nto ARPANET: cscsi.toronto@csnet-relay ------------------------------ Date: Fri 3 Aug 84 10:29:50-PDT From: Ken Laws Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI Subject: Robotics The following challenge appears in the Forum column of the August issue of IEEE Spectrum: The Canine Computer Having seen the June issue, I would like to raise a question about the ability of roboticists to fuse technology with canine capabilities, let alone human ones. I hereby challenge the world's robot experts to duplicate electronically the performance of my little dog, who is able to catch morsels of raisin buns that I toss to him occasionally as he sits patiently and expectantly beside the table. His performance is spectacular. He is able to calculate the parabolic trajectory of the morsel, regardless of its height or direction, and catch it in his mouth, often in the split second before it has reached its apogee. He can do this at all levels---from a crouch to catch low- flying morsels, to a jump to catch high ones. His accuracy is astounding, showing that his internal computer can calculate a parabolic course and give complete and elaborate instructions to his nervous system, including the opening and closing of his mouth at the right microsecond. About 5 percent of the time the morsel hits the tip of his nose and bounces off in a random direction. This event is followed by a lightening retrieval from the floor where it lands. (On one occasion he was able to catch a morsel on a second try after it had bounced off his nose.) My dog weighs 37 pounds. Can anyone build a robot that can equal this dog's operation while on a smooth linoleum tile floor and in an illumination of about 15 footcandles? Can it be done without the 37-pound restriction? I offer no prize for this accomplishment. Perhaps some wealthy philanthropic roboticist would like to step forward. Until electronic technology can equal the computer in the brain of a little dog its very honor is at stake. William B. Elmer Thornton, N.H. The IEEE Spectrum editors then mention that John Billingsly is organizing a contest for Ping-Pong playing robots, to be held at the Computer Fair in London in 1985. Dr. Billingsly's address is: Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Portsmouth Polytechnic, Anglesea Road, Portsmouth, England. The International Personal Robot Congress and Exposition will hold the U.S. trials for a 1986 Ping-Pong contest during the March 1985 meeting: contact IPRC, 777 Locust St., Denver, Colorado 80220. This same issue contains a favorable book review of Ayres and Miller's Robotics: Applications and Social Implications. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Fri 3 Aug 84 11:06:23-PDT From: Ken Laws Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI Subject: Expert Systems, Fuzzy Logic, and Fuzzy Batteries I have recently run across the July 9 issue of Business Week, which featured Artificial Intelligence as its cover story (pp. 54-62). Much of the article discussed expert systems and the 40 or so companies now trying to market them. The August 1984 issue of IEEE Spectrum contains an excellent article by Lotfi Zadeh about fuzzy logic and its applications to process control, robot navigation, database access, expert systems, and other topics. He mentions that fuzzy mathematics now includes the theory of fuzzy topological spaces, fuzzy measures, fuzzy groups, fuzzy random variables, fuzzy arithmetic, fuzzy analysis, fuzzy stability theory, fuzzy systems, and fuzzy graphs. Dr. Zadeh presents a good case for fuzzy linguistics and fuzzy reasoning (as in MYCIN and PROSPECTOR) as essential elements of expert systems and learning systems. For more fuzzy talk, the issue reprints an 1884 Life magazine article about the cat battery. An excerpt: Cats, according to Tyndall, are either electro-positive or electro-negative. When in the neutral state (see Plate I) both fluids are combined, and the most sensitive galvanometer can detect no current. Thus insulated, neither A nor B exhibits either attraction or repulsion for surrounding objects, excepting for a hot stove or a piece of fish. But this affinity, according to the recent investigations of Siemens and Halske, is the result of chemical and not electrical attraction. Now, however, let us submit electro-positive cat A and electro-negative cat B to exciting influences (see Plate II). Instantly we observe the development of electrical energy -- A being strongly positive that he is the better cat, while B is as violently negative. This, as has been proved by the experiments of Prescott, Edison, and others, is due to induction; each cat trying to induce the other to believe that he isn't afraid. This electrical state of activity is accompanied by all the well-known electro-static phenomena. The hairs of each cat stand on end, and surrounding objects -- such as bootjacks, soap, cough-medicine bottles, and crockery -- may be attracted with great velocity from distances of 100 to 250 feet. Cats are absolute non-conductors. This fact was discovered