From: CSVPI 9-JAN-1985 22:04 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a002748; 9 Jan 85 2:54 EST Date: Tue 8 Jan 1985 22:56-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #1 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Wed, 9 Jan 85 22:00 EST AIList Digest Wednesday, 9 Jan 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 1 Today's Topics: Administrivia - Digest Numbering, Hardware - Xerox D-Machines & Text Scanners, AI Tools - Mac LISP & Symbolic Algebra Package, News - Recent Articles & SIGART Meeting & Weizmann Summer School, Programming Style - Malgorithm, Seminars - Better LISP Debugging Tools (SU) & Mapless Networks (Berkeley) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon 7 Jan 85 20:49:08-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: Extra! Extra! 1984 Had 371 Days! Andy Freeman has pointed out to me that the previous issue, V2 #184, should have been the first issue of Volume 3. To set things to rights, I hereby declare that January 5 was actually December 36, 1984. This issue is thus the first of 1985, V3 #1. Happy New Year! -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: 8 Jan 85 15:31:54 EST From: DIETZ@RUTGERS.ARPA Subject: Is Xerox Punting D-Machines? A recent Electronics News has an article suggesting Xerox will close their Information Products Division in Dallas. Isn't that where Dandelions are made? Is Xerox getting out of the lisp machine business? ------------------------------ Date: 5 Jan 85 20:50 PST From: Newman.pasa@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Mac LISP and Kurzweil Scanners In response to two separate postings : 1) There is a company in Santa Barbara called ExperTelligence Inc. who are purportedly developing a LISP (called EXPERLISP) for the MacIntosh. The brochure I have says it "is available at your local Apple Dealer beginning October, 1984". 'Nuff Said. 2) Yes, Kurzweil scanners (text reading machines) are being marketed by a Xerox afilliate. Not knowing who to contact about them, I suggest you speak to the local XEROX sales people in your area. >>Dave ------------------------------ Date: 7 Jan 85 10:48 PST From: trauberman.pasa@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Kurzweil Reader I worked on the Optical Character Recognition system at Kurzweil, so here's a brief description. It was originally developed as a machine to enable blind people to read books, in the late 60's by Kurzweil and other MIT people. It uses a high resolution CCD motorized scanner to scan the page, then multi-font recognition algorithms implemented in machine language on a Data General Nova, to decifer the text, and a speech system to read the text vocally. The recognition system is truly multi-font, using curve-searching and other very general algorithms, some of which had previously been applied to handwriting recognition problems. As a result, the machine is capable of reading with adequate accuracy, about half of all printed material. Kurzweil has developed an office product based on this technology for inputting printed text into a database. With some assistance from a secretary during the initial reading phase, this product is quite effective. David Trauberman ------------------------------ Date: Sun 6 Jan 85 20:07:26-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: Reading Machine The December issue of IEEE Computer Graphics carries a short description of a new document scanner from Electronic Information Technology, Inc. It can be used to enter diagrams, pictures, and text into IBM PC and XT systems, with other interfaces due soon. The blurb implies that it also has output capabilities, although I'm not sure what they are. It does have built-in optical character recognition for at least typewriter fonts. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 7 Jan 85 11:32:07 PST From: tektronix!tekcrl!tekchips!postmaster@uw-beaver.arpa Subject: Symbolic Algebra Packages >> I would like to obtain a symbolic algebra package which would run on >> a VAX/Franz Lisp configuration. Preferably, I like one in the public >> domain. The symbolic computation system REDUCE 3.0, originally written in Standard Lisp, has been ported to Franz Lisp to run on the VAX machine under 4.2BSD. Please contact me if you are interested in the system. uucp: {ucbvax,decvax,ihnp4,allegra,uw-beaver,hplabs} !tektronix!tekchips!abdali CSnet: abdali@tektronix ARPAnet: abdali.tektronix@csnet-relay US Mail: Kamal Abdali Computer Research Lab, 50-662 Tektronix, Inc. Box 500 Beaverton, OR 97077 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 7 Jan 85 10:13:44 cst From: Laurence Leff Subject: News - Recent Articles New Scientist Nov. 29, 1984 Volume 104 No. 1432 Japan woos a wary Britain describes efforts by the Japanese to acquire AI software from Britain and to "cooperate" in AI research. Cybernetica Vol 27 No 3 1984 THES/BID- the construction of a computer-based thesaurus for legal informatics and computer law pp 231 Datamation January 1, 1985 Bringing AI Home Page 34 Describes efforts by various corporations in JAPAN in AI (as distinct from the Fifth Generation Efforts) including a Prolog based VLSI system called WIREX at NEC, a FUJITSU PROLOG/LISP system for hardware design. Also discusses American reactions to the Japanese international conference on the fifth generation. On page 15, the following letter appeared: "Our product IF/Prolog has been available for VAX with Berkeley-UNIX since September 1983, also beating DEC's PROLOG implementation. During 1984 we have ported IF/Prolog to 14 different computers including IBM's PC, VAX/VMS and Eclipse/AOS. We are currently working on a Prolog compiler to be released during the first quarter of 1985." Claus M. Mueller President INterface Computer GmbH Munich, Germany Page 139,in "updates" section: DM DATA estimates the AI market will grow from $148 million this year to $28 billion in the 1990s. Also discusses the need for systems to assist in the knowledge transfer from experts to machines. From the Phoenix Conference on Computers and Communications March 20-22 1985 Advance Program: Tutorial I on Expert Systems by George Luger March 20 Expert System Panel, "Artificial Intelligence Meets the Real World", March 21 3:30 PM 10:30 AM "Hector: A Logic Based Parser, Semantic Interperter, and Planner" March 21 "Sensors, Vision and Robtics: A Perspective" "Vision Systems in Assembly of Semiconductor Devices" "A Kinematic Computer Simulation System for Robotic Manipulators" 1:30 PM "Prolog Interpreter for Industrial Use" "Accounting and Billing Software Related to Computer User Satisfaction: An Interactive Online Expert System Using Diagnostic Audit Trails Through Telecommunications Networks" "Surface: An Application of Small Scale Expert Systems Using the DQR Format" For more info contact PCCC-85 34 W. Monroe, Suite 900 Phoenix, AZ 85003 ------------------------------ Date: Sun 6 Jan 85 20:45:24-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: Recent IEEE Articles IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, December 1984. A Report on the Vail Workshop on Human Factors in Computer Systems, by Michael E. Atwood, p. 48: Participants discussed ways of integrating human factors knowledge with the initial design process for computer systems. Several of the conference subgroups proposed that expert systems technology and knowledge-based prototyping be applied to interface design issues. Symbolic Processing Computer Handles AI Applications, p. 75: A description of the IE Explorer LISP-machine, at $52,500 and up each. IEEE Spectrum, January 1985. Fuzzy Logic, a letter from David McGoveran, p. 8: This is a reply to Lotfi Zadeh's article on fuzzy logic. McGoveran points out that the mathematical foundations of this discipline may be "unsound". He cites his own articles on fuzzy logic, claiming that the approach is not a complete representation system and cannot consistently represent hierarchical systems (because it blurs distinctions of level and thus has no consistent metalanguage or model). He further states that fuzzy logic is commutative, distributive, and not order-preserving, and hence is incapable of consistently representing [noncommutative and/or nondistributive] systems that depend on an ordering. John D. Musa on Software, p. 37: A few comments are made about AI papers at the 7th Conf. on Software Engineering, particularly intelligent editors and tutoring aids. Software, by Paul Wallich, p. 50: Survey of the past year's developments in LISP, knowledge-based system development tools, and ADA. The various implementations of Common LISP seem to be riding high with the defense community, and seven or eight validated ADA compilers are now available. ------------------------------ Date: 8 Jan 1985 11:48-EST From: LEVITT@USC-ISI.ARPA Subject: SIGART MEETING THE SECOND MEETING OF THE BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON CHAPTER OF SIGART WILL BE HELD ON TUESDAY NIGHT, JAN.15 AT 730 AT THE KEY BRIDGE MARRIOT IN ROSSLYN VIRGINIA. IT IS BEING HOSTED BY GENE CARTIER OF SRA, (703)-558-5194. I AM TEMPORARILY ACTING CHAIRMAN UNTIL ELECTIONS: MR. LORE LEVITT, (301)-964-8693 OR VIA THE ARPANET LEVITT AT USC-ISI. LORE ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 8 Jan 85 12:29:26 -0200 From: udi%wisdom.BITNET@Berkeley (Ehud Shapiro) Subject: Summer School at the Weizmann Institute The Karyn Kupcinet International Science School The Weizmann Intitute of Science Rehovot, Israel The Weizmann Institute of Science's Annual Karyn Kupcinet International Science School is accepting a small number of science students (from second year) from overseas for the summer of 1985 to participate in research projects in mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, and biology. A modest stipend and dormitory-style accomodation near the campus are provided. No travel funds are available. Application forms may be obtained from the Academic Secratary, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel. Completed applications should be returned before February 15, 1985. p.s. Student application will be given to the relevant scientists for review. If you know Prolog, Concurrent Prolog, computer graphics, esp. Sun graphics, its window system and operating system, familiar with the Smalltalk or Lisp Machine programming environment, or simply want to come to Israel for a summer, and willing to work hard for that, I will be glad to have you here. Please CC me on your application form. As for equipment, we have here three VAX'es (two Unix and one VMS), two Sun worktations (expecting several more), one Symbolics 3670 (expecting one more), and several IBM and DEC PC's. And (how could I forget) an IBM 3081. Ehud Shapiro Department of Applied Mathematics The Weizmann Intitute of Science ------------------------------ Date: Tue 8 Jan 85 07:19:03-EST From: Sidney Markowitz Subject: Another malgorithm Here's another malgorithm that comes from SIGPLAN NOTICES, Nov., '84, in a letter citing its original publication in an earlier issue. The author is making a case for avoiding backward-directed GO TO's in FORTRAN, so as to make the program more "structured". To that end, he is advocating replacing the following implementation of a WHILE-DO construct: C While condition is true, execute body 10 IF(.NOT. Boolean Expression) GOTO 100 C Begin iterated body . . . C End iterated body GO TO 10 with the following "more structured" version: C CHOOSE N SUFFICIENTLY LARGE SO THE BOOLEAN EXPRESSION C IS TRUE BEFORE I = N. DO 10 I=1,N IF(Boolean Expression) GO TO 100 C Begin iterated body . . . C End Iterated Body 10 CONTINUE TYPE *,'OOPS!PUT ANOTHER DO LOOP AROUND THE CURRENT ONE' STOP 100 CONTINUE Notice what happens if you don't pick a sufficiently large N. The original version apparently didn't even have the error message in the TYPE statement. -- sidney markowitz ------------------------------ Date: 04 Jan 85 1132 PST From: Ted Selker Subject: Seminar - Better LISP Debugging Tools (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] U S E User System Ergonomics A human interface journal club and discussion group Wed January 9, 12:00 PM Margaret Jacks Hall, room 252 Stanford University Chris Perdue from Hp Labs will come lead a discussion on Henry Lieberman's Steps Towards Better Debugging Tools For Lisp paper. Pick up a copy of the paper at The reception desk at the Computer Science Department At Stanford. Contact Ted Selker ejs@su-ai.arpa for information on USE. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 6 Jan 85 13:49:36 -0200 From: scheff%wisdom.BITNET@Berkeley (scheff chaim) Subject: Seminar - Mapless Networks (Berkeley) The Weitzmann Institute of Science - Rehovot, Israel Seminar in Advanced Topics in Computer Science Chaim-Meyer Scheff will speak on "General Description of Search Protocol for a Mapless Network" The talk will take place on Sunday, January 13, 1985 in the Feinberg Building, Room A, at 2:00. Mapless Networks are asynchronous concurrent communication networks in which each node in the network contains a current list of its own internal user population but no node contains a user map of larger scope. Which is to say, each node must operate according to its subjective view in that there is no objective view to appeal to. This is a generalization of Terrestrial Networks and similarly contains spanning tree and leader-net schemes as special cases. Both load optimization and systems relyability at minimum cost are the natural result of implementation; which is provably upward compatible with existing architectures. Portability of the search protocol to computational and communications environments would suggest that mapless networks would provide a stable model for the large scale integration of both into grand scale global systems. // ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 11-JAN-1985 04:51 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a014946; 11 Jan 85 2:50 EST Date: Thu 10 Jan 1985 22:53-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #2 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 11 Jan 85 04:48 EST AIList Digest Friday, 11 Jan 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 2 Today's Topics: AI Tools - CommonLisp Documentation & Lisp in C or Pascal & Mac LISP & Xerox Machines, Seminars - AI, Employment and Income (CSLI) & On Comparatives and Superlatives (CSLI), Conferences - The Lexicon, Parsing, and Semantic Interpretation & IJCAI Student Positions & Expert Systems Hospitality Suites ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 10 Jan 85 09:21:37 EST From: cugini@NBS-VMS Subject: CommonLisp Documentation Does anyone have ordering information for the "official" CommonLisp specification (publisher, document number, cost, ...)? Thanks for any help. John Cugini ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Jan 85 15:45 PST From: "S. Sridhar" Subject: Lisp in C or Pascal I desperately need to port a Lisp interpreter to the HP 9000 (or HP 3000) running 4.2 BSD Unix. For this purpose, I need that the interpreter be written in C, or Pascal or any other machine-independent language. Would anyone be kind enough to lemme know where I can get hold of such an interpreter (or even a compiler) ? Thanks a lot. --- S. Sridhar (sridhar@wsu) Washington State University ------------------------------ Date: 9 Jan 85 07:59 PST From: Newman.pasa@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Mac LISP Pardon me, I would like to correct the error in the posting I made earlier. I quoted the ExperLogo brochure when I meant to quote the ExperLisp brochure. What the relevant part of my posting should have said was: 1) There is a company in Santa Barbara called ExperTelligence Inc. who are purportedly developing a LISP (called EXPERLISP) for the MacIntosh. The brochure I have says it "will be available for shipment in late 1984". 'Nuff Said. My apologies to ExperTelligence. >>Dave ------------------------------ Date: Wed 9 Jan 85 10:45:07-EST From: Wang Zeep Subject: Mac LISP ExperIntelligence is now predicting an April '84 delivery for their Macintosh Common Lisp subset. It should be lexically-scoped (unlike GC Lisp for the PC) and will include a 68000 native compiler. Development is being done on a Symbolics LISPM and there will be some sort of object/class system. They have also advertised a LOGO. As I have never seen an Oct. 84 date for the LISP, I have a feeling something got garbled in transmission. The above information is straight from their technical support staff. Jan '85 MacWorld has a quick bite on ExperLisp in their news section. If this is for real (all of my info comes from the company, not from a neutral source), I'll get a copy and post a review of it. They seemed nice enough.... wz ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 09 Jan 85 14:54:59 EST From: cowan@GE-CRD Subject: Re: Mac Lisp Machines There is a company in Santa Barbara called ExperTelligence Inc. who are purportedly developing a LISP (called EXPERLISP) for the MacIntosh. The brochure I have says it "is available at your local Apple Dealer beginning October, 1984". 'Nuff Said. I met one of the ExperLisp developers at AAAI; they are making effective use of a Symbolics (they wrote a mac cross-compiler) and their goals are quite ambitious. A SCHEME-like lisp interpreter was running in August; I guess now they are working on the compiler and class inheritance facilities. December's "release date" was March, but if they really are developing a truly easy to use object-oriented window system, it will take longer. When the gap between current date and "release date" narrows to within two weeks, that's when to get next month's orders ready. On a more optimistic note, it's pretty certain that sometime in 1986, an Apple 68020 product running a completed Experlisp will be available. If the lisp is efficient, benchmarks indicate [see Deering, p. 73 of AAAI-84] that the combination could be 1/4 the speed of a 1984 Symbolics. Rich ------------------------------ Date: 9 Jan 85 09:48:20 PST (Wednesday) From: Conde.osbunorth@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Re: Is Xerox Punting D-Machines? Never! The Dallas operation made typewriters or something, and they are moving to sunny Southern California. D-Machine will still be made. DSC ------------------------------ Date: 9 Jan 85 09:46:44 PST (Wednesday) From: GMeredith.es@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Xerox D-Machines Alive and Well The manufacture of the Xerox Dandelions has been moved to the building across the street from us here in El Segundo, CA. The production line is in full swing and putting out high quality units. Xerox has not given us any indication that the corporation will be getting out of the lisp field. In fact, a recent full page ad touting a 15 year headstart in AI experience indicates otherwise. Guy ------------------------------ Date: 10 Jan 85 15:39:01 EST From: DIETZ@RUTGERS.ARPA Subject: False Alarm on DLions Xerox isn't going to stop making D machines. They are apparently quite profitable. They are also continuing to make Stars, and will reportedly come out with a much cheaper Star soon. Dallas is being pared back, but apparently not closed. P. Dietz ------------------------------ Date: Wed 9 Jan 85 17:21:34-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - AI, Employment and Income (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH AI, Employment and Income In a recent article in the AI Magazine, Nils Nilsson explores the profound effects Artificial Intelligence is likely to have on employment and the distribution of income. He presents an economic and a psychological reason for his opinion that we should greet the work-eliminating consequences of AI with enthusiasm, since they will liberate people from unfulfilling work without necessarily harming them economically. The article has drawn a number of interesting responses, some of which have been published in a later issue of the AI Magazine. This issue also contains a reply by Nils Nilsson to the readers' letters. The variety of arguments, in the article and the letters, both for and against an optimistic view of the social impact of AI will serve as the basis for our TINLUNCH discussion. Nils Nilsson will be present. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 9 Jan 85 17:21:34-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - On Comparatives and Superlatives (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] ABSTRACT OF THIS WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM ``On Comparatives and Superlatives'' Consider a phrasal comparative like (1). (1) Little died earlier than Dolphy. (`Phrasal' comparatives, as opposed to `clausal' ones, are those which instead of a clause have a single phrase after ``than.'') There are (at least) two ways of approaching the semantic analysis of (1). One is to view ``than Dolphy'' as essentially an elliptical description for a certain degree, viz. the degree x such that Dolphy died x-early, and to construe the whole sentence as basically a comparison between that degree and another one, namely the degree y such that Little died y-early. The other approach is to read (1) as primarily a comparison between two people, Little and Dolphy, who are being compared with respect to a certain `dimension'. The dimension is earliness-of-death and may be formally represented as a function from people to degrees which maps every person x onto the degree y such that x died y-early. This talk adopts the second approach and explores its empirical and theoretical implications. While the scopes of the comparison operators themselves seem to obey constraints that have emerged from studies of quantifier scope, this is not the case for the putative scopes of certain other phrases. To accommodate this finding, I will draw on recent work by Rooth and suggest a refinement of the analysis which recognizes a distinction between scope-assignment proper and something like association-to-focus. ---Irene Heim ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Jan 85 12:10:32 est From: bellcore!walker@Berkeley (Don Walker) Subject: Conference on The Lexicon, Parsing, and Semantic Interpretation THE LEXICON, PARSING, AND SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION CUNY Graduate Center, Auditorium 33 West 42nd Street New York, NY 10036 THURSDAY, JANUARY 17, 1985 8:30 Registration with coffee 8:50 Welcoming Steven Cahn, Provost, CUNY Graduate School John Moyne, CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College 9:00 Linguistic Lexicography Terence Langendoen, CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College 10:00 How to Misread a Dictionary George Miller, Princeton University 11:00 Knowledge Management Support for Language Processing Charles Kellogg, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. 12:00 Lunch 1:30 Customizing the TQA Lexicon for Semantic Disambiguation Fredrick Damerau and David Johnson, IBM Yorktown Research 2:30 Parse Trees as Lexical Projections Joan Bachenko and Eileen Fitzpatrick, Bell Laboratories 3:30 Requirements on the Lexicon for Parsing and Generation Robert Ingria, Bolt Beranek and Newman 4:30 Discussion 6:00 Dinner at Peng Tengs, 219 East 44th Street FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 1985 8:45 Coffee 9:00 The Nuts and Bolts of Lexical Access Martin Kay, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center 10:00 Text Files as Sources for Creating an Augmented Dictionary Robert Amsler and Donald Walker, Bell Communications Research 11:00 The Lexical Base for Semantic Interpretation in a PROLOG Parser Roy Byrd and Michael McCord, IBM Yorktown Research 12:00 Lunch 1:30 Lexicons for Conceptual Analyzers Michael Lebowitz, Columbia University 2:30 The LSP Lexicon for Free Text Information Formatting Susanne Wolff, Joyce London and Naomi Sager, New York University 3:30 Using a Lexicon of Canonical Graphs in Parsing John Sowa, IBM Systems Research Institute 4:30 Closing Advance registration is not necessary, and no fees will be charged for the workshop. