapher August, 1987 Gabriel Robins Intelligent Systems Division Information Sciences Institute The ISI Grapher is a set of functions that convert an arbitrary graph structure (or relation) into an equivalent pictorial representation and displays the resulting diagram. Nodes and edges in the graph become boxes and lines on the workstation screen, and the user may then interact with the Grapher in various ways via the mouse and the keyboard. The fundamental motivation which gave birth to the ISI Grapher is the observation that graphs are very basic and common structures, and the belief that the ability to quickly display, manipulate, and browse through graphs may greatly enhance the productivity of a researcher, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This seems especially true in knowledge representation and natural language research. The ISI Grapher is both powerful and versatile, allowing an application-builder to easily build other tools on top of it. The ISI NIKL Browser is an example of one such tool. The salient features of the ISI Grapher are its portability, speed, versatility, and extensibility. Several additional applications were already built on top of the ISI Grapher, providing the ability to graph lists, flavors, packages, divisors, functions, and Common-Loops classes. Several basic Grapher operations may be user-controlled via the specification of alternate functions for performing these tasks. These operations include the drawing of nodes and edges, the selection of fonts, the determination of print-names, pretty-printing, and highlighting operations. Standard definitions are already provided for these operations and are used by default if the application-builder does not override them by specifying his own custom-tailored functions for performing the same tasks. The ISI Grapher now spans about 100 pages of CommonLisp code. The 120-page ISI Grapher manual is available; this manual describes the general ideas, the interface, the application-builder's back-end, the algorithms, the implementation, and the data structures. A shorter paper is also available, and includes hardcopy samples of the screen during execution. The ISI Grapher presently runs on both Symbolics (versions 6, 7, & 7.1) and TI Explorer workstations (versions 2 & 3); ports to other machines are underway. If you are interested in more information, the sources themselves, or just the paper/manual, please feel free to forward your postal address to "gabriel@vaxa.isi.edu" or write to "Gabriel Robins, Information Sciences Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina Del Rey, Ca 90292-6695 U.S.A." ============================================================================ ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 13-Aug-87 22:33:09-PDT,11693;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 13-Aug-87 22:27:09 Date: Thu 13 Aug 1987 21:53-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #197 - Macsyma, XLISP, Neural Networks To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Friday, 14 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 197 Today's Topics: Queries - OPS5 Benchmarks & Scheme & Xerox 1186 & AI Abstracts & Region Growing, Literature - Dreyfus and Dreyfus Reviews & Sanskrit, Tools - Macsyma Sources & XLISP 1.7 for MS-DOS & Neural Networks, Msc. - Turing Plays ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 6 Aug 87 10:52 EST From: SCAROLA%cgi.com@RELAY.CS.NET Subject: OPS5 benchmarks I'm working on a new version of CRL-OPS which is the OPS5-like component of Knowledge Craft. It's completely written in Common Lisp but includes a full compiler and some other tricks which produce a serious speedup over previous versions. Someone informed me that there exists a standard set of OPS5 benchmarks developed or collected by Columbia University and I'm interested in running these. If anyone has these benchmarks or knows who I should contact to get them please send me mail. Thank you, Dave Scarola Carnegie Group Inc ------------------------------ Date: 10 Aug 87 17:15:24 GMT From: sundc!hadron!cos!duc@seismo.css.gov (Duc Kim Nguyen) Subject: Scheme: where to get it ? Hi, I am looking for pointers to where to get SCHEME interpreter/compiler (ala Abelson&Sussman) to run under UNIX (BSD). Public-Domain distribution would be greatly appreciated, (written in C or Common Lisp, even better!). If there are multiple version, please include the pros-cons of each. thank you! duc@COS.COM ------------------------------ Date: 12 Aug 87 14:59:23 +1000 (Wed) From: "ERIC Y.H. TSUI" Subject: Xerox 1186 I would like to communicate with anyone who has used or is using Xerox 1186 workstations running Interlisp-D and/or Xerox Quintus Prolog environments. CSNET address: eric@aragorn.oz UUCP address: seismo!munnari!aragorn.oz!eric decvax!mulga!aragorn.oz!eric ARPA address: munnari!aragorn.oz!eric@seismo.arpa - - --- Many thanks. Eric Tsui eric@aragorn.oz ------------------------------ Date: 13 Aug 87 04:29:05 GMT From: ihnp4!chinet!nucsrl!berggeo@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (George Berg) Subject: AI Abstracts info wanted Earlier this Summer I received some material in the (paper) mail about something called ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ABSTRACTS. Unfortunately, the material ended-up in the wrong pile and I threw it away. Is there anyone out there who kept the material and who can give me the pertinent information about it (e.g. how much, whom to write, etc.)? *PLEASE*, to avoid cluttering this group, respond to me by e-mail and I will post a summary of the information I receive. Thanks. George Berg berggeo@alpha.eecs.nwu.edu EE/CS Dept. or berggeo@nucsrl.UUCP Northwestern University or {gargoyle,ihnp4,chinet}!nucsrl!berggeo Evanston, Il 60208 [The addresses are: Iris Taylor, Journals Department, Basil Blackwell, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX41JF England; or Journals Department, Basil Blackwell Inc., Box 1320, Murray Hill Station, NY 10156. The special Vol. 1 rate (including a free issue) for individuals in N. America or Japan is $50; for institutions $104. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 Aug 87 17:23:54 EDT From: Ali Minai Subject: Request for Region Growing A friend of mine is looking for REGION GROWING programs for computer vision applications. Are there any standard 3- or 2- dimensional region growing programs around? The references can be e-mailed to me at am@uvaee.ee.virginia.EDU Thanks, Ali Minai, EE, University of Virginia ------------------------------ Date: 10 Aug 87 14:23:09 GMT From: prlb2!ronse@seismo.CSS.GOV (Christian Ronse) Subject: Re: Reviews of Dreyfus & Dreyfus? In article <870805-062024-4511@Xerox>, WAnderson.wbst@XEROX.COM writes: > I am looking for reviews of the Dreyfus & Dreyfus book "Mind Over > Machines." Any and all references appreciated. Thanks, > > Bill Anderson Review by Timothy D. Koschmann in the V33#1 (Sep.87) issue of ``Artificial Intelligence'', pp. 135--140. The exact title of the book is: ``Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer''. ----- Time is Mona Lisa -- Christian Ronse maldoror@prlb2.UUCP {uunet|philabs|mcvax|...}!prlb2!{maldoror|ronse} ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 10 Aug 87 12:56:26 EDT From: Bruce Nevin Subject: Review of D&D in Nature A review of Mind Over Machine appeared in Nature 324.13 (Nov 1986):182-3. On the same page is a cartoon: a man looking glumly at the CRT in front of his chair, a woman standing at his side says `It figures. If there's artificial intelligence, there's bound to be some artificial stupidity.' ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 6 Aug 87 09:40:54 EDT From: "William J. Rapaport" Subject: Sanskrit The paper on Sanskrit, cited by Briggs in his AI Magazine article, by Srihari, Rapaport, and Kumar, ``On Knowledge Representation Using Semantic Networks and Sanskrit,'' Technical Report 87-03 (Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Dept. of Computer Science, February 1987) is available by writing to Ms. Lynda Spahr, Dept. of Computer Science, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA, or sending email to spahr@buffalo.csnet or spahr@sunybcs.bitnet. The full papers were to appear in a book. I haven't heard about its status. William J. Rapaport Assistant Professor Dept. of Computer Science, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260 (716) 636-3193, 3180 uucp: ..!{ames,boulder,decvax,rutgers}!sunybcs!rapaport csnet: rapaport@buffalo.csnet internet: rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu [if that fails, try: rapaport%cs.buffalo.edu@cs.relay.net] bitnet: rapaport@sunybcs.bitnet ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 10 Aug 87 16:47 EDT From: Richard Petti Subject: Re: Macsyma Sources From: jbn@glacier.stanford.edu (John B. Nagle) Subject: Re: Macsyma Sources A competing package is MuMath, from Soft Warehouse 3615 Harding Av Honolulu Hawaii 96816 808-734-5801 This is a symbolic math package written in a quaint but charming dialect of LISP, for which an interpreter is provided. There are versions for the Apple II and IBM PC, and recently a modern version for the PC has been re- leased. I've used the older version on some messy vector calculus problems in my solid modelling work, and found it quite useful in dealing with the grunt work of algebra and calculus. The heuristics aren't very powerful, but the algorithms for the standard solution methods all seem to work. Microsoft resells this package, when they remember it is in their product line, but the developers are in Hawaii and one may as well deal directly with them. Sometimes one of the developers answers the phone. John Nagle MACSYMA is being ported to IBM AT class machines, i.e. 80286 with DOS. It will have the same, or nearly the same functionality as the standard commercial-grade MACSYMA's available from the Computer Aided Mathematics Group at Symbolics. If you are interested in beta-tesing it (starting in October) please call us at 1-800-MACSYMA (622-7962). With regard to the capabilities you mention above, MACSYMA has a vector calculus package and two tensor calculus packages. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 Aug 87 22:06:54 MDT From: t05rrs%mpx1@LANL.GOV (Dick Silbar) Subject: Where to get XLISP 1.7 for MS-DOS In V5 #196 Gabriel asks about XLISP 1.4. Version 1.7 is available on a diskette (#79) from the Pioneer Valley PC User's Group for $6 (plus $5 membership fee). Address is P.O. Box H, North Amherst, MA 01059. ------------------------------ Date: 12 Aug 1987 11:27-EDT From: Alessandro.Forin@speech2.cs.cmu.edu Subject: Re: XLISP You should be able to get a copy of XLISP from the author: David M. Betz 114 Davenport Ave. Manchester, NH 03103 (603) 625-4691 It is nicely small and easily portable to all sorts of machines, but it does not perform very well. I tested it running on a Sun3/160 on Gabriel's benchmarks, and it was roughly 300 (three-hundreds) times slower than compiled CMU-CommonLisp running on an IBM-RT. If it is serious work, have you looked at Kyoto CL ? sandro- ------------------------------ Date: 13 Aug 87 14:34:36 GMT From: phri!uccba!finegan@nyu.arpa (Mike Finegan) Subject: Re: Neural Networks In article <269@ndmath.UUCP>, milo@ndmath.UUCP (Greg Corson) writes: > I am looking for some information and/or demo programs on Neural Networks > and how to simulate them on a computer. Any demo programs would be greatly > appreciated even if they don't do much. Dr. Dobbs Journal had an article (cover article) on neural networks a couple months back. There was source in there for a simulator, written in 'C'. I coded it in (ow - 800 some lines), and it works, except that some interpretation , and addition of code is necesarry to get what you succesfully trained it on to recognize anything. It merely required adapting a pre-existing sub-routine, and forced me to understand the program. It is public domain, so I guess I can send it to you, but note: I have added routines (albeit in the same style, etc.). The source can also be gotten on floppy from the magazine (~$20 ?). > > Also, I could use a few good introductory references on Nerual networks, > how they can be simulated and how to use them for pattern matching type > operations. ACASSP (sic), an IEEE Signal Processing magazine, had a fairly comprehensive introductio to the subject this year. I don't subscribe to it, so I don't remember if it was April, or later; I just copied the article. Mike Finegan Univ. of Cinti. ...hal!uccba!ucece1!finegan ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Aug 87 11:10:34 EDT From: Peter Beck (LCWSL) Subject: turing plays RE: TURING PLAYS The NJ section of the NY Times of Aug 2, 1987 on page 8 had an article on two plays based on Turing's life. They are: "A MOST SECRET WAR" by Kevin Paterson which was performed from july 30 - aug 9 at the Philip J Levin Theater in New Brunswick as part of the Rutgers Summerfest and 'BREAKING THE CODE" by Hugh Whitmore scheduled to open on Broadway Nov 15. I have not read nor seen the plays. peter beck ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 13-Aug-87 22:35:43-PDT,15998;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 13-Aug-87 22:29:29 Date: Thu 13 Aug 1987 22:09-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #198 - TRList, Seminars, Conferences To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Friday, 14 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 198 Today's Topics: Literature - TRLIST Technical Reports, Seminars - Object-Based Knowledge Representation Systems (Lockheed) & Evidential Reasoning: Overview and Implementation (SRI), Conferences - Symposium on Logic Programming & ACL 1988 Annual Conference CALL FOR PAPERS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1987 17:14 CST From: Leff (Southern Methodist University) Subject: TRLIST Technical Reports [The following is a reminder by Lawrence Leff of the technical report abstracts that he keep available. -- KIL] List of Tech Report Files and their contents award1.x Fiscal Year 1986 Research Projects Funded by Knowledge and Database Systems Program, IST 8504726 to IST8607303 award2.x Fiscal Year 1986 Research Projects Funded by Knowledge and Database Systems Program, IST 8644864 to IST8600412 award3.x Fiscal Year 1986 Research Projects Funded by Knowledge and Database Systems Program, IST 8603407 to IST-8607849 award4.x Fiscal Year 1986 Research Projects Fundeded by Robotics and Machine Intelligence Program (No Abstracts) canai1 Canadian AI Tech Report listing part 1 (Courtesy Graeme Hirst) canai2 Canadian AI Tech Report listing part 2 (Courtesy Graeme Hirst) cmu-robotics Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University CMU-RI-TR-85-10 to CMU-RI-TR-85-22 cmu-robotics2 Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University CMU-RI-TR-84-1 to CMU-RI-TR-85-10 issco Reports from ISSCO, Switzerland (mostly natural language) japan reports from ICOT, Japan (reprinted from AIList) mitai MIT AI memos 200 - 334 mitai1 MIT AI memos 335 - 452 mitai2 MIT AI memos 452 - 567 mitai3 MIT AI memos 568 - 641 mitai4 MIT AI memos 642 - 697 mitai6 MIT AI memos 698 - 751 mitai7 MIT AI memos 806 - 868 technical report 219 - 232 mitai8 MIT AI technical report 233 - 860 List of Books and Manuals mitai9 MIT AI technical report 789 - 860 List of Boioks and Manuals mitai10 MIT AI memo 752 - 805 robotics3 Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University CMU-RI-TR-86-1 to CMU-RI-TR-86-8 + (theses and dissertations) robotics4 Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University CMU-Ri-TR-86-9 to CMU-RI-TR-86-14 SRI AI materials, sent by Dr. Laws, order from D. Arceo, AI Center, SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Ave, Menlo Park, CA 94025 st2.x SRI #1 Technical Note 73 to 120 st3.x SRI #13 Technical Note 337 to 354 st4.x SRI #9 Technical Note 280 to 292 st5.x SRI #4 Technical Note 173 to 200 st6.x SRI #12 Technical Note 332 to 336 st7.x SRI #2 Technical Note 121 to 145 st8.x SRI #11 Technical Note 309 to 321 st9.x SRI #6 Technical Note 226 to 245 st10.x SRI #3 Technical Note 151 to 171 st11.x SRI #5 Technical Note 203 to 225 st12.x SRI #7 Technical Note 246 to 263 st13.x SRI #8 Technical Note 264 to 278 st14.x SRI #15 Technical Note 374 to 388 st15.x SRI #14 Technical Note 355 to 373 st16.x SRI #10 Technical Note 293 to 301 ucbcog University of California at Berkeley Cognitive Science Program ut-ai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Texas at Austin ut-ai1 Second List from University of Texas at AUSTIN AI lab +_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_ TRLIST is for redistribution of lists of technical reports from Universities and R&D labs. All tech report lists to be redistributed should include information on ordering the technical reports themselves. We prefer bib or refer format but we would rather get a weird format than no list at all. Administrative matters go to E1AR0002 @ SMUVM1 (bitnet), trlist-request%smu@csnet-relay, or ihnp4!convex!smu!trlist-request. Submitted tech report lists go to E1AR0002 @ SMUVM1 (bitnet), trlist%smu@csnet-relay, or ihnp4!convex!smu!trlist. (Please send large files to the first