in 1876 by Gerritt Smith, while vainly endeavoring to conduct a cat out of the coal cellar. It might be urged, therefore, that they had high internal resistance. This is not true. The external resistance (again glance at Plate II) is very high, but the internal resistance is never over one Ohm ("'ome" or "home," to give German, English, and American terms), while in many cases it is less, as is witnessed by the fact that there are 1,317,009 ohmless cats in this city alone. But while the internal resistance is surprisingly low, the intensity is so high that by inductive influence alone two cat elements can maintain a whole neighborhood in a state of electrical excitement for hours. [...] Speaking of fun with words, this issue of Spectrum also quotes a poll showing that "chemists, if not actually better than all other human beings, are, to say the least, a credit to their race and a damned fine group of upstanding and patriotic Americans, all of whom embody the finest attributes that can be attributed to those to whom those attributes can be attributed." [From Ralph Steinhardt Jr. and David Weinman, "The Courteous Retort," Chemtech, Vol. 14, No. 6, June 1984.] -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: 2 Aug 1984 10:17-PDT From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow Subject: $12,000 Software? San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, July 29, 1984 John Dvorak PERISCOPE $12,000 software? Would you pay $600 apiece for gold-plated lug nuts to be used on the beat-up rims of a '52 Ford pickup truck? What would you think of the marketing man who suggested such a products? I'd think he was crazy. There's a company down in Palo Alto that has a software package it would like someone to buy. (A little background music, please) The company is called Teknowledge Inc. and was started by Stanford professors. The company makes software for the IBM PC. You can buy an IBM PC for around $2,000. The software this company sells costs $12,000. It accomplishes one thing: It allows you to test an idea to see whether an expert system can be built around the idea. An expert system is a computer system that solves complex problems using so-called artificial intelligence. An example of an expert system is a program called Mycin. It was developed in the 1970s to diagnose meningitis and other infections. A user tells the computer certain requested facts and the computer then leads the user to something close to a diagnosis. Now most people would have made a package like this and had it run on an IBM mainframe computer or at least a VAX minicomputer. But to put a $12,000 piece of software on a personal computer is cavalier, to say the least. It's as if to say, "Yeah, we've got this package and we know what it's worth, and we're going to let the well-heeled government-financed research companies use it. Look, we can even make it run on a personal computer--look, but don't touch. This is the old pre-micro attitude toward software. It was proven to be myopic when companies like MicroPro, Ashton-Tate and MicroSoft started doing business in excess of $50 million a year by selling for $500 software that would have cost $12,000 if marketed by Teknowledge. MicroPro decided that everyone needed the power of a dedicated word processor, Ashton-Tate felt that more than just a few dozen researchers would like the power of a relational database, and MicroSoft felt that a computer language would be popular if available for $350 instead of $35,000. OK, so forget about the price. What can the Teknowledge package do? The system is called M.1 (pronounced M dot 1 by my friends). According to its own press release, you spend the $12,000 "for rapid prototyping of potential full-scale operational systems. In addition to establishing technical feasibility, these example systems serve as useful demonstrations." That means this investment just gets you started--started spending, that is. Luckily, the system can also create a stand-alone expert system with up to 200 knowledge base entries. I'm not impressed. The company goes on to exemplify this stand-alone value with a "Wine Adviser" expert system with 100 knowledge base entries. Here's the actual output from this "expert" system. This is called by the company "the deliberation process of a typical California wine expert." The computer asks the question and the user responds. Do you generally prefer red or white wines? Red. Do you generally prefer light, medium or full-bodies wines? Full. Is the main component of the meal meat, fish or poultry? Poultry Does the meal have turkey in it? No. Is the sauces for the meal spicy, sweet, cream or tomato? Tomato. Is the flavor of the meal delicate, average or strong? Average. The following wines will mostly be dry, medium-bodies, and red. They are recommended for your meal: Zinfandel (86%); Cabernet Sauvignon (86%); Burgundy (34%); Valpolicella (34%). At this point every wine connoisseur is turning over in his grave. So the user goes out and buys a Zinfandel from Amador County laced with