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Terence Langendoen, (212) 790-4574 John Sowa, (212) 309-1493, sowa.yktvmt.ibm@csnet-relay Don Walker, (201) 829-4312, bellcore!walker@berkeley Cosponsored by the City University of New York, IBM Systems Research Institute, and Bell Communications Research. ------------------------------ Date: 4 Jan 1985 12:34:16-EST From: Linda.Quarrie@CMU-RI-ISL1 Subject: IJCAI Student Volunteer Positions Available The Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence will be held from August 18 to 24, 1985, at the University of California at Los Angeles. The I.J.C.A.I. Local Arrangements Committee is looking for student volunteers for the August 1985 conference. Volunteers work approximately 8 hours during the conference. Tasks include manning information desks, checking badges at sessions, and distributing conference materials. In exchange volunteers receive a staff T-shirt, free registration at the conference, proceedings, and free admission to any tutorials at which the volunteer works. Additional benefits include a party and great opportunity for meeting people from all over the world. Graduate students are encouraged to volunteer, and undergraduates are welcome. Names will be taken for the next few months, with final assignments made in July. Tentative volunteers are welcome. Volunteers will be taken on a first come/first served basis, so reply now! Reply to: Linda Quarrie arpanet address: lindaq@cmu-ri-isl1.arpa snail mail: Linda Quarrie The Robotics Institute Carnegie-Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 phone: (412)578-8815 (412)521-1968 ------------------------------ Date: 9 Jan 1985 8:55:30 EST (Wednesday) From: Charles Howell Subject: Hospitality Suites for Expert Systems Conference I am helping with local arrangements for the Expert Systems in Government Symposium, which is being held October 23 .. 25 1985 in McLean VA. The conference will consist of a two day symposium preceded by an optional tutorial day. The conference objective is to allow the developers and implementors of expert systems in government agencies to exchange information and ideas for the purpose of improving the quality of existing and future expert systems in the government sector. The conference is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and the MITRE Corporation in cooperation with AIAA/NCS. We are expecting a wide variety of people to attend the conference. I am specifically interested in hardware and software vendors who would like to display their products during the conference. The conference will be held in the Tyson's Westpark Hotel. The hotel has a number of suites available for vendor "hospitality suites". If you are interested, please contact me. I'll put you in touch with the appropriate person at the Tyson's Westpark, and I'll also keep track of the amount of interest from vendors. If there is a lot, we may explore a block reservation of some suites for the period of the conference. Chuck Howell (703) 883-6080 U.S.P.S.: The MITRE Corp., Howell at MITRE 1820 Dolley Madison Blvd., McLean, VA 22102 Mail Code W459 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 14-JAN-1985 22:32 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a002134; 14 Jan 85 13:02 EST Date: Sun 13 Jan 1985 16:26-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #3 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Mon, 14 Jan 85 22:25 EST AIList Digest Monday, 14 Jan 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 3 Today's Topics: AI Tools - Scheme for 3600s & VILM & ExperLOGO for the Mac, LISP - Common LISP Documentation, Business - Xerox and the AI Business, Report - Mathematical Properties of Linguistic Theories, AI Literature - Pearl's HEURISTICS Errata & Online Technical Reports, Psychology - Infantile Amnesia, Seminar - Garbage Collection in a Large Lisp System (MIT) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 01/10/85 12:20:46 From: PETERS@MIT-MC Subject: Scheme for 3600's? [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Not too long ago in these pages someone advertised Scheme for the 3600's. I've forgotten who, can anyone provide the senders address? ------------------------------ Date: 11 Jan 1985 11:22:58-EST From: kushnier@NADC Subject: VILM Todd- I just saw the new HP Pisces/200 computer. It looks like another candidate for a low cost portable LISP Machine. Here are the specs: Pisces/200 is a full function personal computer which integrates a printer, full-size display, keyboard, and disc mass storage in a single transportable package. It is positioned as the transportable offering in the HP9000 product family and represents the low-end product in the HP-UX strategy. Target markets include engineers and technical professionals, and instrument control. HARDWARE FEATURES * 8 Mhz Motorola 68000 * 256KB ROM (OS, Device Drivers, User Interface) * 512K built-in RAM * 8M address space * 710KB 3-1/2" double-sided disk * 255 x 512 Electroluminescent Display (up to 85 characters x 32 lines) * 16 bit Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Custom CMOS IC * 32KB dedicated display memory * Inkjet 80 column printer * Detachable, low profile ITF keyboard with merged numeric keypad. * Mainframe supports ITF Caravan devices via two connectors in front. * PReal Time Clock * Speaker * HP-IB * Briefcase size-upright configuration * Two I/O slots, each capable of supporting I/O, Memory, or an I/O expander * Weight 25 lbs SOFTWARE * ROM-based operating system HP-UX/RO * Multi-Tasking, single user * Visual user interface, Multiple windows, menus & softkeys, supports 2 button mouse * Foreign language localized COST * about 5K I'm pushing the HP Rep to look into the AI market as a possible LISP machine Ron Kushnier kushnier@nadc.arpa ------------------------------ Date: Fri 11 Jan 85 11:32:16-EST From: Wang Zeep Subject: ExperLOGO for the Mac I just received a brochure on ExperLogo. It included a press release that said the Logo was to be released Dec. 17, 1984. I called MacConnection and they told me it was released, but that they had not yet completed negotiations on price, etc. with ExperIntelligence. The salesperson quoted from the manual a few times, etc., indicating that it is a real product. ELogo includes arrays, 3d graphics, compilation, etc. It requires a Mac with an external drive, and uses LOAD-WHEN-NEEDED to run within the 128K memory space. I'm going to wait for their LISP, but anyone with Macs and children may want to look into this. Ken ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 11 Jan 85 11:47:55 EST From: Robert Willis Subject: re: CommonLisp Documentation I assume you mean "CommonLisp" by Guy L. Steele, Jr. The book is published by Digital Press [ 30 North Avenue, Burlington, MA 01803]. Order number EY-00031-DP. You may either order from Digital Press/Order Processing Digital Equipment Corporation 12A Esquire Road Billerica, MA 01862 Title: Stelle, COMMMON LISP Order No.: EY-00031-DP Price (US only): $22.00 (add state sales tax to this amount) Method of Payment allowed: check (payable to D.E.C.), purchase order, Master Card or Visa. OR You may call on the phone (toll free) 1-800-343-8321 (In Massachusetts, 1-800-462-8006) from 8 AM to 4 PM Eastern Time. Have Master Card or Visa number ready. Bob Willis Bolt Beranek and Newman Laboratories, Inc. ------------------------------ Date: Friday, 11 Jan 1985 13:10:51-PST From: puder%bach.DEC@decwrl.ARPA (Karl Puder) Subject: Common LISP: The Language From the frontispiece: Copyright (c) 1984 by Digital Equipment Corporation. ... Order number EY-00031-DP ... Steele, Guy. Common LISP: The Language Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. LISP (Computer program language) I. Title. II. Title: Common LISP: The Language. QA76.73.L23S73 1984 001.64'24 84-7681 ISBN 0-932376-41-X Published by Digital Press 30 North Avenue Burlington, MA 01803 I believe that the suggested retail price is $22.00 postal: Karl Puder, HL02-3/E09, DEC AITG, 77 Reed Road, Hudson, MA, 01749-2809 phone: (1)(617)568-4979 | ARPA: puder%logic.DEC@DECWRL.ARPA DTN: 225-4979 | EasyNET: LOGIC::PUDER UUCP: ...!{ucbvax,decvax,ihnp4}!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-logic!puder CSNET?: puder%logic.DEC@decwrl.CSNET ------------------------------ Date: 12 Jan 85 19:42 PST From: Masinter.pa@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Xerox and the AI business For those who want further evidence that Xerox is in the business, I offer the fact that the Xerox Artificial Intelligence Systems business unit is dramatically increasing the size of their development, support, and marketing staffs. The development group, based in Palo Alto, has projects in systems, communication, programming environment and language development, text processing and graphics, applications, documentation, as well as several different hardware integration projects. Of course, I wouldn't want to use the Arpanet for overt recruiting.... Larry Masinter (415) 494-4365 ------------------------------ Date: Wed 9 Jan 85 17:21:34-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Report - Mathematical Properties of Linguistic Theories [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] NEW CSLI REPORT A new CSLI Report by C. Raymond Perrault, ``On the Mathematical Properties of Linguistic Theories'' (Report No. CSLI--84-18), To obtain a copy of this report write to Dikran Karagueuzian, CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford 94305 or send net mail to Dikran at SU-CSLI. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Jan 85 17:47:40 PST From: Judea Pearl Subject: errata sheet for Pearl's HEURISTICS I have prepared an errata sheet for my book HEURISTICS (Addison-Wesley, 1984). If you wish to obtain a copy please send me a message and indicate if you prefer a hard copy or an electronic message. Judea Pearl ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 11 Jan 85 20:30:20 est From: krovetz@nlm-mcs (Bob Krovetz) Subject: online technical reports The following is a list of people who can be contacted at various sites on the net for ordering technical reports. I've tried to determine who is the site contact, whether they have an on line bibliography, if they have a mailing list for notification of new TR's, and if the TR's themselves are available on line. If anyone knows of this information for any sites I haven't mentioned, please send me a message and I will post a followup to the net. Note that the mailing lists mentioned are U.S. mail, not electronic! Online bibliographies at the various sites may be FTP'd by logging in with id: ANONYMOUS and password GUEST (this only applies if you are on the ARPANET) Yale: Donna Mauri (MAURI@YALE) is the contact person for AI or cognitive science reports. There is no online list of those reports, but she can send a hard copy list. For non-AI/cognitive science reports the contact person is Kim Washington (WASHINGTON@YALE). CMU: No online list, however they do have a mailing list for notification of recent TR's. TR's can be ordered over the net. The contact person is Sylvia Hoy (HOY@CMU-CS-A). MIT: There is an online list, but the publications office is undergoing a restructuring, so it isn't available at the moment. A contact for ordering the TR's will be established at some future time. SRI: No online line of just the report names, but there is a list of the reports plus abstracts. Tonita Walker (TWalker@SRI-AI) is the contact person. Many of the reports are available for FTPing. UTEXAS: A list of current reports is in {UTEXAS}TRLIST. A master list of reports still in print is under MASTER.TR. Many of the current reports themselves are also available in the above directory, but they contain text formatting commands. The directory contains a file READ.ME which tells which text formatter was used for which reports (SCRIBE vs. NROFF). Reports may be ordered by sending mail to CS.TECH@UTEXAS-20. BBN: No reports or list online (no list even in hard copy). Contact author directly about getting a copy of the TR. PARC: Maia Pindar (PINDAR@XEROX) is the contact person. An online copy of the bibliography is not available at the moment, but Ms. Pindar may be contacted to obtain a hardcopy. Rutgers: Contact Christine Loungo (LOUNGO@RUTGERS) or Carol Petty (PETTY@RUTGERS) to obtain reports. They maintain a mailing list to distribute notices of the TR's and the abstracts. The abstracts of recent reports are online and under: {RUTGERS}tecrpts-online.doc. ISI: Lisa Trentham is the contact (LTRENTHAM@ISIB). There is a list of the available reports under {ISIB}ISI-PUBLICATIONS.DOC Stanford: Stanford reports are issued by four sources: the HPP (Heuristic Programming Project), the AI lab, the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), and the Computer Science Department. HPP reports are available without charge by contacting Paula Edmisten (EDMISTEN@SUMEX). Please be reasonable with your requests; no more than 15 at a time! There is no online bibliography available, but a hard copy may be requested. There is an online bibliograpy of AI lab reports in AIMLST in [BIB,DOC]@SU-AI. Some of the reports are available online and are so indicated in the bibliography. Reports from CSLI may be requested from Dikran Karagueuzian (DIKRAN@SU-CSLI). A bibliography of the reports is stored under {SU-CSLI}CATALOG.REPORTS. CSLI will also be issuing lecture notes, and a bibliography of these will be under {SU-CSLI}CATALOG.LECTURE-NOTES. The reports are available without charge, but there is a charge for the lecture notes. There is also a charge for reports published by either the AI lab or the Computer Science Department, but information as to cost and/or availablity may be sent to Kathy Berg (BERG@SU-SCORE) A bibliography of CSD reports from 1963 to 1984 is available for $5.00. The department maintains a mailing list for notification of new TR's. You can be added to it by contacting Kathy Berg. Updates are sent out about five or six times per year. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Jan 85 18:24:11 est From: Dana S. Nau Subject: Re: PBS Series on the Brain From: Ken Laws Subject: Re: PBS Series on the Brain Well, I'm not really familiar with the field -- and introspection is risky. Chris Heiny also questioned infantile amnesia, but Minsky wrote in support of the concept (V2 #173). I do find it strange that I have so few memories of the early years (well into grade school, in my case), whereas I certainly stored a great many long-term memories at the time. [...] I was catching up on old AILIST mail, and I responded to your month-old note before seeing all the responses it had already generated. However, having gotten started on it: I have various memories of events going back to when I was no older than one or two. I really don't know "how many" such memories I have--different memories come to mind at different times and in different contexts. The reason I know that they were before I was 5 was not (as someone on the net was theorizing) because of any special quality to them, but rather because of WHERE they occurred: in houses and towns that we lived in when I was that young. For me, the farther back I go the fewer readily accessible memories I have--but the only kind of "quantum jump" I see in how hard it is to remember things is that I don't think I remember anything that occurred before I was about 1-1/2. Now, that COULD be related (as someone on the net was theorizing) to lack of language skills before that time, but I doubt it. Memories for me are more often visual/aural/olfactory/conceptual than verbal. I suspect it was more likely related to lack of general conceptual skills. Do you suppose that for some reason you might be suppressing some of those early memories? ------------------------------ Date: 01/13/85 03:10:12 From: KMP Subject: Seminar - Garbage Collection in a Large Lisp System (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] On Monday (Jan 14), the AI Lab's IAP seminar series on Advanced Topics in Lisp will host an invited talk by David Moon about ``Garbage Collection in a Large Lisp System.'' The abstract for this talk (from a paper which appeared in this summer's ACM Lisp & Functional Programming Conference) follows: This paper discusses the garbage collection techniques used in a high-performance Lisp implementation with a large virtual memory, the Symbolics 3600. Particular attention is paid to practical issues and experience. In a large system, problems of scale appear and the most straightforward garbage collection techniques do not work well. Many of these problems involve the interaction of the garbage collector with demand-paged virtual memory. Some of the solutions adopted on the 3600 are presented, including incremental copying garbage collection, approximately depth-first copying, ephemeral objects, tagged architecture, and hardware assists. We discuss techniques for improving the efficiency of garbage collection by recognizing that objects in the Lisp world have a variety of lifetimes. The importance of designing the architecture and the hardware to facilitate garbage collection is stressed. The talk will be at 2pm in the 8th floor playroom. All are welcome. No previous attendance at these seminars is required. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 17-JAN-1985 04:53 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a014125; 17 Jan 85 2:27 EST Date: Wed 16 Jan 1985 22:33-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #4 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Thu, 17 Jan 85 04:43 EST AIList Digest Thursday, 17 Jan 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 4 Today's Topics: Application - TeX Indexing Program, Education - Micro LISP & AI Course, Business - Xerox Rumor, News - Recent Articles, Opinion - Overblown Expectations for AI, Psychology - Infantile Amnesia, Conferences - Space Station Automation & Probability in AI ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 9 January 1985 09:49-EST From: Jon C. Haass Subject: TeX indexing program [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] I am very interested in finding a program which will produce an index of specified keywords in a (or several) TeX files. In order to know the page numbers the input would be either a press (or dvi) file, the output would preferably be the list of words with all pages on which they occur. The environment of choice is UNIX 4.2 . If you have information leading to the acquisition of such, I would be glad to offer at least a free lunch! If you have a proof that one does not exist that would also be of interest. Thanks.. ------------------------------ Date: 15 Jan 1985 20:52-EST From: cross Subject: micro LISP for short course? I am setting up a short course in AI concepts and programming techniques. The course will be five weeks long. I want the course to be laboratory intensive and representative of development and laboratory environments using LISP machines. Because of monetary constraints I can only afford IBM XT's. It seems Golden Hill COMMON LISP is a good piece of software to build the course around - fairly compatable with Zeta-LISP (I even hear that someone has an interface that enables programs to be transferred from an IBM machine to a 3600). Any comments anyone has about this programming environment or suggstions for a better one given the constraints would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Steve Cross ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 14 Jan 85 17:09:05 cst From: neves@wisc-rsch.arpa (David Neves) Subject: AI course suggestions? I'm teaching an undergraduate AI course this semester and would like to get/share some ideas with others in a similar situation. Part of the course is Lisp programming projects. Last semester I had 3 projects. The first was the 8-puzzle (A*). I am thinking of replacing it with a simple game (and alpha-beta search). Anyone have any good ideas or experiences with a 2-person game that is easy to represent and which doesn't have many rules? The second program was a SIR-type program teaching about semantic nets. I'm not all that happy with it and am thinking about a program on frames. Ideas here? The last program was an ATN and I'm happy with that. I am looking for an idea for one more program though. For the course I used Rich (for the AI part) and Wilensky (for the Lisp part). Rich is very comprehensive although some parts are confusing to students. It is also used in the graduate course here. The other alternative is Winston's AI book (the 2nd edition). Have others had good experiences with it? It seems easier to understand than Rich but doesn't cover nearly as much material. Another book I like is Raphael's book (The thinking computer). It is somewhat dated but might be appropriate for a lower level (or non computer science) course. I'm trying Winston&Horn (for Lisp) this semester because they seem to have more examples and a somewhat better style (LET's and DO's). -Thanks, David Neves ...!{allegra,heurikon,ihnp4,seismo,uwm-evax}!uwvax!neves neves@uwvax ------------------------------ Date: 14 Jan 85 18:01 PST From: Sheil.pa@XEROX.ARPA Reply-to: Sheil.pa@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Re: Xerox Rumor Xerox moved most of its workstation manufacturing from Dallas, Texas to El Segundo, California quite some time ago, so the changes at Dallas will have no impact on 1108 (Dandelion) production. And, no, we're not getting out of the Lisp machine business! Beau Sheil Xerox Artificial Intelligence Systems ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 10 Jan 85 07:09:43 cst From: Laurence Leff Subject: Recent Articles Computer Design: Volume 23, Number 13 November 84 Single-User Symbolic Processor Cuts AI Systems Cost by J. Bond Datamation January 15, 1985 page 69 from their "Worldwide" section. "TOKYO - Hot on the heels of the phantom fifth comes word of Japanese efforts to go after Josephson Junction Lisp machines, and biological chips that would fuel the sixth generation. Following the familiar form without substance format are recommendations in a confidential report [of] Japan's Science & Technology Agency that plant seeds for biocomputer research." ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 31 Dec 1984 10:18-EST From: munck@Mitre-Bedford Subject: Overblown Expectations for AI [Forwarded from Human-Nets Digest by Laws@SRI-AI.] Les Earnest's report that sanity still exists in the "real" AI community, despite the fantastic pronouncements surrounding it, was long overdue. However, I must quibble with his use of past tense in describing the attempts at AI "Command and Control" systems by the Air Force and others. They've changed focus slightly, but they're still around. Specifically, it's a widely-held belief in the DoD that our problems with building large software systems will be solved - more accurately, circumvented - within a decade by AI. They believe that AI systems will be able to listen to an hour or so of verbal description of, say, an air-defense system and then produce overnight the million-odd lines of code to implement it. Normally, I'd classify this belief as relatively harmless, like those in the Tooth Fairy, the Star Wars initiative, and Santa Claus, but it has a chilling effect on work on practical, people-writing-code methodologies. I have no doubt that there is a great deal of the programming task that can be taken over by computers using AI techniques, but the state of the art is that many people are not convinced that compilers can be used to free humans from doing register allocation. Fusion research uses the criterion of "break-even," the point at which a reactor produces more power than is needed to run it, as a goal. I suggest that a similar measure could be applied to AI systems and the field as a whole. What AI systems have saved more human effort than was needed to produce them? -- Bob Munck ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Jan 85 12:52:32 EST From: Morton A Hirschberg Subject: Re: PBS Series on the Brain I am glad that Dana has brought up the series on the brain. When I was studying psychology with an emphasis on personality, some 15 years ago, the very subject of infantile amnesia arose. We, the professors and students in the seminar, felt that it was a true phenomena. Indeed we also felt it was very unusual for people to have no memories until well into grade school. It does seem that there is the likelihood of either/or suppression or repression at work in these cases. Often the early memories are of a traumatic nature and are of a single incident rather than recurring events. Although basically a Freudian, I am not convinced that a single incident is responsible for latter behavior. I am more of the mind that several events or the entire gestalt or ambiance of the environment are responsible. Serious traumatic events lead to the phenomena of multiple personalities. Here we see that various personalities have no recollection for long periods of time, although I am not suggesting that everyone who has no childhood memories is a multiple. I also recall that some myelination occurs about the time that language skills develop so there seems to be a correlation between lack of language skills and early memory. If you had early conceptual memories more power to you. I would agree with visual/olfactory which seems to make us reminisce, have feelings of deja vu, and when we get older feel maudlin. Remember there are great individual differences so that a wide range can be expected. Don't feel that you are bonkers if you have no early childhood memories (unless supported by other evidence.) Is there no personologist who can shed some further light here? Side issues such as multiple personalities are so fascinating. Mort ------------------------------ Date: 14 Jan 85 1236 PST From: William K. Erickson Subject: Conference Announcement / Call for Papers Call For Papers ****************************************************************** SPACE STATION AUTOMATION to be held in conjunction with the International Conference on INTELLIGENT ROBOTS AND COMPUTER VISION II ****************************************************************** Part of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers' (SPIE) 1985 Cambridge Symposium on Optical and Electro-Optical Engineering 15-20 September 1985 Hyatt Regency Cambridge Cambridge, Massachusetts Chairman: Wun C. Chiou, Sr., NASA/Ames Research Center In the next decade an increasing amount of research will be devoted to the applications of artificial intelligence and robotics technology to space station automation. The purpose of the conference is to bring together researchers in the areas of artificial intelligence, image science and robotics who are working on various aspects of space station automation. Papers on the following and related topics as applied to this unique microgravity, high vacuum, high radiation environment are invited. Topics of interest include: * Space automation and tele-science * Image understanding and scene analysis * Machine/computer vision * Autonomous/self-organizing systems * Hardware architecture designs * Knowledge-based expert systems If you are interested in participating in this conference, please leave your name and address at the SPIE Registration Desk, or contact: Cambridge 1985 SPIE P.O. Box 10 Bellingham WA. telephone: (206)676-3290 Abstract Due Date: April 15, 1985 Manuscript Due Date: August 19, 1985 ------------------------------ Date: Tue 15 Jan 85 14:13:55-PST From: P. Cheeseman Subject: Workshop - Probability in AI CALL FOR PARTICIPATION "Workshop on Uncertainty and Probability in Artificial Intelligence" Sponsored by: AAAI and IEEE University of California, Los Angeles, California August 14 through August 16, 1985 The workshop will explore the use of probabilities for decision making in AI systems. In particular, topics such as the induction of "theories" from uncertain data, coupling to decision theory, the accuracy of probability values, and computerized "subjective" probability estimation will be examined. Participants are encouraged to submit papers or join the discussions on the following topics: * Probabilistic Induction and Machine Learning * Higher Order Probabilities (or accuracy of probabilities) * Probabilities and "Subjective" Estimates (people and machines) * Techniques for Probability Evaluation * Foundations of Probability Theory for AI This workshop has been designed to provide an atmosphere which will foster not only the exchange of information, but also extensive discussion and participation by all involved. Paper Submission Details Authors should submit two copies of an extended abstract to the program chairman by April 6 for consideration by the review committee. Each copy should include a title, the names and addresses of all authors, as well as a primary topic from the above list. One of the authors should be identified as the principal contact. Acceptance will be based on originality as well as significance of research (Notification by April 27). Complete papers should be sent to the general chairman by June 1 for distribution at the workshop. Program Committee: Lotfi Zadeh Judea Pearl Laveen Kanal Peter Cheeseman John Lemmer Program Chairman: General Chairman: Arrangements Chairman: John Lemmer Peter Cheeseman Rob Suritis PAR Technology Corp. SRI International Par Technology Corp. 220 Seneca Turnpike 333 Ravenswood Ave. 220 Seneca Turnpike New Hartford, NY 13413 Menlo Park, CA 94025 New Hartford, NY 13413 (315) 738-0600 x322 (415) 859-6469 (315) 738-0600 x233 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: COMSAT 22-JAN-1985 17:29 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a013619; 20 Jan 85 3:34 EST Date: Sat 19 Jan 1985 23:35-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #5 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 22 Jan 85 17:24 EST AIList Digest Sunday, 20 Jan 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 5 Today's Topics: AI Tools - LOOPS & LISP for PC & Golden Common Lisp, Reports - Functions in LISP & UTexas Reports & Recent Articles, Opinion - Reminiscence ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 17 Jan 85 16:01 EST From: Araman@HIS-BILLERICA-MULTICS.ARPA Subject: PORTING OF LOOPS I would like to know whether LOOPs has been ported on to the Symbolics 3600. I would also like to know whether it has been converted to ZETALISP or has been ported using the INTERLISP COMPATABILITY PACKAGE. Pointers, names & phone nos. would do. thanks in advance -sankar (617 671 3018) ------------------------------ Date: Thu 17 Jan 85 00:33:35-PST From: Sam Hahn Subject: Lisp for PC If you're using PC's and looking for a Lisp, I'd suggest TLC-Lisp, from The Lisp Company. I myself have not used GCLisp, but have been quite impressed with TLC-Lisp, which has a compiler, an object-class system, packages, auto-load entities, and costs less than half what GCLisp costs. TLC is John Allen's (The Anatomy of Lisp) company, located in Redwood Estates, CA. I have no connection with TLC except as a customer. -- sam hahn ------------------------------ Date: 18 Jan 85 0228 EST From: Dave.Touretzky@CMU-CS-A.ARPA Subject: review of Golden Common Lisp This is a review of Golden Common Lisp; I was one of its beta test users. I first got involved with GCLisp when I contracted to develop an intensive week-long tutorial on Common Lisp to be marketed nationally by Carnegie Group, Inc. The tutorial is designed to be held in a classroom full of Compaq Plus computers (PC/XT clones) with 640K of memory and 10.5 MB hard disk drives, running Golden Common Lisp. I'm used to working on a Symbolics 3600, yet find I am quite comfortable moving to the PC using this software. GCLisp is a very respectable subset of the Common Lisp dialect. It includes DEFMACRO, generalized variables (with SETF, etc.), one-dimensional arrays, named structures, closures, stack groups, multiple values, lambda lists with &optional/&rest/&aux keywords, a window package, FORMAT, the sharp sign and backquote macro characters, i/o streams, and pathname objects. The online documentation facilities are excellent. Example: you can start to type in a Lisp expression at top level, like (+ foo (nth and, if you forget the order of arguments to the NTH function, you can hit meta-L and the system will look at the expression you are typing, find the documentation for the NTH function, and display its argument list. The GMACS editor (a descendant of Emacs) is reasonably powerful and contains its own online help facilities. Some of the other programming tools provided are TRACE, STEP, DOC, APROPOS, DESCRIBE, and a pretty printer. Now, here are the negative aspects of GCLisp. First, it is not a full Common Lisp implementation. Missing features include: ratios, bignums, complex numbers, many FORMAT and # options, some of the sequence functions, most of the optional keyword arguments to sequence functions, hash tables, character objects, user-defined packages, and keyword arguments in user-defined functions. Of course, if Gold Hill had crammed a complete implementation onto the PC there would be no room left for user code or data structures. I think they did a good job of deciding which parts of the language to omit. Another shortcoming of GCLisp is that it is dynamically scoped (like MacLisp) rather than lexically scoped (like true Common Lisp). This choice was made for efficiency reasons; it is hard to do efficient lexical scoping in an interpreter. Case in point: at AAAI-84 I saw a PC running GCLisp outperform a Vax running interpreted Vax Common Lisp; both were executing a recursive Fibonacci function, but the Vax was using lexical scoping. Also, to be fair, it was an early version of Vax Common Lisp which wasn't yet tweaked for speed, and the Vax was using 32 bit arithmetic while the PC used 16 bits. But on the other hand, the PC wasn't just slightly faster than the Vax; it was a good deal faster. The folks who created T use a kind of pre-compilation hack to interpret lexically scoped code efficiently. As far as I know, no Common Lisp implementation uses this trick. There is a GCLisp compiler in the works. The first release is due in 30-60 days, although that might be just a beta test version. A random comment one of the Gold Hill people made to me suggests that when the compiler is ready they might decide to switch to lexical scoping. A third criticism of GCLisp is that you can't buy just the Lisp; it is bundled together with a piece of tutorial software known as the San Marco Lisp Explorer, plus copies of two books (Steele's Common Lisp manual and the 2nd edition of Winston and Horn.) If you already know Lisp, and you already have copies of these two books, you have to buy the extra stuff anyway. I don't know exactly how much the bundling adds to the $495 price of GCLisp ($395 for academic institutions), but I hope Gold Hill will reconsider this decision. For large institutions, a site license is available that permits unlimited copies. We are presently arranging to get one for CMU; we plan to move two Lisp courses (one for novices and one for experienced programmers), and the Lisp segment of a third course, onto PC's using GCLisp. This will provide better computing resources and a higher quality environment than what is available running MacLisp on our well-loaded academic DEC-20's. GCLisp needs at least 512K to run, and you really ought to have 640K (the max addressable on a PC) in order to use the system to its fullest without running out of memory too quickly. You don't have to have a hard disk, although it helps. On the new PC/AT, GCLisp can address up to 1 megabyte of memory. (You can put up to 3 meg on an AT, but Gold Hill uses some of the bits in each 32 bit address for type codes and other stuff, so only 20 bits are available for addressing.) Gold Hill's address is: Gold Hill Computers, Inc., 163 Harvard Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139. Telephone (617) 492-2071. In summary: this is a superb product. It puts state-of-the-art Lisp programming technology into the hands of anyone who can afford a PC. -- Dave Touretzky ------------------------------ Date: Wed 16 Jan 85 17:31:31-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Report - Implementation of Functions in LISP [Forwarded from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] NEW CSLI REPORT A new CSLI Report by Michael P. Georgeff and Stephen F. Bodnar, ``A Simple and Efficient Implementation of Higher-order Functions in LISP'' (Report No. CSLI--85--19), has just been published. To obtain a copy of this report write to Dikran Karagueuzian, CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford 94305 or send net mail to Dikran at SU-CSLI. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 18 Jan 85 06:28:48 cst From: Laurence Leff Subject: Recent UTexas Reports Technical Reports U. T. Austin TR-84-29 Translating Horn Clauses from English Yeong-Ho Yu TR-84-30 Automated Proof of a Trace Transformation for a Bitonic Sort Chua-Huang Huang and Christian Lengauer TR-84-33 From Menus to Intentions in Man-Machine Dialogue Robert F. Simmons TR-84-35 Modelling Concepts for VLSI CAD Objects D. S. Batory and Won Kim ------------------------------ Date: Thu 17 Jan 85 17:30:40-PST From: Ken Laws Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Recent Articles Communications of the ACM, January 1985. IJCAI Award for Research Excellence Announced, p. 123: $1000 plus expenses to be awarded every second year to honor sustained excellence in AI research. AFIPS Publishes Volume on Artificial Intelligence, p. 123: Describes "Artificial Intelligence", volume VI in the AFIPS Information Technology series, a collection of NCC and joint USA/Japan Computer Conference papers edited by Oscar Firschein [then at Lockheed, now at SRI]. AFIPS Press Department, 1899 Preston White Drive, Reston, VA 222091, $23 (plus $3.50 if not prepaid). [The collection includes three 60's papers on solving geometic analogy problems, decomposing line drawings in 3-D polyhedra, and representation in GPS; five on knowledge engineering and expert systems; two on planning and problem solving; two on AI languages; six on applications; and six on image understanding.] IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, January 1985: Consensus Bibliography Technique Aids Access to Literature, p. 94: Ware Myers describes a series of annotated bibliographies being compiled by John L. Burch's Ergosyst Associates. (No address is given, but they have a division called the Report Store, 910 Massachusetts St., Lawrence, KS 66044, that sells copies of the cited documents.) The company identifies top people in a field and uses the sources they cite as the core of their bibliography. Each citation they include is accompanied by a capsule review of about 1 or 2 pages, and the volume as a whole has a short introduction to the field (about 17 pages). They have produced two so far, including "Artificial Intelligence: Bibliographic Summaries of the Select Literature" by Henry M. Rylko, 210 entries of about 2.4 pages each. ------------------------------ Date: Wednesday, 16 Jan 85 22:03:25 EST From: shrager (jeff shrager) @ cmu-psy-a Subject: [Comment: rather long and pointless reminiscence. -- KIL] Forwarded from the CMU opinion bboard. Date: Wed 16 Jan 18:10 From: Purvis.Jackson@CMU-CS-CAD Subject: trees (3416) Perhaps what makes me most insecure about artificial intelligence is the feeling of my general lack of natural intelligence that becomes most pronounced when I'm in the company of those well versed in the ideas and language of AI. It seems as though I can be made to feel somewhat small, rather insignificant, when gauging my own intellect by that of certain AI folks I have known. For example, I was at one time a fairly close friend of a certain postdoc who exhibited an uncanny ability to explain endless phenomena without recourse to the well-worn phrase, "I don't know," which seems to characterize an exceedingly large percentage of my responses to questions having to do with the howness of my reasoning. Whether sitting at my elbow in the Squirrel Hill Cafe slugging down beer and Schnapps or fixtured in a corner at parties, he could usually be seen pressing close to his captive audience, eyebrows contorting with emphasis as he clarified point after point in a ceaseless stream of what sounded to me and others, or so I assumed by their wide-eyed expressions of amazement, to be the voice of an Olympian mind looking down through the clouds into the abyss of lackluster intellect where we squirmed and lived our trifling days. He had a temperament that could freeze a simple-minded fool such as me with no more than a gesture that seemed to imply "How drab" when I offered a tidbit of speech that deviated from the course of his conversation. I do not mean to imply that he was an unfriendly person, for he wasn't; quite the opposite really. He once invited me to his apartment for dinner and to discuss an issue about metaphor that troubled us mutually. I arrived at about 6:30 in the evening, and he immediately began to explain all that he knew about metaphor, dissecting point after point, with something akin to anger gently boiling below the surface of his voice, escaping once like the spray from a geyser, which he quickly brought under control again. The apartment itself was intensely stark, devoid of all but the elemental furnishings that seemed to meet his functional requirements. Somehow, midnight turned into the bottom of a bottle of Jamisons, and dinner never came to pass. We spent the last half hour sitting silently, staring at one another as though there was an ethereal presence between us that we neither understood nor worried about. We were vastly different yet so much the same, and the connections were at once the discrepancies: I came from humble soil, he from a veritable garden; I worked at existence, he at the fruit of knowledge; I had been the stoic, he the epicurian. As theme met phorous the final time, I passed 50 dollars to him, and he left me with memories. Perhaps what makes me most insecure about artificial intelligence is my general lack of natural intelligence, especially when I'm warm in winter and away from the hawk with food on my table unlike what it was when I began and grew. And perhaps it's most so this tendency in me to not capture the fleeting obvious until it's too late to say it to who it is that needs to hear it said. I sit inside walls of wires that bring in voices and pictures that move and keep the time accounted for on the walls, but that leaves me less than intelligent, when gauging myself against my memories and wondering how they work and how long they will. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 22-JAN-1985 17:29 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a013925; 20 Jan 85 4:55 EST Date: Sat 19 Jan 1985 23:49-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #6 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 22 Jan 85 17:26 EST AIList Digest Sunday, 20 Jan 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 6 Today's Topics: Algorithms - Malgorithms, Dead Rats, and Cell Death, Business - Expert Systems Funding, Humor - Blender Speeds & Oxymorons & Software Development ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 17 Jan 85 16:04:49 cst From: archebio!gmck@Uiuc.ARPA Subject: malgorithms and dead rats (and C.elegans) The notion of a pessimal algorithm is apparently not all that new; I came across this paragraph in a report by Vaughn Pratt in the 1979 Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science Proceedings (Springer LNCS #74). ``While short inferences padded with irrelevancies may seem uninteresting objects to count, they nevertheless are the bane of automatic theorem provers. A nice, albeit extreme, example of how irrelevancies ("dead rats," as they are sometimes called) can slow things down is provided by the problem of testing existence of feasible solutions in linear programming, i.e. testing rational satisfiability of conjunctions of linear inequations. A "minimally infeasible" system (one in which the removal of any inequality would lead to existence of a solution, corresponding to the negation of a theorem containing no dead rats) can be tested for infeasibility by treating the inequations as equations and solving by Gaussian elimination to demonstrate infeasiblity in polynomial time. A non-minimal system cannot be treated in this way because the spurious inequations interfere with the elimination process; indeed, no polynomial-time decision method is known for the non-minimal case. The simplex method can be viewed as eliminating irrelevant inequations as it moves from vertex to vertex.'' A rather far-out implication of this view is that the existence of global techniques for solving linear programming problems (Kachiyan's and Karmarkar's algorithms) suggests an explanation for the phenomenon of "jumping to conclusions" found in human reasoning might operate along the same lines. I could go on and babble about right hemispheres and geometrical reasoning and massively parallel processing, but I don't think it would be productive. Also, there's an elaborate (and sometimes hilarious) discussion of "pessimal algorithms" in the latest SIGACT news. The authors should be credited, but I've forgotten their names and don't have my copy handy. George McKee Dept. of Genetics and Development Univ. of Illinois, Urbana p.s. I should also comment on the remarks made about the cell death during the development of the nematode _Caenorhabditis_elegans_. It might not be a good idea (then again it might) to think that this is just an artifact of the "tinkering" mode of evolution. Work with parallel grammars ("L-systems") has shown that systems with deletion (cell death) are Turing-equivalent, while systems without are only equivalent to finite automata, or somesuch less powerful serial system. In other words, once a lineage has discovered programmed cell death, it has a vastly larger space of possible morphologies that it can evolve through. And of course the fittest ones are the ones that survive to be studied. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 17 Jan 85 20:57:01 PST From: Richard K. Jennings Subject: Expert Systems Funding We have heard from Bob Munck on his views on how the DoD plans to apply expert systems to Command and Control. As a DoD (Air Force) planner my perspective is different, and reversed. It is the captive contractors who get these harebrained schemes to extort money from the government, and people like myself have to track them down and discredit them. Although not speaking for my employer, the basic approach that I have seen (and personally agree with) is to use expert systems to help operators and decision-makers manage the vast amounts of information available. Expert systems, various methods of data fusion, and computer generated animation are all seen as part of an attack on the man-machine interface problem that plagues us all. Replacing brains with silicon is dumb for many reasons, while offloading tasks that can be better accomplished by computers under the supervison of an expert is critical to free the expert from drudgery and boredom. Another plus for expert systems is that they offer a technology which may permit experts to exploit the benefits of automation with less effort outside of their field of interest. Rich. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 16 Jan 85 07:44:22-PST From: Russ Altman Subject: Labelling the Speeds on a Blender. [Forwarded from the Stanford BBoard by Laws@SRI-AI] I'm usually easy going about things like this. But this afternoon, I actually sat down and read the ordering of speed labels on my Hamilton Beach Blender. I think it would be challenging to create a knowledge base and reasoning system that would come up with the following order. In case your not familiar with blenders, they usually can "blend" at different rpm, and the companies usually feel obliged to give us "mnemonics" for remembering which level to use: SLOW END: 1. whip 8. grind 2. stir 9. mix 3. puree 10. grate 4. beat 11. pulverize 5. aerate 12. churn 6. crumb 13. blend 7. chop 14. liquefy FAST END I find this dissatisfying. I would much rather have an algorithm run in O(puree) than O(churn). ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 18 Jan 85 15:55:12 est From: William Spears Subject: Oxymorons ... Our favorite example is: "government workers" Bill Spears (and others) NSWC/Dahlgren ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 17 Jan 85 11:39 CDT From: quintanar Subject: Software Development RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN SOFTWARE IN TEXAS (first in a series) by Dr. Joe Bob VonNeumann Software Engineer, Texas Software and Military University Mass Destruction Lab translated into English by Harry Bloomberg, University of Texas at Dallas This is the first in a series of papers describing recent advances in the science of software development at Texas S&M. These articles will be written with the non-software type in mind, so that others may attempt to understand software with the proper amounts of awe and reverance. This month's paper will cover two topics: 1) a new sorting algorithm and 2) an application of Ohm's Law to computing. THE MONKEY SORT The following pseudo-code describes a new sorting algorithm that was discovered by a project at the Generally Dynamic Corporation that has since been classified Top Secret so that the designers' names could not be associated with their work. Procedure monkey_sort(n,keys) / n is the number of items to be sorted/ / keys is an array that contains the data to be sorted/ BEGIN / create all possible permutations of keys/ do i = 1 to n! by n / it's below my dignity to write so trivial a procedure as permute, so some day I'll pay some kid just out of school to write it / / create a unique permutation of the data in key and save it in array memory./ call permute(key,memory,n) end do / search for the permutation that happens to be in the right order / do i = 1 to n! by n j = 1 while ((memory(j+i-1) < memory(j+i)) and j <> n) do j = j + 1 end while if j = n then / we found the right permutation! / print (memory(i+k-1),k=1 to n) exit end if end do END monkey_sort The above sort's creators have affectionately named it the "Monkey Sort" after the old tale that if enough monkeys were given word processing equipment they would eventually write either "War and Peace" or 500 lines of error-free Fortran code. However, industrial software managers should be warned that this is not a very effective software development methodology, as case studies of many DoD sponsored projects have shown. Monkey sort does fill two critical needs. First, utilization of processors and memory on future VHISIC-based systems will improve by several orders of magnitude. The extreme step of investing time and money in efficient High Order Language compilers would therefore be justified. Second, the systems engineer will now have a baseline against which to compare other algorithms. This is so close to the way the RF community measures antenna gains that we may refer to Monkey Sort as an Isotropic Process. Algorithms may be compared in decibels, which project managers are more likely to understand than bounding software by a polynomial. For example, a new CS graduate, rather than reporting "One algorithm is O(2n) and the other is only O(n)," can now tell his boss than one is 3 dB faster than another relative to Isotropic. AN OHM'S LAW FOR COMPUTING With the withdrawal of Texas Instruments, Timex, and Mattel from the home computer market, we can now announce the vital role that these corporations played in the discovery of the basic particle of computation. Just as the atom can be split into electrons, neutrons and protrons, it has been discovered that software can be divided into automatrons. Further, it has been shown that these particles obey the famous Ohm's Law (V = I * R) with only slight modifcations: - "I" now represents automatron flow through the computer system. - "V" represents the Electrocomputive Force (ECF). This may be thought of as the demand for computing. Research indicates that ECF is a O(2**n) function where n represents the number of times project managers ask "Are all the bugs out of the software yet?" - "R" is the computational resistance and is directly proportional to the number of Ph.Ds assigned to a project. The automatron was discovered recently with the aid of the Fermi National Lab's 1024 Gbaud bit smasher. Thousands of surplus TI 99/4As, Timex 1000s and Aquarious systems were hurled into lead walls at speeds approaching the speed of light. Whatever was not consumed by the energy of the collision was collected into bit buckets and carefully measured and examined. The key to the data analysis effort was application of a basis of modern computer science: bits are like energy, in that they may be neither created nor destroyed. The Fermi Lab scientists found many parity and checksum errors on their instrumentation tapes and came to the conclusion that the missing bits could be explained only through the existance of previously unknown discrete packets of computational power -- automatrons. Research in the field of computational physics is increasing at an alarming rate. Scientists at MIT have found that the automatron can be further divided into even smaller particles called nu-trons. The recently announced NU-machine and NU-bus extensively use materials that act as nu-tron super-conductors. Unfortunately, further nu-tron applications have been stymied by a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Nairobi University (NU). This suit claims that a machine has been built from parts of two-horned four- legged animals that roam the plains of Africa. This machine is called the Gnu-machine. NEXT: Dr. VonNeumann explores advances Texas S&M has made in the field of Confusibility Theory. Biographical data: Dr. Joe Bob VonNeumann earned his BSEE from Faber College, his MSCS at Darwin College, and his PhD at the elite Swiss Naval Academy (best known as the organization that lost a competition with the Swiss Army to produce a multi-role pocket knife). Before joining Texas S&M, Joe Bob developed high probability-of-kill mechanical systems for use against rodent threats for DeConn Labs. Dr. VonNeumann relaxes by fishing in the Trinity River (he recently traded in his bass boat for a gefilte boat) and by chasing after single women in bars (favorite opening line: "Do you do assembly language?"). Dr. VonNeumann is currently on a Leave of Absence to document the mating habits of software people so that he may discover why there are so few of them. Dr. VonNeumann would like to hear any feedback on this paper. He is especially interested in directed automatron-beam weapon applications for use in the "Star Wars" program. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: COMSAT 22-JAN-1985 17:47 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a020879; 21 Jan 85 15:11 EST Date: Mon 21 Jan 1985 10:09-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #7 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 22 Jan 85 17:37 EST AIList Digest Monday, 21 Jan 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 7 Today's Topics: Psychology - Infantile Amnesia, Humor - Linguistic Humor, Seminars - An Internal Semantics for Modal Logic (CSLI) & Constraint Languages (SU) & Nonlinear Planning (BBN) & Automated Reasoning (CMU) & Mathematical Variable Types (CSLI), Conferences - Functional Programming and Computer Architecture & Symbolic and Numerical Computing in Expert Systems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 21 Jan 1985 0830-PST From: MORAN%hplabs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Infantile Amnesia I asked a knowledgeable friend (Linda Acredolo, associate editor for infancy of Child Development - a major journal) to recommend a list of good review articles for people reading AILIST but clearly have a lack of knowledge in the field. She forwarded the following list, and I have made one addition: White, S.H. & Pillemer, D.B. Childhood amnesia and the development of a socially accessible memory system. In J.F. Kihlstrom and F.J. Evans (Eds.), Functional Disorders of Memory. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1979. [This article is particularly good for those interested in merging Freudian and Cognitive perspectives on the issue.] Spear, N.E., Experimental analysis of infantile amnesia. [see above reference] [This articel considers methodlogical problems in the scientific investigation of the problem.] Nadel, L. & Zola-Morgan, S., Infantile amnesia a neurobiological perspective. In M. Moscovitch (Ed.) Infant Memory. NY: Pleneum, 1984. Schacter, D. & Moscovitch, M. Infants, amnesia, and dissociable memory systems. [see above reference] All these articles contain good reference sections for persons interested in further reading on the infantile amnesia topic. Michael A. Moran HP Corporate Human Factors ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 20 Jan 85 13:26:27 est From: 20568%vax1@cc.delaware (FRAWLEY) Subject: Linguistic Humor Here are some contributions to the AI (and related) humor. A favorite oxymoron: Exciting half-time show And some excerpts from the recent Delaware alternative linguistics course offerings: 1. LING 805 Recursion This course is the same as LING 805. 2. LING 843 Cataphora See below. 3. LING 844 Anaphora See above. 4. LING 870 Pigeons and Creoles Principles of tomato-based creoles; Julia Child's theories; how to make creoles out of pigeons. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 16 Jan 85 17:31:31-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - An Internal Semantics for Modal Logic (CSLI) [Forwarded from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] Thursday, January 24, 1985 2:15 p.m. Redwood Hall, Room G-19 ``An Internal Semantics for Modal Logic'' Moshe Vardi In Kripke semantics for modal logic both notions of possible worlds and the possibility relation are primitive notions. This has both technical and conceptual shortcomings. From a technical point of view, the mathematics associated with Kripke semantics is often quite complicated. From a conceptual point of view, it is not clear how to model propositional attitudes by Kripke structures. We introduce modal structures as models for modal logic. We use the idea of possible worlds, but in Leibniz's style rather than Kripke's style. It turns out that modal structures model individual nodes in Kripke structures, while Kripke structures model collections of modal structures. Nevertheless, it is much easier to study the standard logical questions using modal structures. Furthermore, modal structure offer a much more intuitive approach to modelling propositional attitudes. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 18 Jan 85 20:53:56-PST From: John McDonald Subject: Seminar - Constraint Languages (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford BBoard by Laws@SRI-AI.] LCS Seminar "Constraint Languages" John Alan McDonald Department of Statistics Stanford University Time: 4:15 Thursday January 24 Place: Sequoia Hall 114 Cookies: at 4:00 in the Lounge Abstract: The choice of programming language(s) is a fundamental decision in the design of an environment for data analysis. The goal is to provide appropriate abstractions. Constraints are an abstraction which is useful for many problems that arise in data analysis. A constraint specifies a relation whose truth should be maintained in subsequent computation. For example, in a typical constraint language, one might assert the relation: 2 e == m * c The "constraint engine" would be responsible for computing e, given m and c, or c, given e and m. I will discuss the basic concepts of constraint languages, review several existing languages, describe applications to statistics, and explore possibilities for the future. ------------------------------ Date: 15 Jan 1985 09:10-EST From: Brad Goodman Subject: Seminar - Nonlinear Planning (BBN) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] BBN Laboratories Science Development Program Speaker: David Chapman, MIT AI Lab Title: "Nonlinear planning: a rigorous reconstruction." Date: Thursday, January 24th Time: 10:30am Place: 3rd floor large conference room BBN Laboratories Inc. 10 Moulton Street Cambridge, MA. 02238 Abstract: The problem of achieving several goals simultaneously has been central to domain-independent planning research; the nonlinear constraint-posting approach has been most successful. Previous planners of this type have been complicated, heuristic, and ill-defined. I will present a simple, precise algorithm for nonlinear constraint-posting planning which I have proved correct and complete. The rigor of this algorithm makes clear the range of applicability of classical planning techniques. The crucial limitation on the state of the art is the traditional add/delete-list representation for actions; I will suggest a way to transcend this limitation. ------------------------------ Date: 15 Jan 1985 1406-EST From: Lydia Defilippo Subject: Seminar - Automated Reasoning (CMU) [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Title: Automated Reasoning: Introduction and Applications Speaker: Larry Wos Mathematics and Computer Science Division Argonne National Laboratory Date: Wednesday, January 23, 1985 Time: 2:00 - 3:15 Place: 2105 Doherty Hall What is automated reasoning? Which hard problems have been solved with an automated reasoning program? How can a single general-purpose program (such as AURA or ITP) be effective enough to answer previously open questions from mathematics and from formal logic, design superior logic circuits, and validate existing designs? You are enthusiastically invited to come and hear answers to these three questions--and more. This talk requires no background. I shall discuss other existing applications that range from solving puzzles to proving properties of computer programs, and tell you about a portable reasoning program (ITP) that is available for such applications. I shall tell you how such a program reasons, what strategies it uses to direct and restrict the reasoning, and which procedures contribute to solving diverse and difficult problems with the assistance of such a program. If you wish a preview, the book "Automated Reasoning: Introduction and Applications" by Wos, Overbeek, Lusk, and Boyle is a good source. The book, published by Prentice-Hall, contains numerous examples and exercises. Finally, if you are simply curious about an exciting and challenging area of computer science, I shall attempt to satisfy that curiosity by focusing on one type of computer program--a program that functions as an automated reasoning assistant. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 16 Jan 85 17:31:31-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Mathematical Variable Types (CSLI) [Forwarded from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] ``Theories of Variable Types for Mathematical Practice, with Computational Interpretations'' Speaker: Solomon Feferman, Depts. of Mathematics and Philosophy Time: 1:30-3:30 Date: Wednesday, January 23 Place: Ventura Seminar room A new class of formal systems is set up with the following characteristics: 1) Significant portions of current mathematical practice (such as in algebra and analysis) can be formalized naturally within them. 2) The systems have standard set-theoretical interpretations. 3) They also have direct computational interpretations, in which all functions are partial recursive. 4) The proof-theoretical strengths of these systems are surprisingly weak (e.g. one is of strength Peano arithmetic). Roughly speaking, these are axiomatic theories of partial functions and classes. The latter serve as types for elements and functions, but they may be variable (or ``abstract'') as well as constant. In addition, an element may fall under many types (``polymorphism''). Nevertheless, a form of typed lambda calculus can be set up to define functions. The result 3) gets around some of the problems that have been met with the interpretation of the polymorphic lambda calculus in recent literature on abstract data types. Its proof requires a new generalization of the First Recursion Theorem, which may have independent interest. The result 4) is of philosophical interest, since it undermines arguments for impredicative principles on the grounds of necessity for mathematics (and, in turn, for physics). There are simple extensions of these theories, not meeting condition 2), in which there is a type of all types, so that operations on types appear simply as special kinds of functions. ------------------------------ Date: 11 Jan 1985 0313-PST From: JOUANNAUD at SRI-CSL.ARPA Subject: Conference - Functional Programming and Computer Architecture CALL FOR PAPERS (REMINDER) FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES AND COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE A Conference Sponsored by The International Federation for Information Processing Technical Committees 2 and 10 Nancy, France 16 to 19 September, 1985 This conference has been planned as a successor to the highly successful conference on the same topics held at Wentworth, New Hampshire, in October 1981. Papers are solicited on any aspect of functional or logic programming and on computer architectures to support the efficient execution of such programs. Nancy, in the eastern part of France, was the city of the Dukes of Lorraine; it is known for its ``Place Stanistlas'' and its ``Palais Ducal''. ``Art Nouveau'' started there at the beginning of this century. There are beautiful buildings and museums and, of course, good restaurants. Authors should submit five copies of a 3000 to 6000-word paper (counting a full page figure as 300 words), and ten additional copies of a 300-word abstract of the paper to the Chairman of the Program Committee by 6 February 1985. The paper should be typed double spaced, and the names and affiliations of the authors should be included on both the paper and the abstract. Papers will be reviewed by the Program Committee with the assistance of outside referees; authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by 30 April 1985. Camera-ready copy of accepted papers will be required by 22 June 1985 for publication in the Conference Proceedings. Program Committee: Makoto Amamiya (NTT, Japan) David Aspinall (UMIST, UK) Manfred Broy (Passau University, W Germany) Jack Dennis (MIT, USA) Jean-Pierre Jouannaud (CRIN, France) Manfred Paul (TUM, W Germany) Joseph Stoy (Oxford University, UK) John Willliams (IBM, USA) Address for Submission of Papers: J.E. Stoy, Balliol College, Oxford OX1 3BJ, England. Paper Deadline: 6 February 1985. Return this form to receive a copy of the advance program. [ ] I plan to submit a paper: Subject ....................................... Name ........................................... Organisation ................................... Address .......................................... .......................................... .......................................... J.E. Stoy, Balliol College, Oxford OX1 3BJ, England. NOTE: In the preliminary CALL FOR PAPER, the Conference deadline was January, 31. This new deadline is the true one. ------------------------------ Date: 18 Jan 85 15:12:42 EST From: Patricia.Boyle@CMU-RI-ISL1 Subject: Conference - Symbolic and Numerical Computing in Expert Systems [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] WORKSHOP ON COUPLING SYMBOLIC AND NUMBERIAL COMPUTING IN EXPERT SYSTEMS, sponsored by American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Location: Boeing Computer Services AI Center Bellevue, Washington 98008 Dates: August 17-29, 1985 A majority of the current expert systems focus on the symbolic oriented logic and inference mechanisms of AI. Common rule-based systems employ empirical associations and are not well suited to deal with problems that require structural and causal models. Such problems often arise in science, engineering analysis, production and design, for example the VLSI design. The objective of the workshop is to assemble theoreticians and practitioners of AI who recognize the need for coupling symbolic reasoning with conventional mathematical and statistical algorithms to provide basis for multilevel expert systems. Papers are invited for consideration in all aspects of expert systems combining symbolic and numerical computing, but not restricted to: -architecture of coupled expert systems -configuration of hardware for such systems -implementation languages and software systems -multilevel expert systems -deep reasoning involving quantitative models -applications in science and engineering For more information please contact workshop chairman: Janusz S. Kowalik Boeing Computer Services Advanced Technology Applications Division M/S 7A-03 P.O. Box 24346 Seattle, Washington 98124 (206) 763-5392 or- Mark S. Fox, Robotics Institute, CMU (member, program and X3832 local arrangements committee) ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 25-JAN-1985 04:12 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a008829; 24 Jan 85 13:55 EST Date: Wed 23 Jan 1985 21:45-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #8 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 25 Jan 85 04:06 EST AIList Digest Thursday, 24 Jan 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 8 Today's Topics: Inference - Multisensor Integration Techniques, Symbolic Algebra - Computer_Algebra_List_P, AI Tools - MULTILISP & AI for Microcomputers, Logic Programming - Recent Article, Conferences - Tabulation of IJCAI Papers, Psychology - Modalities List, Seminars - Telling Lies (UCB) & Hierarchical Evidential Reasoning (SU) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon 21 Jan 85 10:39:40-PST From: Len Karpf Subject: Multisensor integration techniques I am currently trying to put together a survey of multisensor integration (a/k/a information fusion, sensor fusion, picture compilation) techniques. Any references or information about work that is being done in this area would be greatly appreciated. I am concerned primarily with the techniques utilized. Thanks. Len Karpf KARPF@SRI-AI SRI International - AH153 333 Ravenswood Ave. Menlo Park, CA 94025 (415) 859-2592 ------------------------------ Date: Tuesday, 22-Jan-85 16:43:52-GMT From: GORDON JOLY (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: Computer_Algebra_List_P ? Is there a Computer Algebra list, similar to AIList? Thanks in advance, Gordon Joly. [There is none on the Arpanet list of lists. Are there any such local or private discussion lists? -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 23 Jan 1985 10:26:55 EST (Wednesday) From: Karl Schwamb Subject: MULTILISP I've heard that there is a version on Lisp being developed for parallel processing called MULTILISP (possibly at MIT). Does anyone know if there is such a beast, and if so who is working on it? Any other comments about it would also be greatly appreciated.... Thanks, Karl send to schwamb at mitre ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 23 Jan 85 21:05:56 CST From: Werner Uhrig Subject: DDJ of March 85 focuses on AI for MICROCOMPUTERS [ figured some of you may want to get that issue. as many people are not familiar with Dr. Dobb's Journal, I'll include a short overview below ] A quick overview, in case you missed reading page 4 in the Dec 84 issue ... NOV-84 p74 - A Guide to Resources for the C Programmer. including a bibliography and lists of program and product sources, this resource guide can help you start tackling the material available. DEC-84 the theme of the issue is "INSIDE UNIX". relevant articles are: p24 - Varieties of Unix. a comparitive overview of Unixes for micros with a brief history of Unix and comments on its future, plus a guide to choosing a Unix p38 - Unix Device Drivers. Version 7 