or third of these as we are charged by the byte for mail received via CSNET.) TRLIST goes out as the moderated group mod.techreports as well as being mailed to a list of 84 addresses as of April 20, 1986, many of which correspond to multiple people looking at an electronic bulletin board. Bib and refer are UNIX products which allow for users to have references automatically included in text and reformatted as needed for different journal styles. In addition, they support a primitive information retrieval function. Refer is produced by AT&T and should be part of most UNIX systems or their writer's workbench if the system comes unbundled. Refer comes as user contributed software under BSD 4.2. Contact Dr. Budd at University of Arizona for more info on bib. For those wishing to put material in bib or refer format but who do not have the software, here is an example of the way the text should look. The abstract and dollar field are optional. Note that each field begins with a percent followed by a one letter key followed by a space. Any line not beginning with a percent sign is a continuation of the previous line. One blank line separates each reference form the next. We publish materials that are not CS. The majority of materials coming are CS related and in the event that there is substantial non-CS tech reports being published, I will split the list as needed. __________________________________________________________________________ %R CS-84-124 %T SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON INTERCONNECTIONS OF COMPUTER NETWORKS %A Govind P. Gupta %A Arjun Gupta %I Washington State University, Computer Science Department %X This technical report is a review of the considerations on Interconnection of Computer Networks. Fundamental concepts of Network architecture, implementation levels, routing and addressing are also reviewed. %$ $2.60 %R CS-84-125 %T MOVEMENT COORDINATION FOR SINGLE--TRACK ROBOT SYSTEMS %I Washington State University, Computer Science Department %A Michael A. Langston %A Chul E. Kim %X We consider problems associated with the coordination of movement within a multiple robot system in which all motion is restricted to a single track. Our objective is to minimize the reconfiguration time, that is, the total time required to move a collection of robots from an initial to a goal configuration. We show that various models give rise to a wide range of problem complexities. For these problems we design and analyze optimization and approximation strategies. %$ $2.50 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 4 Aug 87 07:35:30 PDT From: wiley!joe@lll-lcc.ARPA (Joseph Sullivan) Subject: Seminar - Object-Based Knowledge Representation Systems (Lockheed) [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard.] INTERDEPARTMENTAL COMMUNICATION TO: DISTRIBUTION FROM: JOSEPH W. SULLIVAN O/90-06 B/259 354-5213 DATE: 1 August 1987 SUBJECT: AIC COLLOQUIUM The Lockheed AI Center is pleased to announce a presentation by Dr. Peter F. Patel-Schneider of the Schlumberger Palo Alto Research. An abstract of the presentation is provided below. Weak, Object-Based Knowledge Representation Systems Dr. Peter F. Patel-Schneider Recent work in semantics for terminological logics -- logics about the relationship between classes -- has demonstrated that the tradeoff between expressive power and computational tractability in such logics can be circumvented. This indicates that tractable object-based knowledge representation systems can be built, albeit at the cost of weakening deduction. These systems, because of their tractability, could be used in large knowledge-based systems. Their representational semantics would provide a cleaner foundation for object-oriented knowledge-based systems than do object-oriented programming systems, the systems currently used to build object-oriented knowledge-based systems. This cleaner foundation means that fewer complications would arise in the building and analysis of knowledge-based systems, thus making these difficult tasks easier. DATE: 19 August 1987 TIME: 3:30 PLACE: Lockheed Artificial Intelligence Center Main Conference Room 2710 Sand Hill Rd. (Lockheed Bld. #259) Menlo Park ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Aug 87 10:20:45 PDT From: lunt@csl.sri.com (Teresa Lunt) Subject: Seminar - Evidential Reasoning: Overview and Implementation (SRI) SRI COMPUTER SCIENCE LAB SEMINAR SERIES ANNOUNCES: EVIDENTIAL REASONING: OVERVIEW AND IMPLEMENTATION TOM GARVEY AI CENTER, SRI INTERNATIONAL Monday, August 17 at 4:00 pm SRI International, Computer Science Laboratory, BN182 Evidential reasoning consists of theoretical and practical methods for reasoning from evidence, the uncertain, imprecise, and sometimes incorrect information that is typically provided by "real-world" information sources. This theory evolved in response to the apparent representational and computational inadequacies of classical probability methods when dealing with such information in an expert system framework. Evidential reasoning is (currently) theoretically grounded in the Shafer-Dempster theory of evidence. Using this theory, we have developed procedures for fusing multiple, distinct bodies of evidence, for projecting evidential statements in time, for translating statements in one vocabulary into a different one, for interpreting selected propositions based on a given body evidence, and for summarizing and "gisting" a body of evidence. This seminar will be in the nature of a high-level tutorial describing the Shafer-Dempster theory and Gister, our current implementation of evidential reasoning. ------------------------------ Date: Thu 13 Aug 87 17:16:37-CDT From: "Roger Nasr (MCC-AI)" Reply-to: Nasr@MCC Subject: Conference - Symposium on Logic Programming - 1987 This is a last minute call to fill the remaining commercial exhibit booths at the Fourth IEEE Symposium on Logic Programming to be held August 31st through September 4th at the Hyatt Union Square, San Francisco, California. The Symposium is the main gathering event in the United States for the worldwide Logic Programming community. The program includes 49 research papers presented by leading researchers from around the world and covering a wide range of topics in the area. Included in those topics are: Databases, Language Issues, Applications, Program Development Environments, and Parallelism in Logic Programming. Parties interested in getting more information about the commercial exhibits part of this symposium are urged to contact Roger Nasr on the network at 'nasr@mcc.com', or by phone at (512)-338-3424. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 Aug 87 23:17:22 edt From: walker@flash.bellcore.com (Don Walker) Subject: Conference - ACL 1988 Annual Conference CALL FOR PAPERS CALL FOR PAPERS 26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics 7-10 June 1988 State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, New York TOPICS OF INTEREST: Papers are invited on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics, including, but not limited to, pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax, and the lexicon; phonetics, phonology, and morphology; interpreting and generating spoken and written language; linguistic, mathematical, and psychological models of language; machine translation and translation aids; natural language interfaces; message understanding systems; and theoretical and applications papers of every kind. REQUIREMENTS: Papers should describe unique work that has not been submitted elsewhere; they should emphasize completed work rather than intended work; and they should indicate clearly the state of completion of the reported results. FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION: Authors should submit twelve copies of an extended abstract not to exceed eight double-spaced pages (exclusive of references) in a font no smaller than 10 point (elite). The title page should include the title, the name(s) of the author(s), complete addresses, a short (5 line) summary, and a specification of the topic area. Submissions that do not conform to this format will not be reviewed. Send to: Jerry R. Hobbs ACL88 Program Chair Artificial Intelligence Center SRI International 333 Ravenswood Avenue Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA 415:859-2229; hobbs@warbucks.ai.sri.com SCHEDULE: Papers are due by 4 January 1988. Authors will be notified of acceptance by 8 February. Camera-ready copies of final papers prepared in a double-column format, either on model paper or in a reduced font size using laserprinter output, must be received by 4 April along with a signed copyright release statement. OTHER ACTIVITIES: The meeting will include a program of tutorials organized by Ralph Grishman, Computer Science Department, New York University, 251 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012, USA; 212:460-7492; grishman@nyu.arpa. Anyone wishing to arrange an exhibit or present a demonstration should send a brief description together with a specification of physical requirements (space, power, telephone connections, tables, etc.) to Lynda Spahr, Department of Computer Science, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA; 716:636-2464 or 3181; spahr@gort.cs.buffalo.edu, spahr@buffalo.csnet, spahr@sunybcs.bitnet, or {ames,boulder,decvax,rutgers}!sunybcs!spahr. CONFERENCE INFORMATION: Local arrangements are being handled by William J. Rapaport (ACL), Department of Computer Science, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA; 716:636-3193, 3180; rapaport@gort.cs.buffalo.edu, rapaport@buffalo.csnet, rapaport@sunybcs.bitnet, or {ames,boulder,decvax,rutgers}!sunybcs!spahr. For other information on the conference and on the ACL more generally, contact Don Walker (ACL), Bell Communications Research, 445 South Street, MRE 2A379, Morristown, NJ 07960, USA; 201:829-4312; walker@flash.bellcore.com or {ucbvax,decvax,allegra}!bellcore!walker. PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Jared Bernstein, Roy Byrd, Sandra Carberry, Eugene Charniak, Raymonde Guindon, Lynette Hirschman, Jerry Hobbs, Karen Jensen, Lauri Karttunen, William Rounds, Ralph Weischedel, and Robert Wilensky. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 16-Aug-87 21:46:39-PDT,13202;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 16-Aug-87 21:34:37 Date: Sun 16 Aug 1987 21:29-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #199 - Msc., Neural Nets, Functional Representations To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Monday, 17 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 199 Today's Topics: Queries - S and P Puzzle & Frame-Based Database, Tools - Neural Network Simulator, Comment - Remote Sensing, Philosophy - The Science of Pointless Debates & Natural Kinds, Comment - Object-Oriented Programming, Review - Turing Plays ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 14 Aug 87 12:03 PDT From: Shrager.pa@Xerox.COM Subject: Re: mr. s & mr. p Someone here is looking for the source of an old logic problem about two people named Mr. P. and Mr. S. One of these knows the product of some numbers and the other one knows their sum. Together they can figure out the numbers. There is a particular conversation that goes on between them something like: Mr. P. I don't know the numbers. Mr. S. I knew you didn't. Neither do I. ... and they eventually figure out the numbers. The reference is for a paper going to the publisher in a few days, so if anyone can help us with an exact reference and the precise text of the conversation, it would be greatly appreciated. (Although it might be interesting to talk about the answer, and how it can be figured out, right now we're pretty desperate for a citation.) Thanks in advance. -- Jeff ------------------------------ Date: 15 Aug 87 16:24:56 GMT From: amdahl!dlb!plx!titn!jordan@ames.arpa (Jordan Bortz) Subject: Wanted - FRAMES based database in C,LISP, or SMALLTALK I'm looking for a good frames based expert system in Smalltalk, C, or LISP. Public-domain, of course. If LISP, it would be nice if it ran under FRANZ. Thanks much in advance! Jordan -- ============================================================================= Jordan Bortz Higher Level Software 1085 Warfield Ave Piedmont, CA 94611 (415) 268-8948 UUCP: (decvax|ucbvax|ihnp4)!decwrl!sun!plx!titn!jordan ============================================================================= ------------------------------ Date: 14 Aug 87 14:21:01 GMT From: linus!alliant!sullivan@husc6.harvard.edu (Mike Sullivan) Subject: Re: Neural Networks In article <269@ndmath.UUCP>, milo@ndmath.UUCP (Greg Corson) writes: > I am looking for some information and/or demo programs on Neural Networks > and how to simulate them on a computer. Any demo programs would be greatly > appreciated even if they don't do much. Nerualtech Inc has a product out for beta test which runs on machines from PC's to Cray's. Dr John Voevodsky is the developer of this product which is modeled from the biological processes of the human brain cell. You may not be in the market for such a product, but it might help you to know what other's are doing. for info on PLATO/ARISTOTLE contact: Dr John Voevodsky Neuraltech Inc 177 Goya Road Portola Valley, California 94025 #include ______ / \ \ Michael J Sullivan / \____\ Alliant sullivan@alliant.uucp / / \ ComputerSystemsCorporation /____/_______\ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 Aug 87 08:31:45 pdt From: Eugene Miya N. Subject: Remote Sensing Subject: Re: Reviews of Dreyfus & Dreyfus? [AI is not alone] > the April 3, 1986, New Scientist, pp. 46-47. Roszak doesn't add much > personal perspective, but views the book favorably: "AI's record of > barefaced public deception is unparalleled in the annals of academic > study." -- KIL] Not too shabby a comment. I would say look to satellite remote sensing as another area which has promised a lot and delivered very little for the dollars put in. [This comment is not mine but people's in RS.] It also started about the same time as AI [maybe a tiny bit later than AI]. Remote sensing offers a basis for comparison of the development of these two sciences. --eugene miya NASA Ames Res Ctr. [ex-RS type] [I'd say it's not really the "sensing" that's failed, but the automation of perception. That turned out to be far harder than anyone imagined -- but has to be solved somehow, regardless of which research effort funds the work. Much of the research done under the remote sensing label is of equal interest for missile guidance, autonomous vehicle and robotic vision, and other military applications. Billing it all to remote sensing is somewhat unfair. (Of course the same could be said for much of the AI research.) -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 11 Aug 87 17:24:13 GMT From: hp-sdd!gt%hpfcmt.HP.COM@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu (George Tatge) Subject: The science of pointless debates I am curious... if we do come to a resolution on this riveting issue of whether or not AI is a science, what have we accomplished? It seems to me to be the type of nonsense issue that could only flourish in academia. Are we trying to decide if AI goes into the humanites section of the course catelogue? Are we arguing over which department will ultimately receive the benefit of DOD grants? Maybe but probably not. What I imagine we are doing is carrying on the great tradition of academicians from one field taking pot shots at academicians of a different field. Granted, tis quite an enduring tradition but not really an endearing one. George (I'll be gone before the flames get here) Tatge Obviously, nothing I ever say has anything whatsoever to do with the company I work for. ------------------------------ Date: 13 Aug 87 12:52:52 GMT From: Gilbert Cockton Reply-to: Gilbert Cockton Subject: Re: Natural Kinds (Re: AIList Digest V5 #186) In article MINSKY@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU writes: > >In my view, Wittgenstein missed the point because he focussed on >"structure" only. What we have to do is also take into account the >"function", "goal", or "intended use" of the definition. My trick is >to catch the idea between two descriptions, structural and functional. >Consider a chair, for example. > > STRUCTURE: A chair usually has a seat, back, and legs - but > any of them can be changed in so many ways that it is hard > to make a definition to catch them all. > > FUNCTION: A chair is intended to be used to keep one's bottom > about 14 inches off the floor, to support one's back > comfortably, and to provide space to bend the knees. > >If you understand BOTH of these, then you can make sense of that list >of structural features - seat, back, and legs - .......