residual sugar and 15 percent alcohol, drinks it with his chicken, gags and decides that this "expert" system is useless. The fact is that even the most mundane expert systems such as this are infinitely complex and impossible to develop with the limitations imposed by this $12,000 diskette. [To be fair, I doubt that Technowledge intended this expert system to be taken seriously as a "wine advisor" if they have given it no knowledge of individual wines. It is more likely a demonstration of the type of program and level of sophistication that could be handled with their system. If someone with inside knowledge wishes to defend the system, I will provide a reasonable amount of AIList "space" for the reply. Another point: It appears to me (from typos and other signs) that this message was typed in and not lifted from a newswire. I am willing to distribute such messages (on the sender's responsibility), but I have to be a little more conservative about passing along newswire copy. Certain universities get the newswires gratis as a stimulus to research in automated information retrieval. This service will be discontinued if it appears that our net is publishing the material in competition with other news providers. Warning suspensions have already occurred. I therefore ask readers to be selective about sending in text from newspaper items, preferably sending only summaries or extracts (with proper credit given). On the other hand, I greatly appreciate it when readers send in informative pieces like this one. Thanks, Geoff! -- KIL] ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** 4-Aug-84 21:26:22-PDT,14459;000000000000 Mail-From: LAWS created at 4-Aug-84 21:23:40 Date: Sat 4 Aug 1984 21:16-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V2 #101 To: AIList@SRI-AI AIList Digest Sunday, 5 Aug 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 101 Today's Topics: AI Tools - DOE MACSYMA, Intelligence - Turing Test, Games - Chess Delphi Game & Zebra Problem, Seminar - Learning Implementation Rules in Circuit Design ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 30 July 1984 16:36-EDT From: Harten.Paradigm at MIT-MULTICS.ARPA Subject: DOE MACSYMA AVAILABLE FOR NOMINAL FEE [Forwarded from the Arpanet-BBoards distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.] DOE MACSYMA AVAILABLE FOR NOMINAL FEE This message should receive the widest possible re-transmission. Paradigm Associates, Inc. is pleased to announce that the DOE MACSYMA program is available from NESC. DOE MACSYMA runs on the DEC VAX-series of computers under the VMS operating system, and corresponds quite closely with the 1982 version of MIT-MC MACSYMA (the translator/compiler interface work, but advanced plotting features need work.) Those not already a member of NESC should contact: National Energy Software Center Argonne National Laboratory 9700 South Cass Avenue Argonne, Illinois 60439 Attention: Jan Mockler for information about joining, and should inquire about accession number 9847. We are advised that there are two VAX-VMS BACKUP format tapes with 40 MB of code: source to DOE MACSYMA and NIL, object modules, executable images, control and auxiliary information. This work is supported by DOE Contract W-7405-ENG-48. Users wishing to contribute programs and codes to the New MACSYMA Users Consortium, for re-distribution through NESC, may send their material to Leo Harten, Paradigm Associates, Inc., 29 Putnam Avenue, Suite 6, Cambridge, MA 02139, or to Harten@Mit-Multics (Multics mail is no longer case-sensitive). [This is a volunteer effort for the improvement of the SHARE libraries in DOE MACSYMA.] ------------------------------ Date: 31 Jul 84 13:54:05-PDT (Tue) From: ihnp4!mhuxl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!philabs!linus!utzoo!dciem!mmt@Ucb-Vax.arpa Subject: Re: Should The Turing test be modified Article-I.D.: dciem.1012 The Turing test played over a teletype can give way to one played over a graphics terminal without laying any less bare the intelligence causing the display. But there is an interesting lead article in a recent issue of Science (July something) on impacts of computers, which has something possibly relevant to say. In the experience of IBM, the networking facilities have been used almost never by scientists to do joint work from one site to another, sometimes by engineers on major projects, and frequently by managers. Could it be that the subtle concepts required by scientists do not transmit well over current technology, but that the simpler ideas used repetitively by managers are satisfactorily handled? If there is some kind of a technology limitation on the power of thought conveniently communicated, then the Turing Game should be updated whenever new technology permits. The only thing that should be unfair is to demand a sight of the testee, or to demand that he/she/it move voluntarily or perform actions not expressible on a current technology computer terminal. -- Martin Taylor {allegra,linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!m