drivers are the point of departure for this inside look at the Unix I/O subsystem and device drivers. p50 - A Unix Internals Bibliography. .. so you won't have to "grep for it" p96 - C/Unix Programmer's Notebook. JAN-85 theme: FATTEN YOUR MAC - step by the step instructions to increase RAM in the Macintosh to 512K FEB-85 Gala Anniversary Issue 100 months of DDJ Mar-85 theme: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR MICROCOMPUTERS and announcement of the winner of the AI-competition. APR-85 theme: HUMAN INTERFACE DESIGN MAY-85 theme: GRAPHICS ALGORITHMS JUN-85 theme: SPECIAL COMMUNICATIONS ISSUE [PS: has anyone approached some of the magazine publishers to see if they are willing to provide TOCs in advance of publication, or whenever, in machine-readable form? I'm sure they could as they have it in their machines, and it sure wouldn't hurt their sales. and as it is welcome information for us that does not require typing, I'm sure that no one would consider such postings as improper advertising. Dr Dobbs headquarters seem to be located in Palo Alto, if someone there wouldn't mind making a local call there to ask the question] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jan 85 17:43:26 cst From: Laurence Leff Subject: Recent Article - Prolog Sigplan Notices Volume 20 Number 1 January 1985 M. A. Covington: Eliminating Unwanted Loops in Prolog ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Jan 85 20:08 EST From: Tim Finin Subject: ijcai note The following table summarizes the papers submitted to IJCAI-85: length source ____________ _____________________ Area Total Long Short US Asia EUR CAN ____________________________ _____ ____ ____ ___ ___ ___ ___ Expert Systems 111 59 52 64 23 20 3 Natural Language 99 54 45 57 9 27 5 Knowledge Representation 77 46 31 53 4 16 4 Learning & Know. Acquisition 75 38 37 59 2 12 2 Perception 61 46 15 33 11 11 6 Automated Reasoning 49 32 17 36 1 9 2 Planning & Search 48 28 20 36 2 7 2 Cognitive Modelling 41 24 17 26 0 13 2 Robotics 37 27 10 22 11 4 0 AI Architecture 27 19 8 18 3 6 0 Logic Programming 25 17 8 9 10 5 1 Theorem Proving 19 17 2 9 2 7 1 Automated Programming 18 15 3 13 0 5 0 Philosophical Foundation 16 10 6 11 0 5 0 AI in Education 15 5 10 10 1 3 1 Social Implications 4 1 3 4 0 0 0 ____________________________________________________________________________ TOTALS 722 438 284 460 79 150 29 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Jan 85 18:10:27 pst From: Douglas young Subject: Modalities list Jan.21 85 There seem to be quite a few people who, following my message in AIList #174 ( Dec 9), have read one or other of the two papers in Medical Hypotheses (9:55-70; 10:5-25) I referred to and who would like a copy of the updated list of modalities. I have mailed out a few, but in order to save time and postal charges I am giving the complete list below. It would unfortunately take too long to explain the significance of the modalities not listed previously, but I shall willingly explain some to any individuals who are interested. May I remind AIListers, though, of two things I pointed out in #174 : (1), that both the above papers, while they provide the principles and grounds of the theory of modal meaning, are, in most other respects, substantially out-of-date; and, (2), that no claims are made for any neurological foundations for the " mental modalities"; these are simply categories of mental experience that are unrelated directly to any sensorimotor systems. The significance of these categories lies, as it does for the sensorimotor modalities, in the representations or codes of individual members of each of these categories. SENSORIMOTOR AND MENTAL MODALITIES. ___________________________________ Primary Sensorimotor Modalities Compound Sensorimotor Modalities and Submodalities ________________________________ _______________________________ 1. (RET) Visual pattern 16. (HAP) Haptic 2. (VDM) Visual detection of 17. (GUS) Gustatory movement 3. (COL) Colour 18. (EMP) Emotio-expressive proprioception and control. 4. (RIL) Retinal illumination 19. (CAP) Central autonomic proprioception and control. 5. (VRA) Visual ranging and 20. (VES) Vestibular depth perception. 6. (OCM) Oculomotor 21. (STE) Stereognostic 7. (AUD) Auditory pattern 22. (LES) Sense of location in immediate extrapersonal space. 8. (ADS) Auditory direction 23. (VPC) Verbal perception sensing. 9. (KIN) Kinaesthetic 24. (TPC) Tonal perception 10. (TAC) Tactile 25. (VXP) Verbal expression 11. (PAI) Pain 26. (TXP) Tonal expression 12. (TMP) Temperature 27. (CMD) Command 13. (OLF) Olfactory 14. (TST) Taste Mental modalities _________________ 15. (MOT) Motor 28. (MET) Metaconceptual 29. (TIM) Mental time 30. (EMS) Emotive mental states. 31. (CMS) Cognitive mental states. 32. (CMA) Cognitive mental acts. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 23 Jan 85 15:32:55 pst From: chertok%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Paula Chertok) Subject: Seminar - Telling Lies (UCB) BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM SPRING 1985 Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237B TIME: Tuesday, January 29, 11 - 12:30 PLACE: 240 Bechtel Engineering Center DISCUSSION: 12:30 - 2 in 200 Building T-4 SPEAKER: Paul Ekman, University of California, San Francisco; Computer Scientist, SRI Interna- tional TITLE: ``Telling Lies'' The question I will address is why liars sometimes betray themselves despite their intention to mislead. Why can't liars prevent a slip of the tongue, or what I term leakage in expression, voice or gesture? Why can't liars prevent these behavioral betrayals? Sometimes they do. Some lies are performed perfectly; nothing in what the liar says or does betrays the lie. Why not always? There are two rea- sons, I will suggest, one that involves cognition and the other emotions. Understanding them requires an analysis of lies, liars, and lie catchers. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 22 Jan 85 11:00:01-PST From: Paula Edmisten Subject: Seminar - Hierarchical Evidential Reasoning (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford SIGLUNCH distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.] A Method for Managing Evidential Reasoning in a Hierarchical Hypothesis Space SPEAKER: Ted Shortliffe Medical Computer Science Group, Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory DATE: Friday, January 25, 1985 LOCATION: Chemistry Gazebo, between Physical and Organic Chemistry TIME: 12:05 Many of the underlying reasoning models used in expert systems have assumed that purely categorical inference is adequate for the domain. However, there are many settings in which the inferential rules are inexact and the evidence for a given conclusion is suggestive at best. Expert systems researchers have wrestled with this problem for the last ten years, turning both to normative decision models and to psychological experiments for ideas on how best to handle inexact inference in advice systems. Many ad hoc approaches have been devised and have demonstrated good performance in limited domains. However, it is generally difficult to define the range of their applicability. In addition, they have not provided a basis for coherent management of evidence bearing on hypotheses that are related hierarchically, a phenomenon that is recognized in several common problem solving domains. In this presentation, I will briefly describe the motivation for dealing with hierarchical relationships among hypotheses in expert systems and review the related limitations of the certainty factor model developed for MYCIN. I will then focus on the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory of evidence, an approach to evidential reasoning that is appealing in part because it suggests a coherent approach for dealing with such hierarchical relationships. However, the theory's complexity and potential for computational inefficiency have tended to discourage its use in reasoning systems. I will describe the central elements of the D-S theory, basing the exposition on simple examples drawn from the field of medicine. Finally, I will present an adaptation of the D-S approach that achieves improved computational efficiency while permitting the management of evidential reasoning within an abstraction hierarchy. The analysis in the talk, plus the new approach to applying the D-S theory, are largely the work of Jean Gordon, a medical student and mathematician who has been working with me on the problem for approximately the last two years. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 28-JAN-1985 03:57 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a023621; 27 Jan 85 14:42 EST Date: Sun 27 Jan 1985 10:41-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #9 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Mon, 28 Jan 85 03:53 EST AIList Digest Sunday, 27 Jan 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 9 Today's Topics: Application - Expert Systems for Control Applications, AI Tools - Tree Display Algorithms, Theory - Problem-solving Classifications, Symbolic Algebra - Computer_Algebra_List_P, AI Tools - MULTILISP, News - IMPAK Newsletter & Recent Reports, Humor - Lying Computers, Seminars - Knowledge in Interactive Proofs (UCB) & Recursion Transformation (CMU) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 25 Jan 85 10:45 EST From: Araman@HIS-BILLERICA-MULTICS.ARPA Subject: EXPERT SYSTEMS FOR CONTROL APPLICATIONS I am looking for pointers or references on Expert Systems which have been built in Command and Control situations or just control situations. Do such systems exist or are efforts under way in building such knowledge based application systems in non-military situations.. I am sure research done in command and control situations in military situations could be translated to problems in commercial situations such as process control, production control and inventory control thanks in advance sankar (Araman -at HI-MULTICS or Araman%his-billerica-multics -at cisl-service-multics.arpa) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 25 Jan 85 16:38 EST From: Hannah Blau Subject: inquiry about tree display algorithms Inquiry -- Tree Display Algorithms I am writing a program for the Lisp Machine to produce a graphical display of tree structures with labelled nodes. There is no a priori limit on the complexity of the tree, and the node labels vary in width. I am trying to develop an algorithm to adjust the layout of the nodes and edges in accordance with the dimensions of the window in which the tree is to be displayed. When drawing a big tree in a small window, I want to take advantage of the space available without distorting the structure of the tree. I would greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who has tackled this problem in the past or can refer me to relevant literature. Thank you very much. Hannah Blau HANNAH%upenn.csnet@CSNET-RELAY Department of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 26 Jan 85 18:08:26 pst From: Cindy Mason Subject: Problem-solving Classifications I was recently writing an article on representations in AI when I came across some confusing literature, and I'm hoping some of the people who are experienced with this topic will comment on it. I've noticed that there are QUITE A FEW different classifications for problem solving paradigms. The AI Handbook (Vol. I, Sec. IIB) sees problem representations in terms of State-space representations and Problem-reduction representations, while Nilsson (1971) sees the classification in terms of State-space, Problem-reduction, and Theorom-proving. Hunt (1975) divides problem-solving into State-space, Problem-reduction, Enumeration, and String Rewriting. Winston's classification (1984) includes State-space, Constraints, Generate and Test, the Rule-based paradigm, etc. It seems to me that some of these paradigms (like Theorom-proving and Rules) are special cases of State-space. I'm wondering why there is such a variety of opinion on what constitutes a classification of Problem Solving representations. If anyone cares to comment on this, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say. ------------------------------ Date: Thursday, 24-Jan-85 12:01:51-GMT From: GORDON JOLY (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: Computer_Algebra_List_P ? Thanks for adding my request to AIList. For your information: I would be happy to add your name to the fowarding list for net.math.symbolic. This is a USENET new group devoted to symbolic algebra. Systems frequently referenced Reduce, Macsyma and Maple. We are supporting this interface as part of the Reduce project at Rand, Santa Monica, CA. -- lseward@randgr ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 24 Jan 85 15:20:40 PST From: David Alpern Subject: Re: MULTILISP As of a couple of years ago, Bert Halstead and others around Tech Square (MIT LCS) were talking about a MULTILISP implementation for the CONCERT multiprocessor system. You might want to contact Bert (rhh%mit-vax@mit-mc) and see what developed. - Dave David Alpern IBM San Jose Research Laboratory, K65/282 5600 Cottle Road, San Jose, CA 95193 Phone: (408) 284-6521 Internet: Alpern%IBM-SJ@CSnet-Relay.ARPA Alpern@SJRLVM4.BITNET ------------------------------ Date: Sun 27 Jan 85 10:34:15-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: IMPAK Newsletter For those of you not getting enough AI news, there's another new newsletter dedicated to AI, expert systems, robotics, smart graphics, etc. This one is IMPAK, 1902 Joliette Court, P.O. Box 7148, Alexandria, VA 22307-9990. Twelve issues are $147 ($97 academic). -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 25 Jan 85 13:45:40 cst From: Laurence Leff Subject: Recent Reports Technical Report - University of Wisconsin Madison TR 560 Mechanisms for Concurrency Control and Recovery in Prolog - A Proposal Michael J. Carey David J. DeWitt Goetz Graefe October 1984 UCLA CS Department Technical Reports Order from Ms. Brenda Ramsey UCLA Computer Science Department 3732 Boelter Hall Los Angeles, CA 90024 An Intelligent Router for VLSI Design Pierre Bouchon, Tulin Mangir, and Jacques Vidal CSD 840058 $5.00 Rule Based Generation of Test Structures for VLSI Grace Chen-Ellis and Tulin Mangir CSD-840059 $1.50 The Anatomy of Easy Problems: A Constraint-Satisfaction Formulation Rina Cachter and Judea Pearl CSD-840063 $1.00 Generalized Best-First Search Strategies and the Optimality of A* Rina Dechter and Judea Pearl CSD-840068 A Distributed Expert System for Space Shuttle Flight Control John Joseph Helly, Jr. Jacques Vidal, Chair CSD-840038 $6.75 Convince: A Conversational Inference Consolidation Engine Jin Hyung Kim CSD-840067 $8.50 Control Structures in a Prolog-Based Production System Tulin E. Mangir & Basuki Soetarman CSD-840054 $1.50 Recursive Random Games: A Probabilistic Model for Perfect Information Games Gerard Phillippe Michon Judea Pearl, Chair CSD-840029 $7.50 Pattern Recognition and Array Processing for Pollution Source Identification in Water Pollution Systems Yoshitaka Shibata Walter J. Karplus, Chair CSD-840062 $17.75 ------------------------------ Date: Friday, 25-Jan-85 10:23:18-GMT From: GORDON JOLY (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: A Thought. Computers that are intelligent will probably want to lie about their age. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 23 Jan 85 11:51:25 pst From: khojesta%ucbernie@Berkeley (Khojesta Beverleigh) Subject: Seminar - Knowledge in Interactive Proofs (UCB) [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] HOW TO GET A PROOF FROM THE DEVIL THURSDAY 1-24-85 AT 11:00 A.M. IN ROOM 597 EVANS HALL How much knowledge should a proof of a theorem T contain? Certainly enough to see that T is true. Usually much more. We derive an upper bound (expressed in bits) for the amount of knowledge that a recipient (with polynomially bounded resources) can compute from an interactive proof of T. For some number theoretic Ts. we show how someone who has enough information, henceforth, called "Devil", can prove to a skeptical man that T is true without releasing ANY additional knowledge. The faculty sponsor is Manuel Blum. ------------------------------ Date: 25 Jan 1985 0827-EST From: Lydia Defilippo Subject: Seminar - Recursion Transformation (CMU) [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] APPLIED LOGIC SEMINAR Speaker: Angelika Zobel Date: Wednesday, January 30, 1985 Time: 2:00 - 3:15 Place: 2105 Doherty Hall Title: Transferring Recursions into Iterations Though recursion is a powerful tool in program specification, efficiency makes it desirable to have a way of transforming these recursions into equivalent iterations. In this talk I shall present one such transformation of certain mutual recursions into equivalent iterative programs. The correctness of this transformation will be proved using generalized invariants which in a nice way capture the characteristics of the computation tree. We shall see how intuitive this correctness proof can be. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 29-JAN-1985 05:20 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a003461; 29 Jan 85 1:08 EST Date: Mon 28 Jan 1985 20:45-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #10 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 29 Jan 85 05:15 EST AIList Digest Tuesday, 29 Jan 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 10 Today's Topics: Requests - AI and Chemistry & Symbolics Mailing List, AI Tools - Tree Display & MACSYMA & PSL & Kurzweil's Reader, Symbolic Algebra - Newsgroup & Contest, Pattern Recognition - Bird Counting, News - Recent Articles & Rog-O-Matic, Logic Programming - Tablog, Seminar - Philosophy and AI (MIT) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon 28 Jan 85 15:53:39-PST From: Takashi Okada Subject: AI and Chemistry I am interested in the AI application to chemistry and currently searching a postdoctoral position in universities. Any informations about the research group in this field will be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance. Takashi Okada ( OKADA@SUMEX.ARPA ) Dept. of Chemistry, U.C.Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 28 Jan 85 12:16 EST From: Tim Finin Subject: Symbolics Mailing List Does anyone know of a network mailing list for users of Symbolics Lisp machines? I'm looking for something like the mailing list that exists for users of the Xerox 1100 series. I would like a place to interact with a large community of users of Symbolics machines. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 28 Jan 85 11:18:41-PST From: PORTA@USC-ECL.ARPA Subject: Displaying Tree Structures Regarding your request for a program to display a tree structure with labeled nodes: Eve Longini Cohen, formerly with our group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developed such a program at Carnegie-Mellon to display a tree representing the results of a theorem-prover. She modified it for us so that it would display the results of our diagnoser and our planner. (I may not have all of the history correct, but I know the program plots trees.) We still have Interlisp code for it. Another group at JPL has a Symbolics Zetalisp version. If you're interested in any of these programs, Eve's Arpanet address is ecohen@aerospace and mine is porta@usc-ecl. The group with the Zetalisp version has no connection to the Arpanet, but you may reach one member, Eric Biefeld, by telephone at (818) 354-0565. Harry J. Porta M.S. 201-203 Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology 4800 Oak Grove Drive Pasadena, California 91109 ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 28-Jan-85 19:31:07-GMT From: MACCALLUM QM (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: Recent queries in AI List Re: Symbolic Algebra package request (vol 2 #184) MACSYMA will run on top of Franz on a VAX. For full details the person to consult is probably Richard Fateman (Berkeley). I think Symbolics sell the software at about $1200 for university users (their commercial price is about 15 times that). Re: PSL (Kushnier in vol2 #184) This was developed by Martin Griss and colleagues at Utah, and was available, when I last heard, for about $250 for the VAX/VMS version. It can be obtained by writing to Utah Portable Artificial Intelligence Support Systems Group Department of Computer Science 3160 MEB University of Utah Salt Lake City UT 84112 (801) 581-5017 and will run under VMS or Unix on a VAX, on DEC-20 and Apollo, and possibly other machines. Re: Kurzweil Data Entry Machine This beast certainly exists. One was demonstrated here (Queen Mary College, University of London, UK) during a display of computers for use in the Arts Faculty. I believe it belongs to the Oxford University Computing service, and is available for users in the UK from outside Oxford. Malcolm MacCallum (MMaccall@Ucl-cs.ARPA) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 28 Jan 1985 10:08:09 EST From: AXLER%upenn-1100%upenn.