[ cut ]...... >........This also helps us understand how to deal with "toy chair" and >such matters. Is a toy chair a chair? The answer depends on what you >want to use it for. It is a chair, for example, for a suitable toy >person, or for reminding people of "real" chairs, or etc. a toy chair is a chair if people say it is a chair. I didn't vote for any lexicographer to go and prescribe our language. Whilst agreement on structure is possible by an appeal to sense-data mediated by a culture's categories, agreement on function is less likely. How do we know that an object has a function? Whilst the prime use of a chair, is indeed for sitting on, this does not preclude it's use for other functions - now don't these go back to structure? Or are they related to intention (i.e. when someone hits you on the head with a chair)? Function is a dangerous word, as it pretends a closure well-suited to the description of a well-ordered, unchanging world. I hope that this new focus doesn't take AI down the path of American post-war sociology, where Talcott Parson's functionalism recast the great American dream as the 'natural' functions of all societies. In short, nothing, no "das ding an Sich", has a function. People give things functions. Give a polaroid to someone in a part of the world where cameras aren't understood, and the function is not going to jump out and reveal the essence of the object. In fact, museums of ethnography are full of examples of industrial products put to the strangest uses. There was also once a spate of jokes about what the Japanese did when faced with a western water-closet, and recently a book on Japanese etiquette has warned Westerners about using their hankerchiefs to blow their nose on - we are told that this is not the function of a hankerchief in Japan! So, don't ignore the social. It's the only reality there is. Wittgenstein may have missed your preferred point, but I think you're ignoring his observations. Had he been alive in the '60s, I've a feeling that the growth of sociology would have provided him with more substance for thought than GPS and the Want-P predicate. BTW - what is the function of a Want-P predicate, and what would a Japanese do with a hankerchief afterwards? :-) Times change, the world changes, knowledge-bases stagnate. -- Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.hci ARPA: gilbert%hci.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk UUCP: ..{backbone}!mcvax!ukc!hwcs!hci!gilbert ------------------------------ Date: Fri 14 Aug 87 17:37:51-PDT From: Ken Laws Subject: Object-Oriented Programming Those interested in programming methodology (including expert systems) will probably enjoy reading Russell Abbott's article on "Knowledge Abstraction" in the August issue of Communications of the ACM. It clarifies the role of domain knowledge in programming and suggests that object-oriented programming may be the wave of the future. This supports the impression of Jeffrey Stone in the Spring issue of AI Magazine ("The AAAI-86 Conference Exhibits: New Directions in Commercial AI") that most of the expert system vendors have found rules too limiting and are incorporating object-oriented features in future software. A related, but somewhat different, "knowledge level" view is taken by B. Chandrasekaran in his Fall 1986 IEEE Expert paper: "Generic Tasks in Knowledge-Based Reasoning: High-Level Building Blocks for Expert System Design." While not incompatible with object-oriented programming, his generic tasks are at a level between that of common shell languages (rules, frames, nets, etc.) and the full specifics of real-world domain knowledge. I sense a new view of AI coalescing ... -- Ken ------------------------------ Date: 14 Aug 87 07:29:36 PDT (Friday) From: Messenger.SBDERX@Xerox.COM Subject: Re: turing plays >The NJ section of the NY Times of Aug 2, 1987 on page 8 had an article on two >plays based on Turing's life. They are: "A MOST SECRET WAR" by Kevin Paterson >which was performed from july 30 - aug 9 at the Philip J Levin Theater in New >Brunswick as part of the Rutgers Summerfest and 'BREAKING THE CODE" by Hugh >Whitmore scheduled to open on Broadway Nov 15." > >I have not read nor seen the plays. > >peter beck I saw "Breaking The Code" at the Haymarket Theatre in London, with Derek Jacobi (of "I, Claudius" fame) playing The Man Himself. What similarity this bears to the Broadway version about to open I don't know. The authors have attempted to be as factual as possible and have interviewed everyone they can find who knew Turing. They have included all of the remaining transcripts of Turings speeches, the most noticable of which is the "consider a bowl of porridge" speech he gave at his old school. His life is traced in a series of shortish episodes spanning from his schooldays to his death, using to good effect quick scene changing and flash back techniques. His ideas, philosophy and hopes for the Universal Computing Machine are put across very well, although the outright technical content is low. For what would on the face of it appear to be a minority interest play it attracted a good deal of critical acclaim and played to full houses for many months. I thouroughly enjoyed it, and found it thought provoking and not a little disturbing. The portrayal of his homosexuality, the court case and subsequent "treatment" for his "illness" was particularly well done. The script is a character actors dream, and Derek Jacobi took full advantage of it - I came away feeling that I had met Turing in all his egocentric glory. Don't miss it. -- Hugh ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 19-Aug-87 22:36:47-PDT,11782;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 19-Aug-87 22:26:54 Date: Wed 19 Aug 1987 22:23-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #200 - TerminalTalk, GLisp References To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Thursday, 20 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 200 Today's Topics: Queries - AI References & Frame Language in C & Frames System & Qualitative Analysis vs Qualitative Simulation & Multi-Objective Search, References - GLISP, Humor - TerminalTalk ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 19 Aug 87 21:38:00 GMT From: ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!tenny@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU Subject: AI references I'm building an AI reference database in refer(1) format. Currently the database has 1,000+ entries. I'm interested in receiving contributions in refer(1) format from netlanders. For your troubles, I will mail each contributor the database after it has stabilized and the duplicates have been removed. Larry Tenny tenny@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu tenny@iubacs (BITNET) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 Aug 87 11:26:59 SST From: joel loo Subject: Query - Frame Language in C I wonder anybody anywhere had built any Frame Language in C with any approach? Either by using a preprocessor, macros, subroutine calls, or by calling other language routines. I would like to obtain one if possible or get in touch with some who had developed one to know the cost of building one. I would be glad to summarize responses for the benefit of all. Thanks in advance. ISSLPL@NUSVM.BITNET ------------------------------ Date: 19 Aug 87 00:55:13 GMT From: plx!titn!jordan@sun.com (Jordan Bortz) Subject: WANTED - FRAMES SYSTEM Does anyone have a frames based expert-system that runs under LISP or Smalltalk? Public domain, of course, and running under Franz would be nice. Jordan -- ============================================================================= Jordan Bortz Higher Level Software 1085 Warfield Ave Piedmont, CA 94611 (415) 268-8948 UUCP: (decvax|ucbvax|ihnp4)!decwrl!sun!plx!titn!jordan ============================================================================= ------------------------------ Date: 18 Aug 87 20:49:14 GMT From: ihnp4!alberta!calgary!arcsun!roy@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Roy Masrani) Subject: qualitative analysis vs qualitative simulation Hi. I am wondering if anyone has a good idea of the difference between qualitative analysis and qualitative simulation. I have not done any extensive search on this but it seems that these terms are typically used interchangably. Perhaps, QA refers to a goal directed process to find possible reasons (or explanations) for some phenomena, whereas QS is a data driven process used to observe the consequences of making some changes to the system? Thanks -- Roy Masrani, Alberta Research Council 3rd Floor, 6815 8 Street N.E. Calgary, Alberta CANADA T2E 7H7 (403) 297-2676 e-mail: roy%arcsun.uucp%ubc.csnet@relay.cs.net ------------------------------ Date: 16 Aug 87 18:46:00 GMT From: uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!osiris!chandra@a.cs.uiuc.edu Subject: query:multi-objective search?? QUERY: Are there any search algorithms (like A*) that work with multiple objectives? I would appreciate references to papers, books etc. Thanks in Advance, Navin Chandra ( dchandra@athena.mit.edu ) ------------------------------ Date: 17 Aug 87 06:57:11 GMT From: mcvax!unido!ecrcvax!crcge1!benoit@seismo.css.gov (Christophe Benoit) Subject: Re: Looking for GLISP In article <260@nysernic> weltyc@nic.nyser.net (Christopher A. Welty) writes: > > I am looking for some references to G-LISP, something written >by a guy named Novac (sp?) at Stanford. I don't actually need G-LISP, >but I would like to see the papers or any other references. Any help >would be much appreciated. With enough interest I'll post to the >list.. > >Christopher Welty - Asst. Director, RPI CS Labs >weltyc@cs.rpi.edu ...!seismo!rpics!weltyc You can read the following references: G.S Novak: "Knowledge-based programming using abstract data types". Proc. of AAAI'83, August 1983. "GLISP: a Lisp-based programming system with data abstraction". A.I Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 3, August 1983. Christophe Benoit. benoit@crcge1.cge.fr ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Aug 87 12:29:04 PDT From: Eduard Hovy Subject: terminaltalk (i.e., [| <-> |] ) Who introduced the faces for our bboard language :-) and :-( and :-| and how many others were there? (I remember first seeing them about two or three years ago.) In what order did these marks develop? As far as I know, when you wanted to emphasize something, I mean REALLY EMPHASIZE it, you capitalized... which, pretty soon, was replaced by the *much* *more* elegant stars... Why? Is emphasis enough? How about that little request for confirmation, to make sure the audience is with you? Or just to show a hint of reservation? But perhaps we never use that noninteractively. (--?) Do we need the tension-building pause and resolution? How about: so she slowly opened the door, and inside, she saw... >>>> Meese <<<>>> Eating cheesecake <<<>this<< notation for italics, which seems less obtrusive and easier to pair-match than ***s. (It was my own invention, although I've had an editor ask me if I meant "Spanish quotes.") Another emphatic form you didn't mention was made famous by H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. Words can also be s t r e t c h e d on a terminal. Uppercase is generally taken to mean SHOUTING, although consistent uppercase often signifies that the sender is on an Army base. University students often use @i(Scribe) or {\it TeX} notation, which permits distinguishing italics from boldface but is neither graphic (i.e., "vivid") nor sufficiently universal. What does the future hold? Why animated 3-D color graphics, of course. (Animated text is already a hackers' specialty. Arpanetters can try the "finger laws@sri.com" command for a simple example.) I'm looking forward to typing in Oriental brush strokes. See the last CACM for an interesting article about word processing in Arabic. I don't recall seeing smiley faces in print, although Reader's Digest had a note about a -) tongue-in-cheek symbol about twenty years ago. (Another typographic innovation was the interrobang, used when ?!??!!! seems appropriate -- but far less >>precise<<, to my way of thinking.) I once saw a book about making birthday cakes, faces, and other graphics using red and black typewriter symbols (including many overstruck characters) -- I still have a bookplate that I constucted from the illustrated borders, flourishes, and composite-character alphabets. Someone at Stanford tried to pin down the origin of the smiley faces, without success. I'll forward three of the more interesting messages. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Sat 22 Jun 85 18:04:53-PDT From: Richard Treitel Subject: icons, fallen and risen [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard.] No, it was not I who proposed the icons. I heard about them in a message from CMU, which in turn ascribed the original suggestion to someone else whose name I completely forget. Let me resurrect a few which did not seem to get wide use: $ academic job available $$ industrial job $$$ job at a startup [= housing available in Arizona <= housing available in Minnesota % bad bicycle accident O+ feminist message // downhill skiing and so on. - Richard {:-) ------------------------------ Date: 14 Jun 86 1401 PDT From: Tovar Subject: Icons [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard.] (Courtesy of Symbolics, Palo Alto. -- TVR) From: Marc Le Brun From: Steve Strassmann Date: Wednesday, 31 August 1983 01:41-EDT From: Mark Plotnick To: info-cobol at MIT-MC Re: the last whole smiley face catalog :-) Awhile back, you may remember some discussion about "smiley face codes". Well, here are some new ones, culled from netnews (done@teklabs, rew@hao, ksf@security, msg@houxl, and futrelle@uiucdcs). [:|] submitter is a robot (or other appropriate AI project) :>) submitter has a big nose :<| submitter attends an Ivy League school :%)% submitter has acne =:-) submitter is a hosehead :-(*) submitter is getting sick of most recent netnews articles and is about to vomit :-)8 submitter is well dressed 8:-) submitter is a little girl :-)-{8 submitter is a big girl %-) submitter is cross-eyed #-) submitter partied all night :-* submitter just ate a sour pickle -:-) submitter sports a mohawk and admires Mr. T :-'| submitter has a cold :-)' submitter tends to drool ':-) submitter accidentally shaved off one of his eyebrows this morning 8:] submitter is a gorilla 0-) submitter wearing scuba mask P-) person submitting is getting fresh |-) submitter is falling asleep .-) submitter has one eye :=) submitter has two noses :-D submitter talks too much :-o submitter is shocked  / \ | RIP | || submitter has recently died ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Jun 85 08:24:58 pdt From: Vaughan Pratt Subject: Why do icons fall? [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard.] Why do icons need to be "fallen?" Consider: /|\ highway: messages about routes, rides, car repairs, etc. /v|^\ /^|v\ which side to drive on: right denotes a message agreeing with someone or taking a conformist position, left denotes disagreement or nonconformism --o-O-o-- plane: aviation-related messages (cheap tickets, etc.) claw: a vindictive ~= =|= dragonfly: message about insects \|/ plant: botany, vegetation, etc. _\|/_ explosion: nonnuclear warfare (messages about 108 mm recoilless slings and arrows) |=|=| fence: message about boundaries, also for fence-post errors db scissors up: a wanted cut, e.g. request to cut off a topic of discussion qp scissors down: an unwanted cut - funding cut, etc. ^^^ mountains: hiking/camping/skiing messages (^v^) a user of nonfallen icons, cf. #8^) On the one hand the existence of such icons calls into question the appropriateness of the term "fallen." On the other hand why have almost all of them to date been of the fallen persuasion? -v ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 23-Aug-87 21:58:30-PDT,19985;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 23-Aug-87 21:46:23 Date: Sun 23 Aug 1987 21:29-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #201 - Philosophy of Science, AI Paradigms To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Monday, 24 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 201 Today's Topics: Comments - Programming Paradigms & Qualitative Simulation/Analysis, Logic - Mr. S and Mr. P, Philosophy - AI, Science, and Pseudo-Science & Natural Kinds ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 17 Aug 87 08:49:36 MDT From: shebs@cs.utah.edu (Stanley Shebs) Reply-to: cs.utah.edu!shebs@cs.utah.edu (Stanley Shebs) Subject: Re: Object-Oriented Programming In article <12326542058.16.LAWS@KL.SRI.Com> Laws@KL.SRI.COM (Ken Laws) writes: >Those interested in programming methodology (including expert systems) >will probably enjoy reading Russell Abbott's article on "Knowledge >Abstraction" in the August issue of Communications of the ACM. It >clarifies the role of domain knowledge in programming and suggests >that object-oriented programming may be the wave of the future. Perhaps I missed the point, but I found this paper rather boring. It didn't seem to say much new - is there really anybody that doesn't believe programs are encrypted knowledge, and that making the knowledge more explicit is a Good Thing? Ditto for OOP - at least in the language community, it's started to move from fanaticism to realism. Perhaps the AI community is just getting started on the slide to object fanaticism? Also, some more explicit examples of what is and is not knowledge abstraction would have been useful. In fact, the concept of "knowledge" itself is pretty vague - is "barks(X) :- dog(X)" a