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Symbolic Algebra Newsgroup I received the following message last fall re the forming of a symbolic algebra newsgroup. However, despite responding in the affirmative, I have yet to receive any additional mail on the topic. [Begin forwarded message] Return-Path: lseward@Rand-Unix.ARPA From: Larry Seward Date: 14 Aug 84 10:58:06 PDT (Tue) Subject: Symbolic Algebra Newsgroup A new newsgroup (net.math.sym) focusing on symbolic algebra is being formed on the UUCP/USENET. The group will cover algorithms, applications and related languages. Currently such issues might be discussed in net.ai, net.math or net.lang. There are 3 algebra systems available under UNIX: REDUCE, MACSYMA or MAPLE, all of which will be applicable to the newsgroup. This message is being sent to REDUCE users with a known network address. Although the newsgroup will be a USENET group, a gateway to the ARPANET is being set up by Jim Purtilo at the University of Illinois. Presumably this will also allow access to BITNET and CSNET. If you would like to be included in such a group, please reply directly to Laurence Leff (..!decvax!allegra!convex!smu!leff), or me if you have difficulty reaching that address. If you will be re-distributing the news locally, or if there are others at your site interested in the group, please include a count of them. Larry Seward [End forwarded message] Dave Axler ------------------------------ Date: Fri 25 Jan 85 20:36:55-PST From: Douglas Galbraith Subject: $20 to the first person ... [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] I will pay $20 to the first person to send me the INVERSE Laplace Transform of this equation: 1 2 F(S) = --- * ---------------------------------- S exp[-A*sqrt(S)] + exp[A*sqrt(S)] where "A" is a real constant and "S" is the variable. Thanks, Douglas Galbraith galbraith@sierra doug@helens ------------------------------ Date: Fri 25 Jan 85 08:30:06-PST From: Nils Nilsson Subject: Computers and Birds [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Here's a possibly interesting project for "birders" COLLABORATION SOUGHT ON COMPUTER ANALYSIS OF BIRD SONGS We would like to develop a system for determining the number of different species (kinds) of song birds present in an area from "shotgun" recordings of the singing of the entire avian community. The basic problem is to develop programs that can estimate how many kinds of songs there are on a 45 minute sound tape, even though the songs partially overlap one another, show some variation from individual to individual, and there is no "library" of known songs to use for comparisons. An exact count is not required. We wish to be able to determine whether one patch of tropical forest had, say, 140-160 species present when another had only 35-50. We want, in essence, to use tape recorders in the field to substitute for highly trained ornithologists when doing surveys of bird diversity. This work is part of a project of Stanford's CENTER FOR CONSERVATION BIOLOGY in evaluating the "health" of tropical forest ecosystems. The project is at present unsupported. Rewards would be working on a biologically (and perhaps computationally) interesting problem that has immediate importance to today's environmental crisis and, we hope, glory in the form of publication(s). If you are interested, please call: Paul R. Ehrlich, Department of Biology, Stanford (415) 497-3171 or John Harte,Energy and Resources Program, Berkeley (415) 642-8553 ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 27 Jan 85 05:26:39 cst From: Laurence Leff Subject: Recent Articles Electronic News, December 31, 1984 page 18 Lisp Machine Incorporated received $7.6 million in third round of financing. Electronic News, January 14, 1985, page 47 International Robomation/Intelligence has received $2 million in additional financing from Garrett Corporation. ------------------------------ Date: 27 Jan 85 16:28:14 EST From: Jon.Webb@CMU-CS-IUS2 Subject: Rog-o-matic makes Scientific American [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The "Computer Recreations" column in this month's Scientific American discusses Rogue and Rog-o-matic. ------------------------------ Date: 25 Jan 85 1635 PST From: Yoni Malachi Subject: Tablog [Forwarded from the Prolog Digest by Laws@SRI-AI.] Tablog (Tableau Logic Programming Language) is a language based on first-order predicate logic with equality that combines functional and logic programming. A program in Tablog is a list of formulas in a first-order logic (including equality, negation, and equivalence). Tablog programs may define either relations or functions. Tablog employs the Manna-Waldinger deductive-tableau proof system as an interpreter in the same way that Prolog uses a resolution-based proof system. Unification is used by Tablog to match a call with a line in the program and to bind arguments. The basic rules of deduction used for computing are nonclausal resolution and rewriting by means of equality and equivalence. A previous message by Uday Reddy (U-REDDY@UTAH-20) classified Tablog together with Eqlog and Kornfeld's work. There are however important differences between the three languages: Kornfeld extends unification to unify expressions declared to be equal but his system will not reduce a term into other term defined to be equal to it. Eqlog is an extension of OBJ1 to use narrowing rather than simple pattern matching when trying to reduce functional terms. Tablog, on the other hand, uses standard unification. It operates on both formulas and terms and uses different inference rules to reduce them. An atomic formula is reduced using nonclausal resolution or is rewritten if it is asserted to be equivalent to another formula. A term gets rewritten using an equality rule that is applied to the goal to be reduced and an assertion in the program. This rule is a generalization of paramodulation. Tablog distinguishes between negation and failure, so in a sense it has 3-value logic. Tablog is strictly first-order so it does not allow higher order functions. References: Y. Malachi, Z. Manna, and R. Waldinger, ``TABLOG -- The Deductive Tableau Programming Language,'' Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Lisp and Functional Programming, Austin, Texas, August 1984. Also available as: Stanford Computer Science Technical Report No. STAN-CS-1012. (Contact Berg@SCORE for ordering information) -- Yoni Malachi ------------------------------ Date: Mon 28 Jan 85 18:06:37-EST From: David Kirsh Subject: Seminar - Philosophy and AI (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by JCMA@MIT-MC.] WHY PHILOSOPHY MIGHT MATTER TO AI DATE: Tuesday, January 29th TIME: 2:30 PM PLACE: 8th Floor Playroom In the 20th century, philosophers have made significant advances toward understanding the nature of our higher mental abilities. Since AI is the science of designing possible minds and mind parts, it would be a surprise if philosophy were not relevant to AI. Questions of the form "What must a person know if he is to be able to: understand a language; make valid inductive inferences; explain the occurrence of a physical event; rationally choose his next action..." are characteristic of modern philosophy, and not surprisingly philosophers have their theories. I hope to convince you that philosophers often ask good questions; they have useful formulations of the terms of certain AI problems; and they have partial solutions to some of these problems. David Kirsh ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 2-FEB-1985 00:00 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a000499; 1 Feb 85 16:50 EST Date: Fri 1 Feb 1985 09:51-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #11 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 1 Feb 85 23:52 EST AIList Digest Friday, 1 Feb 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 11 Today's Topics: Business - Symbolics Stock Price, Symbolic Algebra - Laplace Transform Answer, Graphics - Special Issue of CG&A,n Expert Systems - Availability of Steamer Software, Publications - Recent Reports & Artificial Intelligence Abstracts & New-and-Trendy Word Collection, Seminars - Procedural Knowledge (SU) & Reasoning about Actions and Processes (CSLI) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 31 Jan 85 10:26:25 PST From: Marty Cohen Subject: Symbolics stock price At the AI conference at Denver in December, I heard that Symbolics had gone public. Their stock was then under $7 a share. It is now up to $12 a share. Any idea why the surge? (I expected it to rise, but not that fast.) ------------------------------ Date: Friday, 1-Feb-85 8:56:48-GMT From: GORDON JOLY (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: re: $20 to the first person ... -------- We believe the answer to be (see Vol3 #10) s + ir / | 1 | pt 1 f(t) = ----- lim | e ------------------- dp 2 pi i r->inf | p cosh (A sqrt(p)) / s - ir where s is chosen so that all singular points of the integrand lie on the left hand side of the straight line Real(p) = s. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 30 Jan 85 10:55 EST From: Paul Fishwick Subject: Special Issue of CG&A Forwarded From: Norm Badler on Tue 15 Jan 1985 at 11:15 IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications is planning a Special Issue on Computer Graphics and Expert Systems. Papers addressing any relevant topic along the following general lines are invited: * expert systems used in computer-aided design, * expert systems using graphical displays as an essential part of reasoning or analysis systems, or * graphical interfaces to expert systems. Publication is scheduled for October 1985 The submission deadline is April 1, 1985. IEEE CG&A publishes color graphics in a magazine format, but all papers are reviewed. Republication (after revision) of very low circulation conference papers is also permitted. Please submit four copies of the paper, preferably in IEEE format, to: Dr. Norman I. Badler Associate Editor, IEEE CG&A CIS - Moore School D2 University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 (Net address: Badler%UPENN@CSNET-Relay) (215) 898-5862 ------------------------------ Date: Friday, 1 February 1985, 07:32-PST From: Jim Hollan Subject: Availability of Steamer Software Some readers of this list may be interested in knowing that a tape of the source code for the Steamer training system can be obtained from the National Technical Information Service. This includes code for the basic Steamer system and an associated object-based graphics editor. Steamer was recently described (Hollan, Hutchins, & Weitzman, 1984) in the Summer issue of AI Magazine. It is written in Zetalisp and currently runs on Symbolics lisp machines. We would be interested in bug reports but do not have time to offer any support or information services. Send bug reports to hollan@nprdc. The charge for a 9-track 1600bpi tape is $240. The order number for the tape is AD-A146757. It can be obtained from National Technical Information Service 5285 Port Royal Road Springfield, Virginia 22161 Jim Hollan ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 Jan 85 09:45:33 cst From: Laurence Leff Subject: Recent Reports Technical Reports from Carnegie Mellon University Masaru Tomita: An Efficient All-paths Parsing Algorithm for Natural Languages October 1984 Ellen Lowenfeld Walker, Takeo Kanade: Shape Recovery of a Solid of Revolution From Apparent Distortions of Patterns C. E. Thorpe: FIDO: Vison and Navigation for a Robot Rover ------------------------------ Date: 30 Jan 1985 02:29:36 EST From: BASKEYFIELDM@USC-ISI.ARPA Subject: Report - Knowledge-Based Command and Control ABSTRACT KNOWLEDGE BASED MODELS FOR COMMAND AND CONTROL Dennis Cooper General Research Corporation P.O. Box 6770 Santa Barbara, CA 93160-6770 In the last two years, there has been a growing interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence. More specifically, an area known as "Expert Systems" or "Knowledge Engineering" has received much attention. Expert systems are computer programs that can perform at a human expert level in some narrow domain (e.g., infectious blood diseases, VAX 11/780 computer performance, etc.). Expert systems are currently being developed to deal with a variety of problems. In the last six years General Research Corporation has been developing technologies that support the definition and construction of decision-making models. The technology makes use of techniques drawn from the expert systems field. Our decision-making model have been principally applied to Army and Air Force analytical simulations and wargaming models of military combat. The emphasis is thus placed not on developing expert models of command and control but on developing fast, reasonable models of decision-making behavior. In this paper, we present a description of our still developing technology and illustrate its capabilities from examples taken from the TAC ASSESSOR model, CORDIVEM Cap design, and McClintic Theater model. We will also describe two artificial intelligence tools, TIMM and KATIE, which have facilitated knowledge-based model development. Requests for this paper should be directed to the author or I will provide a copy (as long as the number doesn't get outrageous): BASKEYFIELDM@USC_ISI.ARPA ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 30 Jan 85 14:31:31 cst From: Laurence Leff Subject: Recent Reports - University of Illinois University of Illinois Technical Report List Schang, Thierry "A Rule-Based Manager for the GPSI Environment" File 923 (Rule manager for an expert system environment) Challou, Daniel J. "Towards a Knowledge Based Data Restructing Aid" 924 system to assist in development in of data structures and type definitions Cohen, Seth M. "Object Identification Using Keyword Matching" File No 925 user interfaces for AI systems ------------------------------ Date: Fri 1 Feb 85 02:09:06-EST From: Wayne McGuire Subject: Artificial Intelligence Abstracts I perused recently the premier issue of Artificial Intelligence Abstracts, published by EIC/Intelligence in New York. Following is a brief description and review. Artificial Intelligence Abstracts will be published monthly, for an annual price of $295. The first issue is 62 pages long, and prints just over 300 abstracts. Document types abstracted include academic reports, association reports, conference papers, federal government reports, journal articles, news articles, newsletter articles, and patents. Some representative serials abstracted in the first issue: AI Magazine, Artificial Intelligence, Business Week, Byte, Cognitive Science, Computerworld, Datamation, The Economist, Electronic News, Electronics Week, Financial Times of London, High Technology, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man & Cybernetics, Journal of Logic Programming, MIS Week, The New York Times, Science, Scientific American, Signal, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Abstracts of the entire proceedings of the 1984 AAAI National Conference appear to be included in this issue. Abstracts are organized under the following major categories: Markets & Issues: Business & Economics, International News, Human Factors, General; Applications: Specialty Applications, Automation & Robotics, Knowledge-Based Systems; Research: Computer Architecture, Programming & Software, Sensors, Human Machine Interface, Cognitive Sciences. The publication is generously indexed, and abstracts can by accessed by author, subject, source (serial title), or industry or corporation topic. An Events & Meetings section in each issue provides basic information about forthcoming meetings and conferences related to artificial intelligence scheduled to occur during the next 12 months. Although the abstracts in this publication are uniformly useful (the attention to developments in supercomputing is particularly valuable), its coverage could be significantly broadened. The emphasis of AIA seems to be more on the popular and trade press, than on the academic, scientific, and technical literature. Computer & Control Abstracts, for instance, captures much important AI-related literature in all major languages from around the world which AIA's editorial policy apparently excludes or overlooks. AIA's coverage of cognitive science--the AI-relevant literature from philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and educational research--is especially weak. Perhaps there is a need for a special new publication entitled Cognitive Science Abstracts which will do the job for which AIA lacks the interest or space. Any habitual reader of AIList Digest would, I suspect, find Artificial Intelligence Abstracts to be a worthwhile tool. A sample copy can be obtained by writing EIC/Intelligence at 48 West 38th Street, New York, NY 10018, or calling (800) 223-6275. AIList Digest readers might also want to examine EIC's Robomatix Reporter (which abstracts the robotics literature), CAD/CAM Abstracts, and Telecommunications Abstracts. -- Wayne McGuire ------------------------------ Date: 30 Jan 1985 1325-PST (Wednesday) From: Miriam Blatt Subject: new and trendy word collection [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] A friend of mine is looking for words to put in a dictionary she is working on. Some examples of words we have already suggested are "WYSIWYG" - what you see is what you get, and "RISC" - reduced instruction set computer. If you have some words to suggest, or think some may occur to you in the next few days, please save the form at the end of this message and mail it back. Here is the original letter: Hi, We are starting on a new, exciting project and we need your help. The project is a business dictionary - working title "Essential Terms: Today's Business Vocabulary - to be published by Franklin Watts (part of Grolier, they started as a children's house and now do adult books as well) and the help we need is a list of words. What will set our book apart from the ordinary business dictionary is its emphasis on new and trendy words and ironic usages for old words or terms. Some examples: "merged and purged" (what is done, via a computer program, when combining mailing lists to eliminate from the final list, duplicates and people who cannot tolerate direct mail advertising), "socks and stocks" (Sears financial centers in retail stores), "big blue" (IBM), "Kaufmanized" (the state of the financial markets after a pronouncement about the direction of interest rates by Salomon Brothers' economic guru, Henry Kaufman), "golden girdle" (the high tech belt that crosses central Florida) and "valium picnic" (slow day on the stock market). With the exception of the last term, we saw all of these expressions in print. However, to get more of them we need access to words that are so new, so particular, and so irreverent that they have not yet been published, and this is where we hope you can help. What are the fun, interesting terms in your work - field and/or industry? Would you please keep the attached form wherever it is most likely to be at hand when a word "flashes" into your conversation, for the next few days, and fill it with the words/terms and definitions that make "Today's Business Vocabulary" so lively? We appreciate the crucial nature of your help to our project, and will be happy to acknowledge your contribution in our introduction. Please circle February 8th on your calendar and leave a few minutes on that Friday to mail back the list. Thank you very much for your help. Rachel Epstein and Nina Liebman Name: Phone: Wish to be acknowledged: (Yes/No) For each word, give its meaning and origin. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 30 Jan 85 09:50:15-PST From: Paula Edmisten Subject: Seminar - Procedural Knowledge (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford SIGLUNCH distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.] Procedural Knowledge SPEAKER: Michael Georgeff A.I. Center, SRI International and, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University DATE: Friday, February 1, 1985 LOCATION: Chemistry Gazebo, between Physical and Organic Chemistry TIME: 12:05 Active intelligent systems need to be able to represent and reason about actions and how those actions can be combined to achieve given goals. This knowledge is often in the form of SEQUENCES of actions or PROCEDURES for achieving given goals or reacting to certain situations. For example, knowledge about kicking a football, performing a certain dance movement, cooking a roast dinner, solving Rubik's cube, or diagnosing an engine malfunction, is primarily knowledge about procedures for accomplishing these tasks. In this talk we describe a scheme for explicitly representing and reasoning about procedural knowledge based on the notion of PROCESS. The knowledge representation is sufficiently rich to describe the effects of arbitrary sequences of tests and actions, and the inference mechanism provides a means for directly using this knowledge to reach desired operational goals. Furthermore, the knowledge representation has a declarative semantics that provides for incremental changes to the system, rich explanatory capabilities, and verifiability. The scheme also provides a mechanism for reasoning about the use of this knowledge, thus enabling the system to choose effectively between alternative courses of action. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 30 Jan 85 17:26:40-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Reasoning about Actions and Processes (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] ``Reasoning About Actions and Processes'' Room G-19 Michael Georgeff, CSLI 2:15 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 7, Redwood Hall, Stanford Active intelligent systems need to be able to represent and reason about actions and how those actions can be combined to achieve given goals. For example, knowledge about kicking a football, performing a certain dance movement, cooking a roast dinner, solving Rubik's cube, or diagnosing an engine malfunction, is primarily knowledge about sequences of actions or procedures for achieving these goals. Within AI, there have been two approaches to this problem, with a somewhat poor connection between the two. In the first category, there is some work on theories of action, or what an action is. This research has focused mainly on problems in natural language understanding concerned with the meaning of action sentences. Second, there is work on planning, i.e., the problem of constructing a plan by searching for a sequence of actions that yields a given goal. Surprisingly, there is almost no work in AI about the execution of pre-formed plans -- yet this is the almost universal way in which humans go about their day-to-day tasks, and probably the only way other animals do so. In this talk we aim to set the foundation for a theory of action that: (1) provides a suitable semantics for simple action sentences in natural language, (2) provides a method of practical reasoning about how to achieve given goals based on procedural knowledge, and (3) serves as a basis for planning. The first of these aims is met by defining a suitable declarative semantics for action, and the second by providing a suitable operational semantics. The third rests on both of these, but in addition requires that we have a means of searching the space of possible world histories. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 3-FEB-1985 13:15 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a007225; 3 Feb 85 2:58 EST Date: Sat 2 Feb 1985 22:48-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #12 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sun, 3 Feb 85 13:12 EST AIList Digest Sunday, 3 Feb 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 12 Today's Topics: Administrivia - Sublists, Seminars - Berkeley Prolog Machine (SU) & Typography (CSLI) & Conceptual Competence for Solving Problems (UCB) & Belief Revision (CSLI) & Nonlinear Planning (MIT) & Syllable Recognition (CMU), Conferences - Cognitive Science Society & Automated Reasoning and Expert Systems & Systems Sciences Software & Automath and Automated Reasoning Week ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed 30 Jan 85 09:00:34-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: Sublists Readers occasionally ask me whether there is an AIList version that omits seminar notices, conferences, flames, or some other subset of the usual material. Usenet readers used to ask whether messages could be split into two or more bboard streams. (Incidentally, our full Usenet gateway may be working again in two or three weeks.) At present there is no such sublist mechanism. I haven't the time and energy to maintain multiple subscription lists; even if I did, there is no concensus on which messages are the "good stuff". If someone else wants to create such a "cream" distribution, I will help any way I can. I skim material from other bboards and lists, and I see no reason why someone shouldn't excerpt AIList and pass his selections along. We could even have multiple splits, with one sublist taking, say, philosophy and psychology and another carrying psychology and linguistics. (This would cause difficulty, however, in the eventual establishment of the sublists as independent lists.) Another possible solution is for mailers or redistribution systems to include message parsing code that can delete any text starting with "Subject: Seminar -", etc. (Even the ability to skip to the next message would be welcome. I currently read mostly "undigested" or "exploded" digests and bboards, which is one way of getting this convenience.) If someone wants to develop such a mail system, I am willing to cooperate in standardizing the header keyword format. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Wed 30 Jan 85 09:17:43-PST From: Ariadne Johnson Subject: Seminar - Berkeley Prolog Machine (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] CS 300 -- Computer Science Department Colloquium -- Winter 1984-1985. Our fifth meeting will be Tuesday, February 5, 1985 at 4:15 in Terman Auditorium THE BERKELEY PROLOG MACHINE Alvin M. DESPAIN Computer Science, Univ. of Calif.,Berkeley The Berkeley Prolog Machine (PLM) is an experiment in high performance architecture for executing logic programs. It is part of a longer term effort, the Berkeley Aquarius project. The Aquarius project at Berkeley is an on-going investigation whose ultimate research goal is to determine how enormous improvements in performance can be achieved in a machine specialized to calculate some very difficult "real" problems in design automation, discrete simulation, systems, and signal processing. Our approach can be characterized by three important points: (1) Aquarius is to be a MIMD machine made of heterogeneous processing elements, each of which is tailored to accommodate its own individual processing requirements (2) it is to exploit parallelism at all levels of execution, and (3) it is to support logic-programming at the ISP level. The presentation will include a discussion of the systems architecture of Aquarius. The main discussion will focus on the Prolog Machine(PLM) and will describe its key innova- tive features and development status. Some performance estimates of the PLM as derived from simulation studies will be presented. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 30 Jan 85 17:26:40-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Typography (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] 12 noon, 2/7 TINLunch Ventura Hall Excerpts from Charles Bigelow's ``Principles of Conference Room Structured Font Design for the Personal Workstation'' and Fernand Baudin's ``Typography: Evolution + Revolution'' Discussion led by David Levy The TINlunch of February 7 will focus on some of the issues surrounding the new computer technology exemplified by TEDIT, TEX, and EMACS. These ``word processing'' and ``document preparation'' systems are, of course, nothing other than ``writing'' tools -- intended for writing with the aid of the computer. The first reading, an excerpt from an article by Charles Bigelow, discusses the design of typefaces in the new digital medium as a problem of balancing conservation and innovation: conserving the legibility and elegance of our inherited letter forms while meeting the demands of the new medium. In the second reading, Fernand Baudin suggests that the new writing technology will require of us a new literacy: not just the ability to read and write, but the ability to organize our writing visually -- that is, typographically. He calls for ``the close cooperation of specialists in many branches: linguist[ic]s, communication, psychology, history, technology.'' --David Levy ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 31 Jan 85 11:56:01 pst From: chertok%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Paula Chertok) Subject: Seminar - Conceptual Competence for Solving Problems (UCB) BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM Spring 1985 Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237B ``Conceptual Competence for Understanding and Solving Problems'' James G. Greeno, School of Education, UC Berkeley TIME: Tuesday, February 5, 11 - 12:30 PLACE: 240 Bechtel Engineering Center DISCUSSION: 12:30 - 2 in 200 Building T-4 Behavior of people, including children, can include generative conformity to principles in a way that supports conclusions that they understand the principles. This understanding may be implicit, involving a kind of competence. Examples involving principles of number, analyzed using planning nets, and princi- ples of set theory, analyzed using Montague grammar, will be discussed. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 30 Jan 85 17:26:40-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Belief Revision (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] SUMMARY OF THE F4 MEETING ON JANUARY 7 The topic was an overview belief revision as a research area in AI. ``Belief revision'' is a broad enough term to cover many different types of inferential activity in AI. We discussed four types: (1) Search theory, in which assumptions are made and retracted in an effort to find a problem solution; (2) ``Truth'' maintenance systems a la Doyle. There are foundational theories of belief in the sense of Harmon, with a set of unsupported premises underlying all beliefs. The key feature of these systems is their attempt to keep track of all justifications for belief, and to revise these justifications in the face of contradictory belief. (3) Database updates in the presence of integrity constraints or user-defined views, in which case the update can become ambiguous. The syntactic approach of Vardi et. al. was reviewed. (4) Ad-hoc approaches designed for particular domains, for example the simple ``believe what you see'' principle embedded in Shakey the robot. Ned Block made the interesting observation that belief revision in the AI context did not correspond to scientific theory revision as discussed in the philosophical literature; for example, the principle of simplicity did not seem to be a criterion for revision. This provoked a large amount of discussion. --Kurt Konolige ------------------------------ Date: 31 Jan 1985 14:20 EST (Thu) From: "Daniel S. Weld" Subject: Seminar - Nonlinear Planning (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Nonlinear Planning: A Rigorous Reconstruction Dave Chapman - AI Revolving Seminar The problem of achieving conjunctive goals has been central to domain-independent planning research; the nonlinear constraint-posting approach has been most successful. Previous planners of this type have been complicated, heuristic, and ill-defined. I will present a simple, precise algorithm and prove it correct and complete. The analytic tools I have developed in constructing this algorithm clarify previous planning research. The frame problem is revealed as the limiting factor in the range of applicability of state-of-the-art planners. I will suggest a new approach for future research. TUESDAY 2/5/85 4:00pm 8th floor playroom *** NOTE PERMANENT CHANGE OF DAY *** ------------------------------ Date: 31 Jan 85 11:47:59 EST From: Steven.Shafer@CMU-CS-IUS Subject: Seminar - Syllable Recognition (CMU) [Forwarded from the CMU-AI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Speaker: Renato DeMori, Concordia University, Montreal Topic: Parallel Algorithms for Syllable Recognition in Continuous Speech Dates: 5-Feb-85 Time: 3:30 pm Place: WeH 5409 The talk describes a distributed rule-based system for automatic speech recognition. Acoustic property extraction and feature hypothesization are performed by the application of sequences of operators. The sequences, called plans, are executed by cooperative expert programs. Experimental results on the automatic segmentation and recognition of phrases, made of connected letters and digits are described and discussed. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 28 Jan 85 09:15:56 pst From: gluck@SU-PSYCH (Mark Gluck) Subject: Conference - Cognitive Science Society [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] 7th Annual Conference of the COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY August 15-17, 1985 U.C. Irvine Call for Papers Submission Deadline: 11 MARCH 1985 Topics: Language Processing, Memory Models, Vision Processing, Belief Systems, Learning and Memory, Perception, Knowledge Representation, Inference Mechanisms Submission: Four copies, Papers: 5000 word maximum Posters: 2000 word maximum Include: named, address, phone number four key words abstract (100-250 words) total word length Send to: Richard Granger Computer Science Dept. University of California Irvine, CA 92717 ------------------------------ Date: Wed 30 Jan 85 09:46:10-PST From: C.S./Math Library Subject: Idaho State University Conference on Automated Reasoning and Expert Systems [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Idaho State University, Pocatello, Idaho, Dept. of Mathematics is sponsoring their 8th miniconference in the area of Automated Reasoning and Expert Systems. (Does anyone know if this means they have had 8 conferences on automated reasoning or that only the 8th conference is devoted to automated reasoning?) They have sent out a call for papers for the conference to be held in Pocatello on April 26-27, 1984. The people to contact are Larry Winter 208-236-2501 or Bob Girse 208-236-3819 Department of Math. Idaho State University, Pocatello Idaho 83209. Dr. Ewing Lusk of the Automated Reasoning Group at Argonne National Lab. will be the principal speaker. Is anyone familiar with any of the research in this area going on at Idaho State Univ.? Harry Llull ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 26 Jan 85 16:36:00 EST From: "Bruce D. Shriver" Subject: Conference - Systems Sciences Software CALL FOR: Papers, Referees, Session Coordinators, Task Forces ============================================================= SOFTWARE TRACK of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences ======================================================================== HICSS-19 is the ninteenth in a series of conferences devoted to advances in information and system sciences. The conference will encompass develop- ments theory and practice in the areas of systems architecture, software, decision support systems, and knowledge-based systems. The conference is sponsored by the University of Hawaii and the University of Southwestern Louisiana in cooperation with the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. It will be held on Jan. 8-10, 1986 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Papers, referees, and session coordinators are solicited in the following areas: Software Design Tools, Techniques, and Environments Models of System and Program Behavior Testing, Verification, and Validation Professional Workstation Environments Alternative Language Paradigms Reuseability in Design and Implementation Knowledge-Based Systems Software Algorithm Analysis and Animation Visual Languages Please submit six (6) copies of the full paper (not to exceed 26 double- spaced pages including diagrams) by July 5, 1985 directly to: Bruce D. Shriver HICSS-19 Software Track Coordinator IBM T. J. Watson Research Center PO Box 218, Route 134 Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 (914) 945-1664 csnet: shriver.yktvmv@ibm-sj ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 1 Feb 85 12:28:11 est From: minker@maryland (Jack Minker) Subject: AUTOMATH AND AUTOMATED REASONING WEEK AT MARYLAND MARCH 4-8, 1985 WEEK of AUTOMATH AND AUTOMATED REASONING at THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND MARCH 4 - MARCH 8, 1985 The Mathematics and Computer Science Departments at the University of Maryland at College Park and the National Sci- ence Foundation are jointly sponsoring a Special Year in Mathematical Logic and Theoretical Computer Science. The week of March 4-8, 1985 will be devoted to Automath and Automated Reasoning. There will be ten distinguished lec- tures as follows: Monday, March 4 1100-1230 Nicolas deBruin "THE AUTOMATH PROJECT" Monday, March 4 1500-1630 Jeffrey Zucker "FORMALIZATION OF CLASSICAL MATHEMATICS IN AUTOMATH" Tuesday, March 5 1000-1130 Woody Bledsoe "HIGH LEVEL PLANS FOR AN INEQUALITY PROVER" Tuesday, March 5 1400-1530 Larry Wos "AUTOMATED REASONING: INTRODUCTION AND APPLICA- TION" Wednesday, March 6 1100-1230 Larry Wos "AUTOMATED REASONING: OPEN QUESTIONS FROM ALGE- BRA AND FORMAL LOGIC" Wednesday, March 6 1430-1600 Woody Bledsoe "USING ANALOGY IN AUTOMATIC THEOREM PROVING" Thursday, March 7 1030-1200 Robert Constable "PROGRAMMING AS FORMAL MATHEMATICS" Thursday, March 7 1330-1500 Peter Andrews "TYPED LAMBDA CALCULUS AND AUTOMATIC THEOREM PROVING" Friday, March 8 1100-1230 Robert Constable "CONSTRUCTIVE MATHEMATICS AS PROGRAMMING" Friday, March 8 1330-1500 Peter Andrews "TOWARDS AUTOMATING HIGHER ORDER LOGIC" All lectures will be given at: Mathematics Building, Room Y3206 The lectures are open to the public. If you plan to attend kindly notify us so that we can make appropriate plans for space. Limited funds are available to support junior faculty and graduate students for the entire week or part of the week. To obtain funds, please submit an appli- cation listing your affiliation and send either a net mes- sage or a letter to: Jack Minker Department of Computer Science University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 (301) 454-6119 minker@maryland ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 4-FEB-1985 23:44 To: ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a001095; 4 Feb 85 19:10 EST Date: Mon 4 Feb 1985 14:46-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #13 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Mon, 4 Feb 85 23:40 EST AIList Digest Monday, 4 Feb 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 13 Today's Topics: AI Tools - Lisp Machine Graphing/Chart Software & Apple Lisa LISP, Philosophy - Philosophical Logic, Math - Large Sparse Systems of Linear Equations, Lists - Symbolics Users' Group, Hardware - Artificial Intelligence Chips, Applications - Computer Music & Oriental Languages, Culture - True Names, Humor - AI Joke Contest, Courses - The Scientific Essay (MIT) & AI in Medicine (MIT) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thursday, 31 January 1985, 14:32-EST From: Henry Lieberman Subject: Lisp machine graphing/chart software [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Has anybody got a package for generating graphs and charts on the Lisp machine [for example, the equivalent of Microsoft Chart]? ------------------------------ Date: 1 Feb 1985 12:35 EST (Fri) From: Steven Christopher Bagley Subject: LISPs for the Apple Lisa [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Are there are any reasonable LISP systems available for the Apple Lisa? Any pointers, leads, info,.... to Bagley@OZ. Thanks, Steve ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 4 Feb 85 20:41:48 -0200 From: eyal%wisdom.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA (Eyal mozes) Subject: Request for information I am looking for information about the application of traditional philosophical logic (such as Aristotle's rules of the syllogism, or Mill's laws of inductive logic) in computer science, particularly in Artificial Intelligence. I would be very grateful to anyone who can tell me where I can find any reports about work in this direction, or any papers discussing possibilities in this area. I would also be grateful for suggestions about people whose work is close enough to this area to have a good chance of knowing about such work. Eyal Mozes BITNET: eyal@wisdom CSNET and ARPA: eyal%wisdom.bitnet@wiscvm.ARPA UUCP: ..!decvax!humus!wisdom!eyal ------------------------------ Date: Thu 31 Jan 85 21:36:19-PST From: Jose Brazio Subject: Large sparse systems of linear equations - want information [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] I would appreciate if someone could give me some information on the problem of solving the equilibrium equations for a finite Markov chain. That is, I want to solve a system of the form q A = 0 where either A = I - P, with P being the transition probability matrix of a discrete time Markov chain, or A is the rate transition matrix of a continuous time Markov chain. In any case, the matrix A is large (as large as I can get away with) and sparse, the fraction of nonzero elements being of the order of ln N / N (N = order of A). I would like to know (1) If there is any solution method especially appropriate (i.e., exploiting the special structure of A) for this problem; (2) Pointers to literature on implementation issues, data structures, etc.; alternatively, if there is any package with an appropriate subroutine (neither NAG or IMSL seem to have one). Thanks. Jose Brazio ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 2 Feb 85 01:31 EST From: Tim Finin Subject: Symbolics Users' Group I posted a note last week asking about "a network mailing list for users of Symbolics Lisp machines". I received several replies pointing me toward SLUG@UTEXAS-20, a mailing list for the "Symbolics Lisp Users Group". This mailing list is maintained by Rich Cohen (CMP.COHEN@UTEXAS-20). Requests to be added to the mailing list should be sent to SLUG-REQUEST@UTEXAS-20 and submissions to SLUG@UTEXAS-20. This mailing list reportedly does not see a great deal of traffic at present. Tim ------------------------------ Date: Sat 2 Feb 85 22:04:51-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: Artificial Intelligence Chips Wayne McGuire (MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC) has called my attention to a New York Times article by Andrew Pollack, 1/24/85, p. D2, Chips to Spur Intelligence. Some excerpts: [...] artificial intelligence chips are so close to reality that this year that, for the first time, a panel will be devoted to the topic at the international Solid State Circuit Conference, the annual scientific meeting for microchip designers that will be held in New York next month. [...] Texas Instruments Inc., which sells a LISP machine, is working under a Defense Department contract to shrink virtually the entire machine onto a single chip by 1986. Symbolics Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., another vendor of such machines, says it is also working on shrinking its machine onto a chip over the next several years. And Motorola is believed to be considering the development of a LISP co-processor that would work alongside its 68000 microprocessor and speed its handling of artificial intelligence tasks. [...] Proximity Technology Inc. of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., has developed a chip that looks for similarities between strings of characters. Today, a computer will be stumped by a simple spelling error in its instructions. An intelligent computer, however, when asked to search a data base for information on "Los Angelees," would recognize that that probably means "Los Angeles." [...] Such pattern-matching chips could also be useful for speech recognition [...] Developing a meaningful artificial intelligence chip will require putting at least 10 million logic elements, or gates, onto a single piece of silicon, according to Raj Reddy, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. That is 10 times the number of elements that can now be put on even the most advanced chips, he said. [...] "By the year 2000, it's reasonable to have one billion gates on a chip." [...] ------------------------------ Date: Sat 2 Feb 85 21:50:12-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: Computer Music A Stanford bboard item mentioned a 1/29/85 AP article on automated music transcription. This may be relevant to the problem of recognizing bird songs (AIList Vol. 3, No. 10). Some excerpts: Computer Prints Mozart From Piano By STEVE WILSTEIN Associated Press Writer STANFORD, Calif. (AP) - Roll over Beethoven, and take a look at a computer that can transcribe Mozart just by ''listening'' to a piano. An artificial intelligence program developed by Stanford University printed out a minuet from a Mozart symphony, complete with accents, meters and notes on a five-line staff, researchers said Tuesday. The computer has a bit more trouble with the syncopation of ragtime or the funk of Michael Jackson, and can't transcribe harmony. But researchers believe polyphony is less than two years away, and computer jam sessions may be possible. ''It shows there is really good potential,'' said research associate Bernard Mont-Reynaud. ''We've had success with the single voice. Now we're gearing up with new machines to do polyphonic transcription. We should be able to do a full piano piece or string quartet within 1 1/2 years.'' [...] ''My hope is these things will connect someday,'' Mont-Reynaud said. ''You can play something, it gets analyzed, and software transforms it and responds. A musician and a computer can play together.'' ------------------------------ Date: 1 Feb 85 05:59:30 EST From: Ping.Kang.Hsiung@CMU-CS-UNH Subject: a good article on IEEE COMPUTER [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] For those who are interested in gaining some knowledge on the Chinese/Japanese/Korean languages, the article written by Joseph Becker in Jan 85's *IEEE Computer* provides an extremely rare opportunity. This paper highlights the features of the idiographic writing systems, and gives intelligent description of the structure of written and spoken Chinese/Kanji. It also discusses some possible approaches and related problems to "computerize" these languages--which used to be, and still are the subject of calligraphic creation. Mr. Becker is a remarkable reseacher in this field as well as an excellent writter. His paper is well organized, easy to read, yet gives very precise illustration of some certain abstract concepts in these beautiful languages. His previous article dealing with a similar topic and published on June, 1984's *Scientific American* is also very good. (As a person who holds Chinese as his mother-tongue, i actually feel quite embarrassed by the fact that here is this *foreigner* who studys my language so deep and detailed, such that i have to from time to time stop reading and think for a while before agree with him.) ------------------------------ Date: 30 Jan 85 09:54 PST From: Tom Perrine Subject: "True Names" Vernor Vinge's classic SF/AI novella is back in print! The latest edition is from Bluejay Books, in a larger-format paperback. This edition features an afterword by Dr. Marvin Minsky. The book is worth buying just for the afterword, although I originally bought the book because I was familiar with the story. The book was a Hugo nominee several years ago (1981, I think). I strongly recommend it to anyone in the Cognitive Science field. (Actually, I recommend it to *everyone* I know.) Tom Perrine "tom@logicon.arpa" ------------------------------ Date: Fri 1 Feb 85 11:46:39-EST From: Bob Hall Subject: AI JOKES (with a twist) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Well, the AI Joke Contest is winding down and so far the response has been minimal (but non-zero). There IS still time to enter, but there is now a deadline of postmark by Feb. 25. Since there has been some griping about actually having to find a stamp and some paper, I HAVE AGREED TO BE A NETWORK ADDRESS FOR ENTRIES. So send 'em to me, rjh@oz, and I'll send 'em in for ya. Include all the same info. Here's a reminder ... AI Joke Contest Come up with a good cocktail-party-worthy joke about some aspect of AI and win a U.C., Berkeley T-shirt! Enter as many times as you like. Winner (exactly one) will be judged solely on the number of ``HA''s evoked from the impartial panel of judges. Ties will be broken by earliest postmark and contest ends Feb 25, 1985. To be eligible for a prize, you must include your address and t-shirt size. Entries become property of the judges. To Enter: Mail via US Mail your entry in any legible format to (or send via net mail to rjh@oz) AI Jokes 1717 Allston Way Berkeley, CA 94703 Enter Now! ------------------------------ Date: 31 Jan 1985 2117-EST (Thursday) From: dndobrin@mit-charon (David N. Dobrin) Subject: Course - The Scientific Essay (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Name: 21.780 The Scientific Essay Time: TR 3:30 - 5:00 Place: 4-260 (Probably) This is simultaneously a historical course in essays on the mind and a writing course, for people who write sentences like this one and wish they wouldn't. The reading begins with James and Freud. It then moves to artificial intelligence and cognitive science--the usual Tuuring, Simon, Minsky, Fodor stuff, with the addition of (dare I say it) Dreyfus and Searle. The writing is partly on the essays and partly on anything you want. (If you have something you've got to get done, you can write it in this class.) The course is designed for undergraduates. Taking courses with similar reading (24.09) is helpful, but not required. ------------------------------ Date: 28 January 1985 16:40-EST From: Rosemary B. Hegg Subject: Course - AI in Medicine (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] SPRING TERM SEMINAR The following course will be offered next term: 6.891 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN MEDICINE (A) Prereq: 6.824 or equivalent. 6.871 in addition is recommended. G(2) 3-0-9 Friday 9-12, Room 26-314. Enrollmment may be limited to preserve a seminar atmosphere. This seminar course will explore the state of the art of AI in medicine research. Much of the methodology of ``expert systems'' was first developed for medical applications, and the field of medicine continues to provide excellent problems for challenging AI work. The intent of this course is to assess the accomplishments of over a decade of work in this field, to identify and study those problems now thought to be central to further progress, and to review the most interesting current approaches to these problems. Topics to be covered include: 1. The rationale for medical reasoning systems; their possible use as error-detectors, consultants and teachers; historical non-AI approaches to medical decision making. Pragmatic constraints and opportunities provided by the needs of the health-care system. 