piece of knowledge or not, and how crucial is a context or not? Or putting it in a more practical way, why would a Silogic Prolog program be considered a "knowlege program" and not a Fortran program? >A related, but somewhat different, "knowledge level" view is taken >by B. Chandrasekaran in his Fall 1986 IEEE Expert paper: "Generic >Tasks in Knowledge-Based Reasoning: High-Level Building Blocks for >Expert System Design." While not incompatible with object-oriented >programming, his generic tasks are at a level between that of common >shell languages (rules, frames, nets, etc.) and the full specifics >of real-world domain knowledge. This same idea may be found amidst all the glitzy results in Lenat's Eurisko papers - heuristics are objects with their own sorts of hierarchy and inheritance. The so-called weak methods tend to be near the root of hierarchies, while more specialized and domain-specific heuristics are at the leaves. >I sense a new view of AI coalescing ... Or at least a new view of AI tools. Some exciting and relevant papers may be found in a book edited by Gary Lindstrom and Doug DeGroot, called "Logic Programming: Functions, Relations, and Equations" and published by Prentice-Hall last year (reviewed in latest Computing Reviews). The papers speak more to language types than to AI types, but there is much food for thought... stan shebs shebs@cs.utah.edu ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Aug 87 11:17:46 EDT From: Paul Fishwick Subject: Qualitative Simulation/Analysis In reference to the question on definitions for qualitative simulation and analysis: the two terms should not be considered identical. If we temporarily drop the adjective 'qualitative' then we have the terms simulation and analysis --- simulation includes analysis of data but also includes the primary area of modeling. On a slightly different note, though, the term 'qualitative simulation' is somewhat difficult to define since ultimately all simulations on digital machinery will be quantitative. Qualitative modeling and simulation in general seem to reflect the need to represent highly abstract models using 'qualitative' terms. These terms are mapped onto the real number space (for instance) and a quantitative simulation ensues. Paul Fishwick University of Florida ------------------------------ Date: 19 Aug 87 23:27:00 GMT From: pur-ee!uicsgva!luke@seismo.CSS.GOV Subject: Re: mr. s & mr. p I definitely saw this problem in the "Mathematical Games" section of Scientific American some years ago. I am not sure which issue it appeared in, but I am positive that it came out between 1979 and 1982. I am 90% certain that it can be found in the range of January 1980 to December 1981. My first guess would be the October 1980 issue. The article says that the problem made its debut at a party primarily attended by mathematicians. I don't remember all the details of the problem, but here is what I do remember: Mr. P and Mr. S are experienced mathematicians. X and Y are two different positive integers (For the benefit of the reader, it has been disclosed that both X and Y are less than or equal to 20. This constraint, however, is sup- posedly unnecessary.) The sum of X and Y has been disclosed to Mr. S and the product of X and Y has been disclosed to Mr. P. Neither man knows the value of X or Y, nor are they allowed to tell the other what their sum or product is. They are allowed to talk to each other over the phone, and do so after sufficient time to think about what the other has said. The dialogue, as far as I remember is as follows: Mr P to Mr S: I can't tell from the product what X and Y are. (later....) Mr S to Mr P: I can't tell what they are either. (later....) Mr P to Mr S: I still can't tell what X and Y are. At this point, my memory fails me. But this is the earliest point that I could feel comfortable with the following dialogue. I'm pretty sure that these guys start knowing something within two more bounces. Mr ?? to Mr ??: Now I know what X and Y are. (later) Mr ?? to Mr ??: In that case, I know what X and Y are too! According to Scientific American, the answer is 4 and 13. If anyone finds the article, I would also like to know the reference. - Luke Young Computer Systems Group University of Illinois +-------------------------------------------------------------+ | BITNET : LUKE@UIUCVMD CSNET: luke%haydn@uiuc.csnet | | UUCP : {ihnp4,seismo,pur-ee,convex}!uiucuxc!uicsgva!luke | | ARPANET : luke@haydn.csg.uiuc.edu or luke%haydn@uiucuxc | | acoustic: office (217) 333-8164 home (217) 328-4570 | | physical: 6-123 CSL, 1101 W Springfield, Urbana, IL 61801 | +-------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------ Date: 15 Aug 87 12:29:41 GMT From: munnari!trlamct.oz!andrew@uunet.UU.NET (Andrew Jennings) Subject: Re: AI, science, and pseudo-science In article <108@glenlivet.hci.hw.ac.uk>, gilbert@hci.hw.ac.UK (Gilbert Cockton) writes: > > My criticism of AI is that most of the workers I meet are pretty > ignorant of the CRITICAL TRADITIONS of ESTABLISHED disciplines which > can say much about AI's supposed object of study. When AI folk do stop > hacking (LISP, algebra or logic - it makes no difference, logic finger > and algebra wrist are just as bad as the well known 'computer-bum'), > they may do so only to raid a few concepts and 'facts' from some > discipline, and then go and abuse them out of sight of the folk who > originally developed them and understand their context and deductive > limitations. What some of them do to English is even worse :-) > -- I am afraid I cannot let this pass. It almost appears as if you view programming as charlatan in itself ! Suffice it to say that if we view AI as an empirical search then we have some definite criteria : either the program works or it does not. Sure I'm in favour of CRITICAL thought and CRITICAL appraisal of work in AI : its just that I don't want to get buried in a pile of useless Lemmas (no doubt generated by you and your accomplices). Why can't you realise the simple truth : a discipline goes through STAGES of development. First the empirical paradigm dominates, then the engineering paradigm and last of all the theoreticians replete with armchairs. -- UUCP: ...!{seismo, mcvax, ucb-vision, ukc}!munnari!trlamct.trl!andrew ARPA: andrew%trlamct.trl.oz@seismo.css.gov Andrew Jennings Telecom Australia Research Labs ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 Aug 87 07:51:03 PDT From: Stephen Smoliar Subject: Re: Natural Kinds (Re: AIList Digest V5 #186) In article <115@glenlivet.hci.hw.ac.uk> Gilbert Cockton writes: > >Whilst agreement on structure is possible by an appeal to sense-data >mediated by a culture's categories, agreement on function is less >likely. How do we know that an object has a function? Whilst the prime >use of a chair, is indeed for sitting on, this does not preclude it's >use for other functions - now don't these go back to structure? Or are >they related to intention (i.e. when someone hits you on the head with >a chair)? There seems to be a bit of confusion between that the function of a perceived object IS and what it CAN BE. There are very few concepts for which structure and/or function are unique. The point is that both serve to guide the classification of our perceptions. Thus, we may recognize a chair by its structural appearance. Having done so, we can then identify the surface upon which we should sit, how we should rest our back, where we can tuck our legs, and so forth. On the other hand, if I walk into a kitchen and see someone sitting on a step-stool, I recognize that he is using that step-stool as a chair. Thus, I have made a functional recognition, from which I conclude that he is using the top step as a seat, he is resting his legs on a lower seat, and he is managing without a back support. Thus, one can proceed from structural recognition to functional recognition or vice versa. This may be what Cockton means by "intention;" and it is most likely highly societal in nature. However, we must not confuse the issue. We do not classify our perceptions merely for the sake of classifying them but for the sake of interacting with them. Depending on my needs, I may choose to classify the chair at my dining room table as a place to sit while I eat, a place to stand while I change a light bulb, or a weapon with which to threaten (or attack) an intruder. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Aug 87 13:30:39 EDT From: mckee%corwin.ccs.northeastern.edu@RELAY.CS.NET Subject: Should AI be scientific? If yes, how? One reason is simple intellectual honesty. If AI researchers call themselves Computer Scientists (as many of them do), they're implicitly also claiming to be scientists. And to be perfectly blunt, any scientist who doesn't use the scientific method is a charlatan. I'd prefer AI to be serious science, but if you don't want to do science, I won't argue. Misrepresentation is a different matter: if it's not science, don't call it science. Another, more technical reason involves the perennial question "what is reality?", and how one verifies any answer that might be submitted. The question is important to AI not only in its "what is intelligence, really?" aspect, but also because any AI system that interacts with the real world ought to have an accurate understanding of its environment. Scientific facts are (almost by definition) the most accurate description of the universe that we have, and scientific theories the best summaries. And the reason this is so is because the scientific method is the best way we've yet discovered for making sure that facts and explanations are accurate. Besides science, the other significant field with aspirations toward understanding reality is philosophy, which has even evolved a specialized subfield, ontology, devoted to the question. Now I haven't studied ontology, not because the question is unimportant, but because I think philosophical methodology is fatally flawed, and incapable of convincing me of the substance of any conclusions that it might obtain. I'm not interested in a discussion of how philosophy has or has not lost its way since Kant wrote his "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Which Will Be Able to Come Forth as Science", but I think philosophers' methodology has kept them from being as productive of useful understanding as they could have been. The critical question in choice of methodology concerns verifiablity. I'd hate to see AI researchers cast adrift in a sea of notions by thinking that a solid intellectual structure can be built on "Philosophical Foundations", so I'm going to attempt to concisely describe a schema of the different ways a theory can be confirmed. I'm afraid I'll have to leave out a lot of details and examples, but I hope you'll be able to fill in the rest of the picture yourself. In this schema, philosophy turns out to use the weakest form of confirmation, AI as it's currently practiced uses somewhat stronger methods, and the natural sciences end up as strongest. To see how this happens, think of the subject matter of a field of study as a set of statements (observations, facts) connected by a network of reasons. The reasons can be arbitrarily long (or short) chains of inferences. What a researcher needs to do to "understand" the field is find a set of axioms and inference rules that will show the explanatory relation between any pair of observations. However, the problem is underdetermined -- there's more than one consistent set of explanations for any set of facts. At the very least, one can always say "Because!", and define a special rule for each ill-behaved pair of facts. Doing this everywhere gives your theory a very simple structure, and Occam's razor decrees that simplicity is important. If there are always multiple theories that can explain all the observed data, then one must turn to some confirmation methodology to distinguish between them, and using anything but the most powerful techniques is a waste of time and resources. They are all based on prediction -- applying explanations to facts until one has covered all the facts, then generating new "potential facts" from incompletely bound explanations. For philosophers, all that can be done is to compare predictions, since the operations of the human mind are not externally visible. Worse, the facts of experience itself are inaccessible to more than one theorist, so that the data can't be verified, only statements about it. And since Godel proved his famous incompleteness theorem, we've known that no realistic model of the world can be derived from a finite set of axioms, so there's no way of telling if any discrepancy in predictions might be cured by the addition of "just one more" axiom. [Beyond this my metamathematics doesn't go. It would be interesting to know if there's any convergence at higher degrees of metafication. I don't think so, though.] In AI, one can trace the operation of a theory that's been instantiated as a program, as long as there's sharing of source code and the hardware is the same. This gives you operational confirmation as well as implicational confirmation, since you can watch the computer's "mind" at work, pausing to examine the data, or single-step the inference engine. The points of divergence between multiple theories of the same phenomenon can thus be precisely determined. But theories summarize data, and where does the data come from? In academia, it's probably been typed in by a grad student; in industry, I guess this is one of the jobs of the knowledge engineer. In either case there's little or no standard way to tell if the data that are used represent a reliable sample from the population of possible data that could have been used. In other sciences the curriculum usually includes at least one course in statistics to give researchers a feel for sampling theory, among other topics. Statistical ignorance means that when an AI program makes an unexpected statement, you have only blind intuition and "common sense" to help decide whether the statement is an artifact of sampling error or a substantial claim. In the natural sciences, in addition to implicational and operational confirmation, you'll find external confirmation. Each relation in the theory is tested by an experiment on the phenomenon itself, often in many ways in many experiments. It's not easy to think of statements about the content of AI (as opposed to its practice or techniques) that *could* be validated this way, much less hypotheses that actually *have* been experimentally validated. Hopefully, it's my ignorance of the field that leads me to say this. The best I can think of at the moment is "all intelligent systems that interact with the physical world maintain multiple representations for much of their knowledge." To verify a hypothesis like this, one of the strategies one can use is to build synthetic intelligent systems and then look at their structure and performance, remembering that the engineering used during construction is not the scientific goal. And then, to understand the structure one would use analytic techniques, and to understand the performance one would use behaviorist techniques. (Behaviorist anti-theory can safely be ignored, but don't forget that their methodology allowed them to discover learning sets when their animals became skilled at finding solutions to new *kinds* of problems.) Another strategy is to look at the structure and behavior of the intelligent systems one finds in nature. One would use the same methods to validate the behavioral descriptions as in the synthetic case, but to study natural systems' structure one must use indirect, non-invasive means or non-human subjects, since ethical considerations forbid destructive testing of humans except in very special circumstances. However the problem here is not lack of data but lack of understanding. If I believed that more data was needed, I'd be back in the lab recording from multiple microelectrodes, or standing in line for time on a magnetic resonance imager (which can already give you sub-millimeter resolution in a 3-dimensional brain image -- why wait for magnetoencephalography which won't tell you what you want to know anyway?), instead of building and running abstract models of neural tissue. Oops, four times as many words as I had hoped for. Oh well, thanks for your attention. - George McKee College of Computer Science [sic] Northeastern University, Boston 02115 CSnet: mckee@Corwin.CCS.Northeastern.EDU Phone: (617) 437-5204 Quote of the day: "It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's the things you know that ain't so." - Mark Twain ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 23-Aug-87 22:03:36-PDT,13223;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 23-Aug-87 21:50:33 Date: Sun 23 Aug 1987 21:49-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #202 - Conferences To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Monday, 24 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 202 Today's Topics: Conferences - Conceptual Graphs & CAPAMI '87 Advance Program ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 21 August 1987, 08:42:59 EDT From: Anand Rao Subject: Conference - Conceptual Graphs SECOND ANNUAL WORKSHOP ON CONCEPTUAL GRAPHS IBM Paris Scientific Center 2, 3, 4 September 1987 The first workshop on conceptual graphs was held at the IBM Systems Research Institute in Thornwood, New York, in August 1986. As a result of that workshop, a number of the participants have been writing chapters for a forthcoming book, Conceptual Graphs for Knowledge Systems, edited by John Sowa, Norman Foo, and Anand Rao. It should appear in print in early 1988. This year, another workshop will be held at the IBM Paris Scientific Center from September 2 to 4, 1987. The conference chairman is Dr. Jean Fargues. Following is a preliminary list of speakers and topics: James BALDWIN & Anca RALESCU, University of Bristol (UK), A Conceptual Graph Tool-kit Written in FRIL. Henri BERINGER, Electronique Serge Dassault Corp (France), Conceptual Graphs in Prolog. Kathleen DAHLGREN, IBM Los Angeles Scientific Center (USA), Commonsense Knowledge as Lexical Knowledge. Jean FARGUES, IBM Paris Scientific Center (France), Towards Understanding French Texts Using Conceptual Graphs. Norman FOO, Anand RAO, & John SOWA, Sydney University and IBM Systems Research Institute (Australia & USA), An Abstract Machine for Processing Conceptual Graphs. Brian J. GARNER, Deakin University (Australia), Actor Implementations for Cybernetic Reasoning. Pavel KOCURA, Heriot-Watt University (Scotland), Thematic Relations Hypothesis and Conceptual Graphs. Juan MORAN, Educational Testing Service, Princeton (USA), Modeling the Acquisition of Expertise using Conceptual Graphs. Jean-Francois NOGIER, Paris VII University, IBM Paris SC (France), French Natural Language Generation from Conceptual Graphs. Massimo POESIO, University of Hamburg (Germany), Modified Case Frame Parsing for a Speech Understanding System. Stephen REGOCZEI, Trent University (Canada), Nested Contexts: Stating What We Think They Mean. John SOWA, IBM System Research Institute (USA), Contexts and Definite References. Peter STOCKINGER, C.N.R.S (France), Conceptual Representations for NL Dynamic and Static Situations. Anyone who is interested in attending should write to, Ms. Martine Torres 2nd CG Workshop IBM Paris Scientific Center 36 avenue Raymond Poincare 73116 Paris, France In the letter to Ms. Torres, please note the answers to the following questions: 1. Would you like to give a talk? On what topic? 2. Do you need a hotel reservation? Very comfortable at 700 F per night or good average at 500 F per night? 3. What are your arrival and departure dates? For 1988, there are tentative plans for two workshops -- one in Australia, probably in July, and another in Minneapolis either during or after the AAAI conference in August. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Aug 87 09:45:21 CDT From: dyer@stilton.wisc.edu (Chuck Dyer) Subject: Conference - CAPAMI '87 Advance Program CAPAMI '87 1987 WORKSHOP ON COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE FOR PATTERN ANALYSIS AND MACHINE INTELLIGENCE Seattle, Washington October 5 - 7, 1987 CAPAMI '87 will focus on new architectures and associated algorithms for computer vision, image processing, and artificial intelligence. This workshop is a successor of the Computer Architecture for Pattern Analysis and Image Database Management workshops. The program, given below, consists of high-quality refereed papers, invited speakers, and panel sessions on the design and implementation of parallel architectures and algorithms for pattern analysis and machine intelligence. Invited speakers are: Tom Knight, MIT, George Reeke, Rockefeller University, and Masatsugu Kidode, Toshiba. ____________________________________________________________________________ WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION General Chair: Steve Tanimoto, University of Washington Program Chair: Chuck Dyer, University of Wisconsin Finance Chair: Yongmin Kim, University of Washington Local Arrangements Chair: Charlotte Lin, Boeing Program Committee: Chris Brown Jim Little Michael Duff Azriel Rosenfeld Bob Haralick Jorge Sanz Ramesh Jain Len Uhr John Kender Jon Webb H. T. Kung ____________________________________________________________________________ REGISTRATION Mail check payable to CAPAMI '87 (U.S. currency only) to: CAPAMI '87 Registration c/o Ms. Lori Tollefsen Department of Computer Science, FR-35 University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 IEEE Member Non-Member Student Registration Before Sept. 8 $110 $140 $60 After Sept. 8 $135 $170 $80 Banquet $ 30 $ 30 $30 Note: Student fee includes proceedings. Requests for refunds must be received in writing before Sept. 15. Cancellation fee is $15. ____________________________________________________________________________ HOTEL RESERVATION INFORMATION Reservations must be received by Sept. 14. Mention CAPAMI '87 when making reservations. To guarantee your reservation for late arrival (after 6 PM), either a check for one night's lodging or appropriate credit card information must be given to the hotel. Westin Hotel 1900 Fifth Avenue Seattle, WA 98101 (206) 728-1000 / (800) 228-3000 / Telex: 152900 ____________________________________________________________________________ FOR MORE INFORMATION CAPAMI '87 c/o IEEE Computer Society 1730 Massachusetts Ave., N.W. Washington, DC 20036-1903 (202) 371-0101 ____________________________________________________________________________ ADVANCE PROGRAM MONDAY, October 5 9:00 - 10:00 Invited Talk: TBA Tom Knight, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 10:00 - 10:30 Coffee Break 10:30 - 12:10 Session 1: Hypercube-based Architectures and Algorithms Hypercube and Shuffle-Exchange Algorithms for Image Component Labeling, R. Cypher, J. L. C. Sanz, and L. Snyder How to Program the Connection Machine for Computer Vision, J. J. Little, G. Blelloch, and T. Cass Optical Cellular Logic Architectures based on Binary Image Algebra, K. S. Huang, B. K. Jenkins, and A. A. Sawchuk A Parallel Algorithm for Region Labeling, M. H. Sunwoo, B. S. Baroody, and J. K. Aggarwal 12:10 - 1:45 Lunch Break 1:45 - 3:25 Session 2: Shared-Memory Algorithms Parallel Algorithms for Dynamic Systems with known Trajectories, L. Boxer and R. Miller Shared Memory Algorithms and the Medial Axis Transform, S. Chandran and D. Mount Formula Dissection: A Parallel Algorithm for Constraint Satisfaction, S. Kasif, J. H. Reif, and D. D. Sherlekar On the Complexity of Incremental Parallel Computations in Artificial Intelligence, A. Delcher and S. Kasif 3:25 - 4:00 Coffee Break 4:00 - 5:40 Session 3: Linear and Pipeline Architectures and Algorithms Progress on the Prototype PIPE, R. Goldenberg, W. C. Lau, A. She, and A. M. Waxman Heuristic Scheduling Algorithms for PIPE, C. V. Stewart and C. R. Dyer Computing the Hough Transform on a Scan Line Array Processor, A. L. Fisher and P. T. Highnam A VLSI Implementation of PPPE for Real-Time Image Processing in Radon Space - Work in Progress, W. B. Baringer, B. C. Richards, R. W. Broderson, J. L. C. Sanz, and D. Petkovic TUESDAY, October 6 9:00 - 10:00 Invited Talk: Selection and Perceptual Categorization: New Architectures for Nonalgorithmic Networks George Reeke, Rockefeller University 10:00 - 10:30 Coffee Break 10:30 - 12:10 Session 4: Mesh-based Algorithms Parallel Algorithms for Line Detection on a Mesh, C. Guerra and S. Hambrusch Solving the Depth Interpolation Problem on a Parallel Architecture, D. J. Choi and J. R. Kender The Hough Transform has O(n) Complexity on SIMD n x n Mesh Array Architectures, R. Cypher, J. L. C. Sanz, and L. Snyder EREW PRAM and Mesh Connected Computer Algorithms for Image Component Labeling, R. Cypher, J. L. C. Sanz, and L. Snyder 12:10 - 1:45 Lunch Break 1:45 - 3:25 Session 5: Pyramid and Hierarchical Architectures and Algorithms Real Time Synchronization in a multi-SIMD Massively Parallel Machine, P. Clermont and A. Merigot Iconic Image Analysis with the Pipeline Pyramid Machine (PPM), P. J. Burt and G. S. van der Wal Dynamically Quantized Pyramids for Hough Vote Collection, R. P. Blanford A VLSI Architecture for a Neurocomputer using Higher-Order Predicates, R. Geller and D. Hammerstrom 3:25 - 4:00 Coffee Break 4:00 - 5:30 Panel: Which Parallel Architectures are Useful/Useless for Vision Algorithms Moderator: Jorge Sanz, IBM Almaden Research Laboratory 6:00 - 10:00 Banquet: Boat cruise on Puget Sound to Blake Island with a Northwest-Indian-style, Alder-smoked salmon dinner WEDNESDAY, October 7 9:00 - 10:00 Invited Talk: Image Processing Machines in Japan Masatsugu Kidode, Toshiba Research and Development Center 10:00 - 10:30 Coffee Break 10:30 - 12:10 Session 6: Mesh-based Architectures and Algorithms Geometric Algorithms on HMESH Architecture, S. B. Chalasani and C. S. Raghavendra Polymorphic-Torus: A new Architecture for Vision Computation, H. Li and M. Maresca The OFC Enhanced Mesh Architecture: A Performance Study, A. M. Jrad and R. W. Hall Image Processing on VLSI Architectures with Reduced Hardware, H. M. Alnuweiri and V. K. P. Kumar 12:10 - 1:45 Lunch Break 1:45 - 3:00 Session 7: Loosely-Coupled MIMD Architectures and Algorithms Some Aspects of an Image Understanding Database for an Intelligent Operating System, F. Weil, L. Jamieson, and E. Delp HBA Vision Architecture: Built and Benchmarked, R. S. Wallace and M. D. Howard A Binary-Image Processing Method using Run Length Representation, K. Nakabayashi 3:00 - 3:30 Coffee Break 3:30 - 5:00 Panel: Research on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Architectures in Japan and the U.S. Moderators: Masatsugu Kidode, Toshiba Research and Development Center, and Steven L. Tanimoto, University of Washington ______________________________________________________________________________ ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 23-Aug-87 22:08:52-PDT,11337;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 23-Aug-87 21:56:47 Date: Sun 23 Aug 1987 21:53-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #203 - Spang Robinson Review & TerminalTalk To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Monday, 24 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 203 Today's Topics: Queries - Applied AI Reporter & CL Planner & Rule-Based Software & Language-Independent Text on AI, Comments - TerminalTalk, Review - Spang Robinson Report on AI, Vol. 3, No. 8 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 22 Aug 1987 06:56:55 PDT From: Laurence I. Press Subject: Applied AI Reporter?? I have heard of a publication called the Applied AI Reporter, from the University of Miami. Can someone give me an address or phone number for more information on the publication? Thanks, Larry ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Aug 87 16:56:29 EDT From: Kenneth Basye Subject: Request for CL planner I'm looking for a simple Nonlin style planner written in Common Lisp. Source is essential; documentation would be wonderful, but is not neccesary. Thanks very much, Ken Basye UUCP {ihnp4|allegra|decvax}!brunix!kjb ARPA kjb%cs.brown.edu@relay.cs.net CSNET kjb@cs.brown.edu U.S. MAIL Ken Basye Box 1910 Dept. of Computer Science Brown University Providence, RI 02912 ------------------------------ Date: 22 Aug 87 23:30:52 GMT From: RAMESH-T@OSU-20 Subject: rule-based software From: journeyman I am interested in obtaining general comments from any of you who is knowledgeable about rule based systems software, currently available in the market. We are looking for software that satisfies most or all of the following requirements : 1. Compatible with commonly available PC's (IBM, Mac) 2. User friendly (not a must if there are other good features). 3. Includes good display facilities, or allows display utilities to be programmed in. Here's a list of available software that we've heard of but don't know much about : *ADVISOR *GURU *RULEMASTER *1st Class *WIZDOM XS *WIZDOM PX *SAGE *ESP ADVISOR *EXPEROPS5 *EXPERTEDGE *EXSYS *INSIGHT 1.2 *INSIGHT 2/INSIGHT 2+ *MACKIT *MICROEXPERT *PERSONAL CONSULTANT *TOPS1 *WISDOM XS *XPER *XSYS Any information would be welcome (general, availability, prices, applicability, will you give it to us free, etc). ramesh ------------------------------ Date: 21 Aug 87 09:10:32 GMT From: mcvax!ukc!its63b!dcl-cs!strath-cs!murray@seismo.css.gov (Murray Wood) Subject: A good language-independent text on AI ? I am preparing a set of 24 introductory lectures on AI aimed at presenting the main concepts, techniques and applications with little regard for theory. The students are in their second year having only programmed in Pascal. Although I intend to spend 4/5 lectures discussing the relative merits of Prolog and Lisp there is no time to actually program in either of these languages. The course is therefore intended to be programming language independent. I would like to recommend a textbook to the students and be able to follow it quite closely in the lectures - can anybody suggest a good book, ideally costing less than 20 pounds (30 dollars) ? My current intention is to use the book by Shirai and Tsujii 'Artificial Intelligence: Concepts, Techniques and Applications'. Does anybody have any experience and / or views on this book for such a course ? Thank You Murray -- ARPA: murray%cs.strath.ac.uk@ucl-cs.arpa, murray@cs.strath.ac.uk UUCP: murray@strath-cs.uucp, ...!seismo!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!murray JANET: murray@uk.ac.strath.cs ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Aug 87 13:02:22 CDT From: "Michael T. Gately" Subject: Terminal Talk With referenc to TERMINAL TALK, another effective device for highlighting a portion of a message is _to_surround_it_with_underscores_. I use this when typing book references without a text formatter. Another interesting notation is the order of the characters in a serial interrobang. I feel that there is a definate difference between ?! and !?. The first would be appropriate when describing (with disbelief) a question someone asked. The second is used when questioning a statement someone made. ------------------------------ Date: 21 Aug 87 17:12:25 GMT From: petsd!hjuxa!uucp@rutgers.edu Subject: Re: terminaltalk I can shed no light on most of Hovy's questions, but I think I can claim priority on the use of underscores as delimiters: He's reading _Moby Dick._ He says it's _very_ boring. An earlier format uses underscores throughout; e.g., I need a copy of _The_Art_of_Computer_Programming_, Volume 4. Personally I prefer *asterisks* for emphasis and _underscores_ for other applications of italics. By the way, recently my three-year-old son told me excitedly that there was a kitty on my home terminal. Actually it was a C-R (carriage-return) glyph, with the C slightly higher than the R and running into it like a cat's tail. Can anybody think of a use for such "kitties"? -- Col. G. L. Sicherman ...!ihnp4!odyssey!gls ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1987 21:21 CST From: Leff (Southern Methodist University) Subject: Summary of Spang Robinson Report on Artificial Intelligence (bm695) Summary of Spang Robinson Report on Artificial Intelligence August 1987, Volume 3, No. 8 "AAAI-87: Underwhelming" is the front page leader. This title is expounded upon by the statment, "There was little research, or product drama to speak of; no blockbuster announcements or revolutionary changes. ... Almost uniformly, products presented were reiterations and refinements." Teknowledge revealed that the time between initial contact and final sale went from six to twelve months. There is also a section on suggestions for future AAAI conferences. Four hundred people attended the neural network tutorial. (?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(?(? Carnegie Group: A Company in Transition Carnegie Group will announce the appointment of a new president, Dennis Yablonsky. He used to be president and Chief Operating Officer at Cincom. Carnegie group has a relationship with CMU to serve as the technology transfer outlet for applied computing research. Carnegie Group will now be selling Knowledge Craft in a series of modules. The company is still unprofitable, it is declaring a positive cash flow. Some of its's projects include a) system to automate the design of digital circuits b) a system for assembly path programming c) a shop planning and scheduling system for Boeing d) a forger shop scheduler for Ellwood City Forge Co. e) an autombobile troubleshooting diagnostic system that will be deployed across Ford Motor's system car dealership network. f) a telemarketing system g) a system for a financial insitutution to analyze English language news stories, financial statements and bank telexes. &^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^&^ SHORTS (including announcements at the AAAI-87) TI now has a $1900 utility to convert a Personal Consultant Plus expert ssytem to one that is embedable in C and runable under UNIX. Keystone is an expert system can port applications built on Intellicorp's 2.1 to a 286 for delivery. Expertelligence's Prototyper puts an object or Smalltalk like structure around Lisp. Knowledge Garden exhibited a tool that uses hypertext and expert systems. Knowledge maker is a an $99 inductive-rule generating system that geneerates rules for KnowledgePro, Insight 2+, M.1 and Micro Expert. If/then is a $70.00 expert system that runs on top of Lotus. (A product review for this is also in this Spang Robinson Report.) Intellicorp has announced a ten percent reduction in staffing and declared that it will report a substantial loss for the quarter and fiscal year ending June 30, 1987. Teknowledge will be selling several products under a Copernicus architecture including a development Facility, deelivery facility, database integration system, COBOL integration system and TeKSolutions Applicatin Pakcks. Artificial Intelligence Corporaiton has formed a consortium of corporations to develop an expert system shell for IBM mainframes. APEX has a Computed Text program that generates end user reports from Common LISP products. Lucid Common Lisp will be ported to HP's 9000 Series 300 and 800 computers. Aion and Arthur Anderson will jointly deelop a high-performance version of Aion's application expecution system. MSA Advanced Manufacturing Inc. has signed an agreement allowing it to use Aion products to develop manufacturing expert systems. Primefax of San Antionio, TX will be developing repair support software. Nihon Digital Equipment Corporaiton will be distributing Artificial Intelligence Technologies' AIT Lisp TOOLKIT. Sun and Schlumberger will be jointly developing AI software for the SUNS. Sun introduced a Symbolic Programming Environment for its Sun 3 and Sun 4 workstations that will provide the powers of a dedicated LISP system while remaining a general purpose work station. Inference Corporationa nd Lockheed-California have introduced a system to audit medical claims. Symbolics has introduced a software package that enable susers to deliver applications packages on its work stations. Gensym Corporation unveiled a real-time expert system for process control applications. Prices start at $36,000. BBN Advanced Computers has a LISP for its Butterfly parallel processing system costing $12,000. Quantun InKNOWvations Corporation is sellling a knowledge-base environment for 386 based machines and includes a relational database. Bookman Consulting introduced a system to assess the technical knowledge and proficiency of computer programmers. -[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[-[ New Bindings Teknowledge named Peter Weber new president and executive officer. Michael P. Coleman, formerly vice president of Marketing and sales and McDonnell Douglas Computer Sales was named IntelliCorp vice president of marketing and sales. Spencer Leyton was named vice president of business development for Symantec Corporation of Cupertino, CA. Was vice president of sales and business development at Borland International. Randy J. Raynor is manager of development for Inference Corporation (was vice president of product development at UCCEL) ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 28-Aug-87 00:21:12-PDT,13062;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 28-Aug-87 00:14:56 Date: Fri 28 Aug 1987 00:10-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #204 - S and P Puzzle, AAI Reporter, Msc. To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Friday, 28 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 204 Today's Topics: Queries - GoldWorks & "If-Then" Rules & Conceptual Graphs & Concept Definitions for Object Classification & Modeling Creativity & How to Measure Learning Ability?, Logic - Mr. S and Mr. P, Review - Understanding AI, Binding - Applied AI Reporter ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 25 Aug 87 09:50 EDT From: TAM%MCOIARC.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu Subject: GoldWorks by Gold Hill Computers We have recently purchased GoldWorks expert system development package, and have just returned from Gold Hill's 5-day training course. I was wondering if anyone out there used GoldWorks and what is there opinion of it compared to other PC-based expert system shells. I am particularly interested in real applications using GoldWorks. Thanks, Paul Tam Medical College of Ohio bitnet: TAM@MCOIARC ------------------------------ Date: 24 Aug 87 16:38:52 +1000 (Mon) From: "ERIC Y.H. TSUI" Subject: Request for a set of "if-then" rules I would like to have access to a set (or sets) of in-use "if-then" rules. I am encoding a General Purpose Inference Engine (GPIE) for a conceptual graph (J.F. Sowa's book on Conceptual Structures) system and would like to ask for a set of "if-then" rules currently used in some typical rule-based systems. Something between 50 to 200 rules are quite appropriate for testing. These rules, presumably not written in the CG notation, will be encoded in the CG formalism and then used for testing the GPIE. The rules, encoded in the CG notation, can be returned to the original source. Meta-rules, self-referencing rules and other non base level rules are also sought, though they may not incorporated into the testbed. Rules are most preferred in areas like financial and auditing domains, diagnostic systems, planning and intelligent help/advisory systems. Others are also welcome. Does anyone have access to such a set of rules ? Can someone provide pointers to locate such rules ? Any other advise ? Eric Tsui eric@aragorn.oz Division of Computing and Mathematics Deakin University Victoria 3217 AUSTRALIA ------------------------------ Date: 25 Aug 87 10:26:00 EST From: cugini@icst-ecf.arpa Reply-to: Subject: conceptual graphs > > Date: 21 August 1987, 08:42:59 EDT > From: Anand Rao > Subject: Conference - Conceptual Graphs > > > SECOND ANNUAL WORKSHOP ON CONCEPTUAL GRAPHS > > IBM Paris Scientific Center > 2, 3, 4 September 1987 > > .... Regarding this recent announcement on AIlist: Are there any articles currently in print on this topic? Eg, Proceedings of the 1st conference? I'd be very grateful for any pointers you can give me on this. Tutorial/basic-overview type articles are especially welcome. John Cugini ------------------------------ Date: 27 Aug 87 12:20:08 +1000 (Thu) From: "BETTY CHENG" Subject: Request for a set of Concept Definitions for Object Classification I am doing a project on Concept Classification and would like to know whether anyone has developed, have access to or can provide pointers to locate a set of concept definitions for real world knowledge. For example, definitions for physical objects like bus, vehicle, clothes etc. Definitions for primitive acts are also sought. For example, definiton for 'open', 'close', 'eat' etc. These definitions of concepts will be encoded in the conceptual graph (c.f. Sowa's book on Conceptual Structures) formalism and an interactive classification program, currently being implemented, will help to identify instances of existing concepts, insert new concepts into the knowledge base and in the process of the executing the above two functions, perform exact and partial matching on existing concepts. Ideally, these definitions are already presented in a frame-based or in an attribute-value pair form. However, other forms of presentations will certainly be considered. Could anyone possess such a set of definitions of concepts ? Any idea on where I can locate a set of these definitions ? Any comment/criticism/idea ? [A summary of the result of the responses will be posted, given that there exists sufficient interest in the readership.] Betty Cheng cheng@aragorn.oz ------------------------------ Date: 27 Aug 87 03:35:52 GMT From: harnad@princeton.edu Subject: Modeling Creativity I would be grateful to receive references to work on modeling creativity (in any domain -- verbal, mathematical, artistic, motor). I am also interested in relevant experimental and observational work. Stevan Harnad harnad@mind.princeton.edu (609)-921-7771 -- Stevan Harnad harnad@mind.princeton.edu (609)-921-7771 ------------------------------ Date: 27 Aug 87 20:05:40 GMT From: berke@locus.ucla.edu Subject: How to measure learning ability? I am involved with a project part of which is to teach mime to learning-disabled children. I maintain that: Mimicry behavior is integral to or forms the basis for animal learning. Directly training mimicry should therefore directly train learning ability. This is a simple, to me, an obvious claim. The question is, how to determine whether it is true? If you can answer the following simple question, I would appreciate hearing from you: Question 1: Are there any measures of general learning ability that are commonly accepted? If not, what measures of learning ability do you use (or know of), whether they purport to measure verbal learning, skill acquisition, or any other behavior that can be classified as learning? In "cognitive science" and related fields there is a lot of hubub currently about new and better brain models. I have my own which I call Network Recombination. I refer to "learning and memory" as a unified process of learning/memory because of the implications of my model. If you ascribe to a model of how brain activity produces the phenomenon of learning/memory (or "learning" or "memory" separately), I would appreciate an answer to the following question: Question 2: Does your model make any predictions about intermodal transfer of abilities? Specifically, say a subject's verbal skills are poor and so she does poorly on vocabulary tests which Thorndike (in Human Learning, 1931, p.174) considers "an excellent intelligence test." Say I now train the subject in physical skills to increase discrimination, analysis, and creative abilities (defined primitively below). How much will these abilities transfer to verbal or quantitative skills? What form will the transfer take? Or will there be none? Discrimination ability - seeing different parts in observation Analytical ability - breaking things into parts Creative ability - putting parts into new wholes I appreciate all opinions and advice, especially from people who have worked with learning-disabled children (and even more from people to whom this posting seems based on my ignorance and misconceptions). But I would like to specifically request those putting forth "mind models" for predictions of their models. I would like to QUANTIFY increase in general learning ability, and so the predictions of specific models with specific properties is necessary. If there is no such thing as general learning ability, then I would like to QUANTIFY transfer of abilities from physical to verbal or intellectual skills, or verify that there is none. Can you help me? I have posted this to several news groups. Perhaps it would be best to reply to me in e-mail, or to decide on a single group for follow-ups, perhaps sci.research. It has little traffic. Thank you in advance for all replies. Peter Berke berke@cs.ucla.edu (213) 394 - 6797 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Aug 87 13:37:25 EDT From: tim@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Tim Finin) Subject: Mr. S and Mr. P I don't know the full history of the Mr. S and Mr. P puzzle, but I'm sure it goes back a long way. I first saw it when Will Dowling of Drexel University sent it to me with the suggestion that it might be easy to express the solution in Prolog. I posted it to Prolog-digest in November or October of 1984. There were several follow up posting, some of which discussed its history. You could explore the prolog digest archives at SUMEX-AIM for more information. Here is the puzzle as it was told to me: There are 2 integers n and m between 3 and 98 inclusive. Mr. S has been told their sum and Mr. P their product. The following truthful conversation occurs: P: I don't know n and m. S: I knew you didn't. Neither do I. P: Now I know them! S: Now I do, too!! What are the values of n and m? By the way, the answer to this version of the puzzle is NOT 4 and 13! I won't spoil anyone's fun by saying what the answer is, or by describing how one determines what it is or is not. This is a simple example of a general problem which requires one to model and reason about the beliefs and knowledge of other agents, a topic that has been receiving some attention lately. Halperin (IBM) and Moses (Stanford) have been using a similar puzzle (variously called "the cheating wives" and "the dirty children") in their recent work. Tim ------------------------------ Date: 23 Aug 87 20:41:00 GMT From: uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!osiris!goldfain@a.cs.uiuc.edu Subject: Re: A good language-independent text on To: murray@cs.strath.ac.uk Subject: Good AI Survey Book The book: Understanding Artificial Intelligence, by: Henry C. Mishkoff, published by Howard W. Sams & Company, a division of MacMillan Inc. (4300 West 62nd Street, Indianapolis, IN 46268 USA) seems to have about the emphasis and level that you describe. You may want to check into it. Here in the U.S., I got it for about $15. It was written for industry audiences more than university students, but you may consider this a plus, judging from your "application" emphasis. In addition to a high-quality typesetting, it has a bibliography and glossary in the back. It's 250 pages. (NOTE: I have no vested interest in whether or not the author sells a single copy.) - Mark Goldfain (ARPA: goldfain@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu) ------------------------------ Date: 24 Aug 87 18:51:13 GMT From: gatech!pitt!psuvax1!cisunx!wvucsb.UUCP!aw@seismo.CSS.GOV (Ajay Waghray) Subject: Re: Applied AI Reporter?? > Approved: ailist@stripe.sri.com > Xref: wvucsb comp.ai.digest:300 > > I have heard of a publication called the Applied AI Reporter, from the > University of Miami. Can someone give me an address or phone number for > more information on the publication? > > Thanks, > Larry > ------- The Applied AI Reporter published from the Intelligent Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Miami. I do not know any phone numbers but the address for editorial correspondance is :: Editor P.O. Box 248235 Coral Gables FL 33124 Address for subscriptions and inquiries is :: ICS RESEARCH INSTITUTE P.O. Box 1308-EP, Fort Lee NJ 07024 Hope this helps Ajay ---- {allegra, cadre, bellcore, psuvax1}!pitt!wvucsb!aw ------------------------------ Date: 25 Aug 87 17:17:22 GMT From: root@sgi.sgi.com (Superuser) Subject: Re: Applied AI Reporter?? It is published by the Intelligent Computer Systems Research Institute, 421C Jenkins Bldg., Stanford Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33124 (305) 284-5195 BITNET dumics@ser Mike Bender sgi!wdl1!mhb mhb@wdl1.UUCP ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Aug 87 09:47:12 PDT From: lambert@cod.nosc.mil Subject: applied ai reporter Larry, In response to your request in AIList: Applied Artificial Intelligence Reporter Intelligent Computer Ssytems (ICS) Research Institute University of Miami P.O. Box 248235 Coral Gables, FL 33124 $98.00 per year. Dave ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 28-Aug-87 00:22:00-PDT,13190;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 28-Aug-87 00:20:54 Date: Fri 28 Aug 1987 00:19-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #205 - Philosophy To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Friday, 28 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 205 Today's Topics: Philosophy - Wittgenstein and Natural Kinds & Fear of Philosophy & Should AI be Scientific? & Philosophy of Science, AI Paradigms ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 24 August 1987, 23:09:52 EDT From: john Sowa Subject: Wittgenstein and natural kinds Wittgenstein's basic point is that the most important concepts of ordinary language cannot be defined by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. No matter whether you try to give structural definitions or functional definitions, you cannot state a precise set of conditions that will admit all relevant instances while ruling out all irrelevant ones. In my book, Conceptual Structures (Addison-Wesley, 1984), I made the distinction between natural types (or kinds) and role types. Something can be recognized as belonging to a natural type by its own properties. Examples include MAN, WOMAN, CAT, DOG, NUMBER, or NAIL. A role type can be recognized only by relationships to something outside of itself: FATHER, LAWYER, PET, WATCHDOG, QUOTIENT, or FASTENER. The number 4, for example, can be recognized as a number in isolation, but as a sum, divisor, quotient, product, etc., only in relation to something else. A tee shirt had the slogan "Food is the only edible thing in the universe." That is true by definition, since FOOD is a role type, defined by its role of being considered edible. Yet that distinction does not solve Wittgenstein's problem. Every culture has its own standards of what is considered edible. In Scandinavia, there is a rotten fish delicacy that requires a mound of raw onions and garlic to prepare the taste buds and liberal quantities of aquavit to wash it down. Even for a particular individual, degree of hunger shifts the boundary line between the roles of FOOD and GARBAGE. Even mathematical concepts have shifting definitions. Consider what happened to the concept of number as rational number, irrational number, complex number, transfinite number, etc., were introduced. If you try to give a precise definition today, somebody tomorrow is sure to invent some kind of hyper-quaternary-irresolute number that will violate your definition, yet be so similar to what mathematicians like to call a number that they would not want to exclude it. To handle Wittgenstein's notion of meaning as use, I introduced schematic clusters (in Section 4.1 of Conceptual Structures) as an open-ended collection of schemata (or frames) associated with a concept type. Each schema would represent one pattern of use (or perspective) for a type, but it would not exhaust the complete meaning of that type. There would always be the possibility of some new experience that would add new schemata to the cluster. Consider the concept ADD: one schema would show its use in arithmetic. But if someone wants to talk about adding a line to a file, another schema could be added to the cluster for that use. And then one should add a new schema for adding schemata to clusters. Every schema in a cluster represents one valid use of the concept type. The meaning is determined not by any definition, but by the collection of all the permissible uses, which can grow and change with time. Does that solve the problem? Maybe, but we still need criteria for determining what kinds of uses can legitimately be added to a cluster. Could I say "To add something means to eat it with garlic and onions"? What are the criteria for accepting or rejecting a proposed extension to a concept's meaning? John Sowa ------------------------------ Date: 25 Aug 87 08:33:00 EST From: cugini@icst-ecf.arpa Reply-to: Subject: Fear of philosophy > From: mckee%corwin.ccs.northeastern.edu@RELAY.CS.NET > Subject: Should AI be scientific? If yes, how? > > ....Besides science, the other significant field with aspirations toward > understanding reality is philosophy, which has even evolved a specialized > subfield, ontology, devoted to the question. Now I haven't studied > ontology, not because the question is unimportant, but because I > think philosophical methodology is fatally flawed, and incapable of > convincing me of the substance of any conclusions that it might > obtain. ...I think philosophers' methodology has kept them from > being as productive of useful understanding as they could have been. It's worth noting that the rest of McKee's message consists of nothing but philosophizing, with particular emphasis on epistemology and the philosophy of science. Just for instance, his claim, in passing, that it is verifiability that distinguishes the scientific method, simply echoes the logical positivist school of thought. No one doubts that there is a lot of silly philosophy out there, but simply to ask the questions like: "Why should we believe the results of a scientific inquiry more than those of an inquiry using non-scientific methods?" or, more fundamentally, "What constitutes the scientific method?" is already to begin to philosophize. These are, then, not properly scientific questions (under what microscope will you find and verify their answers?), but philosophic questions about science. The distinction, then is not between a) wooly-headed philosophers and b) hard-headed scientists, but rather between a) self-conscious philosophizing, which attempts to learn about and profit from 2000+ years of related efforts, and b) "naive" philosophizing, which disdains previous experience and usually winds up inventing positions originally propounded and discussed anywhere from 20-2000 years ago. John Cugini ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Aug 87 10:56:51 MDT From: shebs@cs.utah.edu (Stanley Shebs) Reply-to: cs.utah.edu!shebs@cs.utah.edu (Stanley Shebs) Subject: Re: Should AI be scientific? If yes, how? In article <8708240436.AA19024@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> mckee@CORWIN.CCS.NORTHEASTERN.EDU writes: > >[...] If AI researchers >call themselves Computer Scientists (as many of them do), they're implicitly >also claiming to be scientists. Not necessarily. "Computer Science" is an unfortunate term that should be phased out. I wasn't there when it got popular, but the timing is right for the term to have been inspired by the plethora of "sciences" that got named when the govt started handing out lots of money for science in the 60s. I prefer the term "informatics" as the best of a bad lot of alternatives. ("Datology" sounds like a subfield of history; the study of dates :-) ) >[... tutorial on scientific method omitted ...] > In AI, one can trace the operation of a theory that's been instantiated >as a program, as long as there's sharing of source code and the hardware is >the same. This gives you operational confirmation as well as implicational >confirmation, since you can watch the computer's "mind" at work, pausing >to examine the data, or single-step the inference engine. Goedel's and Turing's ghosts are looking over our shoulders. We can't do conventional science because, unlike the physical universe, the computational universe is wide open, and anything can compute anything. Minute examination of a particular program in execution tells one little more than what the programmer was thinking about when writing the program. >The points of >divergence between multiple theories of the same phenomenon can thus be >precisely determined. But theories summarize data, and where does the >data come from? In academia, it's probably been typed in by a grad student; >in industry, I guess this is one of the jobs of the knowledge engineer. >In either case there's little or no standard way to tell if the data that >are used represent a reliable sample from the population of possible data >that could have been used. In other sciences the curriculum usually includes >at least one course in statistics to give researchers a feel for sampling >theory, among other topics. Statistical ignorance means that when an AI >program makes an unexpected statement, you have only blind intuition and >"common sense" to help decide whether the statement is an artifact of sampling >error or a substantial claim. I took a course in statistics, but you don't need a course to know that sampling from a population is not meaningful, if you don't know what the population is in the first place! In the case of AI, the population is "intelligent behavior". Who among us can define *that* population precisely? If the population is more restricted, say "where native-speaking Germans place their verbs", then you're back in the Turing tarpit. A program that just says "at the end" (:-) is behaviorally as valid as something that does some complex inferences to arrive at the same conclusion. Worse, Occam's razor makes us want to prefer the simpler program, even though it won't generalize to other natural languages. When we generalize the program, the population to sample gets ill-defined again, and we're back where we started. >[...] It's not easy to think of statements about the content >of AI (as opposed to its practice or techniques) that *could* be validated >this way, much less hypotheses that actually *have* been experimentally >validated. Hopefully, it's my ignorance of the field that leads me to >say this. The best I can think of at the moment is "all intelligent systems >that interact with the physical world maintain multiple representations >for much of their knowledge." This could only be a testable hypothesis if we agreed on the definition of "intelligent system". Are gorillas intelligent because they use sign language? Are birds intelligent because they use sticks? Are thermostats intelligent? I don't believe the above hypothesis is testable. Almost the only agreement you'd get is that humans are intelligent (ah, the hubris of our species), but then you'd have to build a synthetic human, which isn't going to be possible anytime soon. Even if you did build a synthetic human, you'd get a lot of disagreement about whether it was correctly built, since the Turing Test is too slow for total verification. > - George McKee > College of Computer Science [sic] > Northeastern University, Boston 02115 AI people are generally wary of succumbing to "physics envy" and studying only that which is easily quantifiable. It's like the drunk searching under the street light because that's where it's easy to see. AI will most likely continue to be an eclectic mixture of philosophy, mathematics, informatics, and psychology. Perhaps the only problem is the name of the funding source - any chance of an "NAIF"? :-) stan shebs shebs@cs.utah.edu ------------------------------ Date: 24 Aug 1987 14:50-EDT From: Spencer.Star@h.gp.cs.cmu.edu Subject: Re: AIList V5 #201 - Philosophy of Science, AI Paradigms In V5 #201 Andrew Jenning suggests that AI is empirical research when a programmer writes a program because we have some definite criteria: either the program works or it does not. Unfortunately, this view is rather widespread. Also, it is wrong. Empirical research seeks to make general statements of a quantitative nature. For example, the measurement of the speed of light gives us a value that is applicable in general, not just Tues July 15th in Joe's lab. A psychologist who measures the reaction time of a person before and after drinking alcohol is making an empirical statement that should hold in other labs under other similar experimental conditions. The central ideas of empirical research is that results be publically repeatably, and lead to some generalizations. If it happens that the results confirm or disconfirm some theoretical predictions, so much the better. A programmer who gets a program to work says nothing more scientific than a plumber who has cleared a drain or a dentist who has filled a tooth. In most cases there was no theory being tested, there is no generalization that can be made, the work is handcrafted and cannot be repeated in another lab based on the public description of what was done, and we cannot even be sure that the program works on anything more than the specific examples used in the demonstration. At best such a program is an example of craftsmanship and programming skills. It has nothing to do with scientific research. Spencer Star (star@h.cs.cmu.edu) ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 28-Aug-87 00:34:01-PDT,12720;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 28-Aug-87 00:32:35 Date: Fri 28 Aug 1987 00:30-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #206 - Terminal Icons, Meetings To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Friday, 28 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 206 Today's Topics: Linguistics - Terminal Iconography & Paralanguage, Seminar - An Autonomous Agent (NASA Ames) Conference - 5th Int. Workshop on Database Machines ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 24 Aug 87 12:24:02 -0400 From: Andy Latto Subject: terminal iconography Resent-From: Bruce Nevin Date: Thu, 20 Aug 87 16:07:17 -0400 From: Stephen Gildea The first use of *askerisks* for emphasis that I know of is the game Adventure, which only assumed one case. This was 1967. Question: did the authors invent it, or were they using an already-common notation. < Stephen ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Aug 87 16:26:24 -0400 From: John Robinson Reply-to: jr@ALEXANDER.BBN.COM Subject: Re: terminal iconography >> From: Stephen Gildea >> This was 1967. Well, maybe 1976. /jr ------------------------------ Date: 22 AUG 87 10:57-EST From: ASTEROFF%CUTCV1.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu Subject: Paralanguage/Terminal Talk In answer to the recent posting about "Terminal Talk," I recently completed my doctoral dissertation on Paralanguage in Electronic Mail, a.k.a. "Terminal Talk" in electronic communication. Below is a formal definition for paralanguage in computer-mediated communication and some categories that I developed for my analyses. /Janet Asteroff Teachers College Columbia University Definition: Paralanguage is a component of spoken, written, and electronic communication. It gives to what is being communicated a character over and above that which is necessary to convey meaning in the linguistic or grammatical sense. Paralanguage in electronic mail is positioned between spoken and written paralanguage in its visual and interpretive structures. Electronic paralanguage, a term developed to describe paralanguage in computer-mediated communication, is defined as: features of written language which are used outside of formal grammar and syntax, and other features related to but not part of written language, which through varieties of visual and interpretive contrast provide additional, enhanced, redundant or new meanings to the message. Categories of Paralanguage 1. Vocal Spellings. Vocal spellings or contractions can be used as a time-saving typing device for those who send many messages. In certain cases, this use may not have any relation to sound qualities. When used solely to save time or typing, vocal spellings are "speedwriting" techniques. r u clogging up the print queue? 2. Vocal Segregates. Sound substitutes to indicate tone of voice appear often in the public and private electronic mail of some computer users, usually but not exclusively those who have spent a great amount of time using computer-mediated communication systems. Many of these expressions originated in and are borrowed from cartoons or comics. Vocal segregates such as "wham," "arghh" and *gak* for instance, can be as common to some (but hardly to all) users of electronic mail as they are to cartoonists. In that form of print communication, vocal segregates function to convey a great deal of information in a small space, such as in a single drawing or in one frame of a longer strip. 3. Manipulation of Grammatical Markers. The use of ??? .... ( ) etc. 4. Manipulation of Special Symbols. This includes any symbol on the computer keyboard used to mark off various parts of a message by surrounding certain words or phrases. Like the manipulation of grammatical markers these symbols, in order to be paralinguistic features, are used outside of their traditional or formal meaning, e.g., Apartment #2K uses the number sign for its traditional meaning, but in the expression @@!#%^* it becomes a paralinguistic feature. Like grammatical markers, special symbols indicate degrees of stress, show pause, signal a shift in tone or changes of subject. Most often they are found on the top (number) row of the computer keyboard by shifting to uppercase, although any symbol on the keyboard can be used. This includes the asterisk (*), number sign (#), up-arrow (^), plus sign (+) and ampersand (&), as well as right and left angle brackets (< >) and the or bar (|). Like grammatical markers, special symbols serve many different functions. An asterisk placed at the beginning and end of a word, like uppercasing, shows stress, and a string of asterisks in the middle of a message signals a change in subject. When grouped together special symbols can be the entire communication, as indicated in the first example below, where the function is to indicate extreme stress and in some cases to substitute for obscenities. 5. Spatial Arrays. A spatial array is defined in this research as the systematic spatial arrangement of characters to create a graphic or an identifiable image... This definition of spatial arrays is supported by examples of the more recent use on the computer of symbols, letters and numbers to create "faces" or face symbols, popularly and generically referred to as a "smiley face." Various combinations of symbols, letters, and numbers create several different kinds of faces which when viewed sideways create an image. Face symbols, particularly the "smiley-face" and the "frowney-face" originated in print and mass media in the early 1970's, and were not created by computer users. The many variations on the basic "smiley-face" however, would appear to be unique to computer-mediated communication. 6. Text Forms. Text Forms describe the types of paralinguistic features made possible through certain kinds of basic and technically sophisticated text manipulation, the latter accomplished using a text editor. These features can provide a contrast and indicate stress, pause, or different kinds of tones within a message. Text Forms provides a way of looking at certain types of presentations of text on the screen, including the entire message or individual parts. In most cases a Text Form is not as dramatic or as systematically patterned as a spatial array. Text Forms include different types of text arrangements such as spacing between letters and words, the justification of paragraphs or blocks of text, numbered or unnumbered lists, outlines, and "the absence of certain features or expected work in composition" such as the lack of paragraphing (Carey, p. 68). 7. Text Movement. Text, or any symbol, can be made to appear to move across the screen, horizontally from left to right, by overwriting one letter on top of another. This places the same characters in different parts of the screen. By its very nature, text movement indicates that these words should be read differently from stationary text. Text movement indicates emphasis, and in some cases demonstrates extreme stress. Several kinds of text movement and combinations also make possible different features. Text movement can be smooth and constant if the spacing between each appearance is even, or choppy and inconsistent with uneven spacing. Regular or constant text movement creates a regular rhythm, while uneven text movement creates long or short pauses. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Aug 87 13:39:14 pdt From: plu..jared@ames-pioneer.arpa Subject: Seminar - An Autonomous Agent (NASA Ames) NASA, Ames Research Center, Seminar Announcement An Autonomous Agent Steven Vere Lockheed AI Center Abstract: The goal of the autonomous agent project is the creation within the next 5 years of an integrated AI artifact with the following capabilities: 1) Limited natural language understanding and generation in a core vocabulary of 1900 words. The vocabulary is approximately the union of Ogden's Basic English and 1000 most frequent English words. Syntax coverage will be limited. 2) Common sense knowledge about the concepts and actions underlying the core vocabulary. 3) Reasoning, plan synthesis, and plan execution capability. 4) A personal event episodic memory system. Work is in progress to write the semantics and common sense knowledge for the core vocabulary. This is based on a set of about 50 relational semantic primitives, such as LOCATION, EXISTS, CAN, etc. For compatibility with planning, verbs are described in a state change semantics ultimately expandible into primitive relations. However, the primary concern is with the content rather than the form of this knowledge. A graphics simulation package is being developed to exercise the agent in a simulated Seaworld involving an autonomous unmanned submarine. In this way, distracting and (for us) uninteresting perception and low level control problems are bypassed, allowing the project to focus on cognitive level problems. Biography: Dr. Vere is the developer of the DEVISER planning and scheduling system. Those of us who have done some work in AI planning should be familiar with his system since it was the first AI plannerto consider "time" in the course of planning. Vere developed DEVISER while at JPL. He has recently joined Lockheed AI center and would be talking to us about his plans for the construction of "An Autonomous Agent". Date: Thursday, August 27, 1987 Time: 3:00 to 4:30 PM Location: Bldg. 244, Room 103 Inquires: Hamid Berenji, (415) 694-6525, berenji@ames-pluto.arpa ***************************************************************************** ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1987 17:19 CST From: Leff (Southern Methodist University) Subject: Conference - 5th Int. Workshop on Database Machines (bm707) AI at Upcoming Conferences Fifth International Workshop on Database Machines October 6-8, 1987, Karuizawa, Japan ICM3: Design and Evaluation of an Inference Crunching Machine J. C. Syre, J. Noye et. al (ECRC, FRG) Knowledge Base Machine Based on Parallel Kernel Language H. Itoh, T. Takewaki, (ICOT, Japan) KEV-A - A Kermenl for Bubba W. K. Wilkinsont (Bell Communications Research), H. Boral (MCC) A Stream-Oriented Approach to Parallel Processing for Deductive Databases Y. Kiyoki, K. Kato, N. Yamaguchi, T. Masuda University of Tsukuba, Japan DDC: A Deductive Database Machine R. Gonzalez-Rubio, J. Rohmer, A. Bradier, B. Bergsten (Bull sa Centre dde Recherche, France) An Inference Model and a Tree-Structured Multicomputer System for Large Data-Intensive Logic Bases G. Z. Qadah (Northwestern University) Knowledge-Based System for Conceptual Schema Design on a Multi-Model Databse Machine E. Ozkarahan (Arizona State Univer., USA), A. Bayle (Honeywell Bull) An Algebraic Deductive Database Managing a Mass of Rule Clauses T. Ohmori, H. Tanaka, University of Tokyo Japan A Shared Memory ARchitecture for MAJI Production System Machine J. Miyazaki, H. Amano, K. Takeda, H. Aiso (Keio Univ., Japan) A Real Time Production System Architecture Using 3-D VLSI Technology S. Fujita, R. Aibara, T. Ae (Hiroshima Univ., Japan) Architectural Evaluation of a Semantic Network Machine T. Furuya, T. Niguchi, H. Kusumoto, K. Handa, A. Kokubu (ETL, Japan) A Superimposed Code Scheme for Deductive Databases M. Wada, H. Yamazaki, S. Yamashita, N. Miyazaki, Y. Morita, H. Iotoh (Oki and ICOT of Japan) An Architecture for Very Large Rule Bases Based on Surrogate Files D. Shin, P. B. Berra (Syracuse Univ., USA) A Simulation STudy of a Knowledge Base Machine Architecture H. Sakai, S. Shibayama Implementing Parallel Prolog System on Multiprocessor System PARK H. Matsuda (Kobe Univ., Japan), K. Kohata (Okayama Univ. of Science, Japan), T. Masuo, Y. Kaneda, S. Maekawa (Kobe University) Search Strategy for Prolog Data Bases G. B. Sabbatel, W. Dang (INPG, France) The Unification Processor by Pipeline Method M. Tanabe, H. Aiso (Keio Univ., Japan) ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 30-Aug-87 21:46:49-PDT,14268;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 30-Aug-87 21:33:12 Date: Sun 30 Aug 1987 21:31-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI.COM US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V5 #207 - Neural Networks To: AIList@SRI.COM AIList Digest Monday, 31 Aug 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 207 Today's Topics: Queries - OPS for the IBM-PC,XT,AT, AI Tools - Neural Network Simulator ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 28 Aug 87 10:31 From: Julian Lebensold Subject: OPS for the IBM-PC,XT,AT Has anyone had experiences (good, bad, indifferent) with versions of OPS for the IBM PC environment? We are looking to port a small application from the DEC VAX OPS5 to a micro, and we have little information on the comparative virtues of various implementations of OPS 5. Thanks in advance for your replies. Julian Lebensold Lebensold@capone.crim.cdn ------------------------------ Date: 29 Aug 87 01:04:34 GMT From: moritz@tub.UUCP Subject: OPS5 for PC - that's what I need!!! - (nf) Article-I.D.: tub.66300001 *** I'm posting this for a friend without direct access to this group ! *** OPS5 for PC ? I'm looking for a full-blown version of OPS5 for the IBM-PC. Working with the VAX-VMS version of OPS5, I'd like to experiment on my (not so terribly loaded) private PC. TOPSI - as far as I know - does not support the essential features which make OPS5 unique: RETE-match and therefor no recency conflict resolution, terrible effects of rule growth on the resources (time!). Without Rete-Match, a program developed will not be portable to serious environments which is what I want. Does anybody have an idea where to get (buy or public domain) ? If nobody knows I might try to make my own (with Turbo-prolog or Pascal). But it might take me a long time...... @(^!^)@. Thank you very much in advance, Thomas Muhr, Berlin, W-Germany UUCP: ...!pyramid!tub!netmbx!morus (Germany: ...!unido!tub!netmbx!morus) "unido!tub!moritz"@seismo.CSS.GOV PS.: I would also like contact with anybody interested in or working with OPS5 or interested in ai-applications like configuration problems etc. ------------------------------ Date: 24 Aug 87 21:59:18 GMT From: mtune!io!jr@RUTGERS.EDU (j.ratsaby) Subject: Re: Neural Networks first,is this the right newsgroup for Neural Nets or is there a more specific one for it ? second,is there anyone out there experimenting in stochastic neural nets i would like to contact you in private. thanks much joel [Try neuron-request%ti-csl.csnet@RELAY.CS.NET, being careful to use lowercase where indicated. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Aug 87 10:01 EDT From: Andre Marquis Subject: Responses to connectionist simulator/inference query Here is an edited summary of the replies I received for my query: In article <8708071233.AA29422@linc.cis.upenn.edu> you write: I would like to experiment with connectionist inference mechanisms. Is there a publically avaialble connectionist simulator? I have a Sun-3/160 with C and Common Lisp, among other things. I'm willing to port code from other machines. Also, if you have any good references on inference using connectionist networks, please send them. Shastri's PhD thesis is the only thorough treatment I've seen so far. SIMULATORS: >From: C Lynne D'Autrechy on Mon 10 Aug > 1987 at 9:49, 20 lines >Stat: Read/Answered/Network >To: bodick@cis.upenn.edu >Subj: Re: Query: Connectionist Simulator >A group of us here have developed a general-purpose simulator for developing >and evaluating connectionist models. The system is currently written in Franz >Lisp and runs on a MicroVAX (and should also run on a SUN supporting Franz >Lisp). >Lynne D'Autrechy >From: mcvax!unizh!fuchs@seismo.CSS.GOV on Tue 11 Aug 1987 at 12:44, 19 lines >Stat: Read/Network >To: Bodick@cis.upenn.edu >Subj: Re: Query: Connectionist Simulator >Zoltan Schreter, Genetic Artificial Intelligence and Epistemics Laboratory, >Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, >Switzerland, has what he calls "a poor man's connectionist system" running - >if I remember correctly - on an IBM PC. > --- nef >From: "John C. Akbari" on Thu 13 Aug 1987 at > 22:46, 65 lines >Stat: Read/Answered/Network >To: bodick@cis.upenn.edu >Subj: [Mail Delivery Subsystem : Returned mail: > Host unknown] > univ. rochester has a simulator for the sun & butterfly. you need to >fill out a license agreement. costs about $150 (as of a few montsh ago, >anyway). looks pretty neat from the description they sent. writen in c; uses >sun graphics pacakge. contact: john costanzo (costanzo@cs.rochester.edu). > univ. california (san diego) has a spiffy-looking simulator >for the symbolics running release 7.1. costs $500 (educational rate). i >believe the commericial rate is $2000 (!). for "quickie" overview, see >chapter 13 in PDP. written in flavors, i think, so probably not too portable. >contact > kathy farrelly > institute for cognitive science, c-015 > cognitive mechanisms group > ucsd > la jolla ca 92093 > 619.534.3359 > sorry, no email address >please be advised that i haven't worked with either of these simulators. > >ainet-1 & ainet-2: call andy chun at brandeis (617.671.3652 or >hon@brandeis.csnet) regarding these. about $150 for ainet & $300 for ainet-2. >andy says ainet-1 is primarily a graphics tool & ainet-2 is for development. >neither supports learning. also, THESE RUN UNDER RELEASE 6.1 ONLY. REFERENCES: My own: %A Jerome A. Feldman %A Dana H. Ballard %A Christopher M. Brown %A Gary S. Dell %T Rochester Connectionist Papers: 1979-1985 %R University of Rochester Department of Computer Science Technical Report 172 %D December, 1985 %A Lokendra Shastri %T Evidential Reasoning in Semantic Netowrks: A Formal Theory and its Parallel Implementation %R University of Rochester Department of Computer Science Technical Report 166 %D September, 1985 %A Lokendra Shastri %A Jerome A. Feldman %T Semantic Networks and Neural Nets %R University of Rochester Department of Computer Science Technical Report 131 %D June, 1984 %A David E. Rumelhart %A James L. McClelland %T Parallel distributed processing %V 1 & 2 %C Cambridge, Massachusetts %P The MIT Press %D 1987 %K Human information processing, cognition >From: George Berg on Mon 10 Aug 1987 at 23:24, 74 lines >Stat: Read/Answered/Network >To: bodick@cis.upenn.edu >Subj: Inference on Connectionist Networks > I saw your posting to the net this afternoon. I don't know if this >is exactly what you want but I saw two papers recently which roughly >fit the category of "inference in a connectionist framework". Both of >them are by Mark Derthick of the Department of Computer Science at >Carnegie-Mellon University. > "Counterfactual Reasoning with Direct Models," Proceedings of AAAI-87. > "A Connectionist Architecture for Representing and Reasoning about >Structured Knowledge," Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of >the Cognitive Science Society (1987). > > George Berg > EECS Dept. > Northwestern University > Evanston, IL 60208 > berggeo@alpha.eecs.nwu.edu > or > berggeo@nucsrl.UUCP > or > ...!ihnp4!nucsrl!berggeo >From: "John C. Akbari" on Thu 13 Aug 1987 at > 22:46, 65 lines >Stat: Read/Answered/Network >To: bodick@cis.upenn.edu >Subj: [Mail Delivery Subsystem : Returned mail: > Host unknown] >Two books not yet published: >mcClelland & rumelhart. explorations in pdp: a handbook >of models, programs & exercises. mit press. >supposed to have some c programs to accompany the pdp books. > >macgregor, r.j. neural & brain modelling. academic press, nov. 87. >supposed to have some fortran programs to simulate neuroelectrical activity. >From: sdcsvax!ics.UCSD.EDU!cottrell@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU on Fri 21 Aug > 1987 at 0:01, 33 lines >Stat: Read/Network >To: CIS.UPENN.EDU!Bodick@ucbvax >Subj: Re: Query: Connectionist Simulator >Try my IJCAI 85 paper for an alternative way of doing inheritance inferences. Andre Marquis Department of Pathology and Lab Medicine 2 Gibson Building Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania 3600 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19106 bodick@cis.upenn.edu ------------------------------ Date: 26 Aug 87 20:25:11 GMT From: hao!boulder!mikek@ames.arpa (Mike Kranzdorf) Subject: Neural Network Simulator I have seen inquiries around here about neural net simulators. I have written a program called Mactivation which simulates single and double layer networks which can be viewed as matrix-vector multipliers. If this doesn't make sense you can still probably use the program. It assumes minimal knowledge of things like activation values, state vectors, and connection matrices. Things like delta rule, normalization, etc. are included. Activation curves are (almost) completely under your control. A nine page manual is included in the form of a MacWrite 4.5 document. Version 2.0c was distributed at the ICNN conference in San Diego in June. Since then I have made many improvements but not completed it as a product. Since I have to get back to my research, I am releasing version 2.01 as is. The program runs on any Mactintosh, as far as I know. It is public domain, so you may be able to find it around. If you would like a copy, send either 1) a blank 3.5" disc and a 39 cent stamp or 2) a check for five dollars made out to me to the address below. I format single-sided to be safe. Foriegn orders are fine. I will probably upload it one of these days, or someone else can when they get one. Source code is not available now, but it might be someday. Happy trails. Mike Kranzdorf University of Colorado Center for Opto-electronic Computing Systems Campus Box 425 Boulder, Colorado 80309 (303) 492-8238 CSNET: mikek@boulder.colorado.edu ARPA: mikek%boulder.colorado.edu@relay.cs.net BITNET: mikek%boulder.colorado.edu@wiscvm.bitnet UUCP: {hao, nbires}!boulder!mikek Mactivation(tm) copyright 1987 Joint Optical Laboratory "Once in while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right" ------------------------------ Date: 25 Aug 87 01:56:52 GMT From: cbosgd!mandrill!hal!uccba!finegan@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Mike Finegan) Subject: Neural Network Simulator An Adaptive Template Matching Image Categorizer (An Experimental Computer Vision Program) [I can't forward the entire 72K file, particularly since I had to set an AIList policy against sending out code. Those who want the simulator can probably get it from the message author. -- KIL] Hi, Thanks for the response, this will be brief, but feel free to send mail about neural nets, or anything related. It may be that different machines require other header files ... I have since been told that the original source is on Compuserve in DDJFORUM -> C Chest DL. I have never used Compuserve ... - Mike ...hal!uccba!finegan I don't have a shell archiver, or anything like that, so just cut out file 1, and then file 2. The remembered pattern is identical to the training pattern format except for no first (hdr) line. It will become clear if you read the Dr. Dobbs article and this (or the original) program. Modified program is followed by the original. I typed the original in by hand - if there are uncorrected typo's, I apologize. I copied it and then modified it (there were some typo's originally). This file is ~69K, ~1/2 for each ... #define PGM_ID "SILOAM CI-C86 Ver. 0f 11/22/86 for PC-DOS 2.x+" /* * An Adaptive Template Matching Image Categorizer * (An Experimental Computer Vision Program) * * This program implements a trainable pattern classifier as * a committee network of threshold logic units. It learns to * recognize patterns by being trained from a set of prototype * patterns presented in a training file. The training file is * organized as a set of visual images represented as an orthogonal * array of picture elements, or pixels. Each pixel is a number * representing the gray-scale value of that point in the image. * Associated with each pattern is a number, or tag, that * represents the category to which that pattern belongs. * * R. J. Brown * Elijah Laboratories International * 5225 N.W. 27th Court * Margata, Fl. 33063 * (305) 979-1567 * * Ownership: I hereby place this program in the public domain. * * System: Red River ATlas 10 Mhz 80286 IBM-PC/AT clone * * Compiler: C86 Version 2.30H; Computer Innovations, Inc. * */ ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************