2. A rapid review of the original AI programs for medicine, looking at the strengths and weaknesses of simple rule-based reasoning programs such as MYCIN and simple frame-matching programs such as INTERNIST and PIP. 3. Consideration of knowledge representations that make explicit the anatomical, physiological, temporal and causal inter-relationships in medicine; new reasoning methods (e.g., CADUCEUS) that can exploit a number of these representations. 4. Reasoning at multiple levels of detail, thus integrating reasoning based on associations drawn from experience with reasoning based on an analysis of the structure and function of the body (e.g., ABEL.) 5. Analysis of the generic problem solving tasks (e.g., classification, construction, debugging) in diagnostic and therapeutic reasoning, and consideration of programs that adapt their methods to the problem at hand. 6. Generation of explanations and justifications of a program's knowledge, reasoning strategies, and conclusions. 7. Knowledge acquisition. Learning from textbooks, by disagreement with experts, and from experience. Analysis of protocols of expert behavior. This seminar will be an advanced-level course, intended only for students with a strong artificial intelligence background. The textbook will be "Readings in Medical Artificial Intelligence: The First Decade" by Clancey and Shortliffe, and a large number of additional papers. Each student will write a substantial term paper, and there will be short (?) research problems that involve building small systems. Instructor: Prof. Peter Szolovits, NE43-365, 3-3476, ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: COMSAT 6-FEB-1985 05:33 To: RETRIEVAL,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a007811; 5 Feb 85 22:09 EST Date: Tue 5 Feb 1985 13:27-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #14 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Wed, 6 Feb 85 05:17 EST AIList Digest Tuesday, 5 Feb 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 14 Today's Topics: AI Tools - Common Lisp ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 4 Feb 85 13:43:34 EST From: Charles Hedrick Subject: Common Lisp and Lexical Bindings I saw a comment on AIList about Common Lisp that should probably be answered. The claim is that the Gold-Hill CL interpreter is faster than the VAX interpreter because the VAX interpreter does lexical bindings. This is almost certainly false. During the early design stages of Elisp (the extended-addressing TOPS-20 UCI Lisp), I tried several different binding strategies. I found that in the interpreter there was almost no difference in speed caused by a full A-list binding strategy. This should be about the same as implementing lexical bindings in the obvious way. The main problem with lexical binding in the interpreter is that it uses CONS cells, since most implementations use some sort of binding list to keep local bindings. This it causes more GC's. In the DEC-20 CL, I construct these lists on the stack, since bindings are not needed once you exit from the routine in which they are made. If someone constructs a lexical closure, I copy all bindings from the stack to the heap. But this happens fairly seldom. The mechanisms needed to do the copying from stack to heap are somewhat delicate, but it can be made to work. There are also implementations using indirect pointers, if that turns out to be reasonable on your machine. A CL interpreter will probably be slower than a Maclisp interpreter, because of a number of things: - lexical closures - the & binding options - multiple values Each of these things can be implemented without adding serious overhead, but the affect of all of them together is noticable. However I think a properly tuned interpreter should be able to get within a factor of 1.5 of Maclisp. The current DEC-20 Common Lisp is entirely interpreted. Even system functions are supplied in interpreted form. Although more speed would be desirable (Our compiler will be out Real Soon Now), one can certainly do real work in our system. I can see that someone might want to produced a stripped-down pseudo-CL for some sort of real-time work. In that case, a lot of thought would have to go into what to leave out. I do not think it makes sense to leave out only lexical binding. That alone does not cause serious performance problems. The real problem is the size of the language, and the number of options, particularly in the sequence functions. This means that good performance can be obtained only by careful special-case optimizing. Unfortunately the language is so large that a compiler that does appropriate optimizations will take a while to develop. ------------------------------ Date: 22 Sep 84 05:11:10 EDT From: Charles Hedrick Subject: report of meeting about Common Lisp [Forwarded from the Rutgers bboard, with permission from the author. I just recently discovered this September message. -- KIL] This is a report on the Common Lisp Workshop, held at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterrey, CA, 18 and 19 Sept 84. The meeting was called by ARPA, to examine the present state of CL, and to make suggestions on where it should go next. The attendees were mostly associated with organizations that were implementing CL or thinking of doing so, though there were also some user organizations. There was a mix of Universities, commercial vendors, etc. The main thrust of the meeting seemed to be how CL would make the transition between a nice idea dreamed up by a few language designers to a language that is being supported by a large number of vendors and required by ARPA. My discussion will follow the overall organization of the sessions. (However this order is not chronological. It is organized so that some of my users won't have to wade through technical details to see what is likely to be of the most interest to them.) ARPA policy Subsets Organizational issues Proposed extensions Workstation/server architecture Multi-processing facilities I. ARPA Policy The folks who were here from ARPA were Ron Ohlander and Steve Squires. Apparently Ron will be leaving ARPA (when? I didn't get the time - I think within a year), and Squires will end up carrying the ball for CL. Ron did most of the talking in this meeting. One of the factors that is going to change the nature of CL is the fact the ARPA is planning to push it strongly. No final decisions are made, but it looks like ARPA is going to require and/or strongly suggest that CL be used for its research contracts. This will be particularly the case for the Strategic Computing project, since they intend for all contractors involved in that project to be able to share code. They made all the normal qualifications about doing this in a way that will not stiffle innovation, and allowing exceptions as appropriate. But the evidence is that they will exert very strong pressure towards CL. (They mentioned in passing that they also plan to specify that systems they pay for should use TCP/IP for networking. Incidentally, they also said that if you want the RFP for the Strategic Computing initiative in new architectures, you should ask for N0039-84-R-0605(Q) from the Naval Electronics Systems Command, Code 2013. The following phone number is not for Code 2013, but they can refer you: 202-692-6085.) One of the amusing results of ARPA's policies is that there is now a bit of a battle over how much of CL you have to implement in order to qualify. Certain vendors seem to be interested in providing some degree of CL compatibility within their existing Lisps, and on that basis want to be qualified to participate in cases where CL is specified. It is not clear to what extent they have sound technical reasons for not wanting to do full CL, and to what extent they feel that they don't have time to do so soon enough. ARPA seems to be willing to put at some money into helping CL get off the ground, and also to supplying some clerical support, and possibly legal and organizational advice. II. Subsets One of the questions which was posed is whether the CL community should specify one or more official subsets. There are a number of reasons why subsets might be desirable: - several people have proposed a subset for teaching purposes. The language is so big that many courses would probably prefer not to deal with the whole thing. It might be helpful if different texts would use the same subset. This could promote a competitive marketplace. It might also be nice if our AI textbooks and our Lisp programming intro assumed the same subset! This might not mean a special implementation, since it would be easy enough to hide the names of the functions that are not in the subset. Instructional applications also tend to be on small machines, and so might also fall afoul of the second requirement: - it might be nice to implement CL on small machines. Existing CL implementations seem to take between 1 and 2.5 Mbytes of ram (more if you count editors, etc.). It would be nice to be able to have CL for the Macintosh and other smaller machines. - full CL has features that may make it hard to do efficient implementations. This could be important for slower micros. But it also affects people interested in doing "embedded systems", i.e. things that have to go inside missles, or that have to do process control, etc. Examples of such features are lexical binding, multiple values, and sequence functions. There was considerable disagreement over how significant this issue is. Some felt that with enough work all of these problems could be overcome, but it does seem clear that the first implementations of full CL are going to be noticably slower than simpler Lisps such as PSL. - some vendors may not find it practical to implement full CL immediately. They would like to be able to start with a subset, and have that be enough to qualify them to participate in projects for which ARPA wants CL to be used. There was no concensus on this issue. Discussion of subsets got off to a slow start, but it kept coming up, and tempers starting getting hotter as time went on. Here is my reading of the general reactions: - people seemed to agree that an educational subset might be useful and was harmless. No one seemed to feel that the CL designers or this meeting were ready to specify such a subset. So it seems that textbook writers will be left on their own, at least until we see how a few of these subsets turn out. - little was said about the small-machine problem. - there was a lot of discussion about the last two types of subsets. (They are hard to separate.) There were strong feelings on both sides. Some people feel that only a full CL should be called CL, and that we should not encourage subsets. Even the most extreme holders of this view did feel sympathetic to purveyors of existing Lisp implementations, and did agree that they should be encouraged to provide whatever degree of CL compatibility they felt they could manage. This issue is obviously going to come up again at the next meeting, and will be discussed hotly with ARPA in the meantime. ARPA will have a strong effect on this. If they plan to require use of CL, then they will have the final say on what they mean by CL. There will surely be subsets of this kind. I would be willing to bet that ARPA will allow it for embedded systems and process control, where there are clear technical reasons. I have no idea what they will do in other cases. (Maybe the Ada approach, where subsets are allowed as long as there is a clear plan to move to a full implementation.) There is also some indication that ARPA may find it acceptable to do work in another Lisp as long as there is a program to translate the results into CL. Clearly a subset would qualify here. Note that some of these "subsets" may not be real subsets. It is likely that they will have to add a few features. E.g. those implementors who do not want to bear the overhead of generic sequence functions may add a few type-specific functions, such as STRING-CONCAT. It is quite likely that people who do this will want these functions added to the full language, so that their implementations will be true subsets. III. Organizational issues It is interesting to see how much difference it makes that this language is going to be supported by vendors. They want to make sure - that the language is well-defined. This means that there is some authoritative way to answer questions, and that a validation procedure is developed (including a validation suite). - that it is possible to make changes where implementation experience shows that it is desirable, or as the CL community comes up with important new ideas - that changes to the language do not happen too quickly - that their interests are represented in whatever group is authorized to change the language. It is clear that these requirements imply a person or persons who control the development of the language. Initially the language was designed primarily by a group of 5 people (the so-called "gang of 5"), with participation by many others over the Arpanet. The vendors that I heard would like for those original designers to continue to have a strong influence over the language. (Indeed the Gang of 5 is probably the most enthusiastic to turn things over a formal organization.) Most people see that we are going to start some organization analogous to a standards committee. However most people do not want to be involved in ANSI, ISO, etc. The feeling seems to be that there is too much bureacracy, and that CL still needs enough clarification and additions that we could not tolerate the delays involved in conventional standards organizations. Clearly some vendors would like to see an ANSI standard eventually, but everyone seems to agree that we are not ready yet. Here is a partial list of things that the people responsible for the language have to handle: - some way to process proposals for changes to the language. Everyone envisions that some sort of vote of a large CL community will be required to approve changes. (This has been true all along, except for last-minute details.) So we are looking for a person or persons to receive suggestions, distribute them for comment, and conduct votes if appropriate. I suspect that this group might also solict suggestions and possible make some themselves. - some way to give authoritative answers to questions that call for an interpretation of the language specification - destribution of any decisions that result from these two processes to all interested parties - an archive of all decisions, and possible of all discussion - a "delta document". This would represent all changes that will show up in the next edition of the CL manual. I.e. it is with respect to the most recently published edition of the CL manual. - new editions of the CL manual. Initially this may happen as often as once a year - maintenance of online documentation. This would be used by builtin help facilities, etc. This will require some negotiation with Digital Press, as they currently hold a copyright for the manual. - licensing special editions of the manual. Vendors may want to intersperse details of their implementation in the text, so that the user has a single, integrated manual for Vendor X's CL. Most people seem to feel that this is OK as long as the manual contains the unadulterated text of the official CL manual, with all additions being set off visibly (e.g. printed in a contrasting color). They may also allow subsets to cut parts of the CL manual, but this will require that there is a clear disclaimer that this is not CL. Anyway, somebody is going to have to set reprint policies and monitor what is going on. This will also have to be done in conjunction with Digital Press. - a test/validation suite. - implementation notes - a library of public-domain CL code (the "yellow pages" library) - a group to vote on changes and matters of policy. Generally some way of providing "legitimacy" to the whole process. - trademarking of the language. We are not sure whether it is too late to trademark CL. One proposal is to trademark CL-84, CL-85, etc. The date would be associated with a test suite (and probably also an edition of the manual - these would be issued at the same time). There is no clear concensus that trademarking is needed, but it should at least be looked into. - budget for clerical support, mailings, and other expenses associated with the above. We have an interim arrangement to handle all of this for the next 6 months. A committee will make a proposal for a permanent organization to take effect at the end of 6 months. Probably there will be another CL workshop at that time. The CL mailing list will continue to be used to take votes on major issues, and generally to represent the CL community as a whole. This list may be split, as there seem to be some people who are just random users, and do not want to (or should not) participate in the design decisions. The gang of 5 will moderate the mailing list, and will also continue to take somewhat of a leadership role in technical matters, i.e. answering questions, coordinating proposed changes, etc. This coordination includes maintaining archives, the delta document, etc. They will investigate some of the other issues, such as licensing the manual for online use and special editions, trademarks, and preparation of an initial budget. (This budget will probably be covered by ARPA.) They will try to do something about the Yellow Pages library. (There is actually already one at CMU. Maybe this will just continue for the interim period.) Committees were appointed to propose extensions to the language in several important areas (see below). The results will be discussed on the CL mailing list. There is also a committee to propose a permanent organization. It is likely that some funding will be needed for the 6 month interim, if only to handle clerical support. There way a broad hint that the Gang of 5 might find ARPA receptive to a proposal that ARPA fund this. IV. Proposed extensions No one was crazy enough to propose that we should come up with extensions to CL on the spot during the meeting. Instead we tried to agree on what areas are the most important to look into. Committees volunteered to look into each of these areas. We hope that they will propose extensions. I think most of us agree that the actual language design is going to be done by individuals or very small groups in each case. The committees are thus the people who want to be in on initial discussions, and also people who are considering writing proposals or parts of proposals. Here was the initial set of extensions proposed: object-oriented programming window support error handling multiprocessing support graphics iteration (e.g. some sort of macros for writing loops) facilities to monitor the internal state of Lisp interface to the surrounding system networking interface to database facilities configuration and version management tools pattern matching calling foreign (non-Lisp) functions destructuring international character sets program manipulation facilities coercion among numerical types storage management We took a vote, giving each person 6 votes. Most of the above received 0 to 4 votes. The only significant votes were for the following items. almost 100% - object-oriented programming almost 100% - error handling about 50% - display support (windows, etc.) about 50% - calling foreign (non-Lisp) functions about 33% - iteration about 33% - graphics These are the areas for which committees were set up. V. Workstation/server architecture A number of people expect that we will continue to have systems of differing power. That is, in your office will be something for around $15K. It will be able to handle CL. You will do a lot of your development work on it. But when you want to process a lot of real-world data, you will want a more powerful machine. These machines would likely be $100K or more. The folks from ARPA seemed to feel that configurations like this would be important for their Strategic Computing projects. The issue put before us was what sort of language facilities are needed to support this. No one seemed to feel that we knew enough of this sort of thing that we were ready to add such facilities to the language. Of course individual researchers would make extensions in the course of their research. But we would like to see several such projects before adopting a particular design permanently. VI. Multi-processing facilities This discussion was somewhat similar to the previous one. We envision multiprocessing as becoming more important as time goes on. Again, the Strategic Computing project is likely to use this. The question is what language facilities will be needed to support multiprocessing. No one feels we know enough about this area to say at the moment. Brief mention was made of several pieces of work in this area: Gabriel's work at Stanford Halstead's at MIT Both of these are shared-memory. the remote sensing project at CMU. Multiple PERQ's with CL. Uses the facilities of the PERQ OS. This is more like conventional networking. BBN's butterfly project. Many 68000 systems in parallel, with a Lisp Machine as a front end to supply the user interface. Both the 68000's and the LM will use CL. It is clear that there are not only many different approaches, but even more than one basic model (shared memory and networking are sort of the opposite ends of the spectrum). In the end we may need language facilities to support both styles. But nobody is ready to say much at the moment. Anyone interested in working on multiprocessing support is invited to send mail to RPG@SU-AI to be added to a mailing list. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: COMSAT 6-FEB-1985 23:56 To: RETRIEVAL,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a009985; 6 Feb 85 8:16 EST Date: Tue 5 Feb 1985 23:30-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #15 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Wed, 6 Feb 85 23:47 EST AIList Digest Wednesday, 6 Feb 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 15 Today's Topics: AI Tools - LOOP Macro under CommonLisp & Relational Database System, Games - Cubic, Math - Inverse Laplace Transform Problem, News - Recent Articles, Report - Conditionals in Logic, AI Tools - Chez Scheme, Seminar - The Digital Orrery (Boston SICPLAN) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 05 Feb 85 14:00:37 PST (Tue) From: Steve Smith Subject: LOOP macro under CommonLisp Has anybody hacked up the old MIT Loop macro to work under vanilla CommonLisp (eg. DEC's CommonLisp)? --Steve Smith (ssmith%nrtc@usc-ecl) ------------------------------ Date: 5 Feb 15:02:33 1985 From: des.allegra.btl@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Relational Database System Does anyone have or know where to find a relational database management system written in Zetalisp for the Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machine? Thanks, Douglas Stumberger U.S. Post: AT&T Bell Laboratories Room 3C-438 600 Mountain Ave. Murray Hill, N.J. 07974 csnet: allegra!des%ucb-vax@csnet-relay.arpa uucp: allegra!des Phone: 201.582.5251 ------------------------------ Date: 4 February 1985 1232-EST From: Hans Berliner@CMU-CS-A Subject: The game Cubic [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] A few years ago someone proved that the game Cubic (4x4x4) tic-tac-toe is a win for the first player. If anyone has a reference to this paper I would very much appreciate getting it. ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 4-Feb-85 13:49:53-GMT From: GORDON JOLY (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: Points Arising. Two points from Vol 3 # 11. The Symbolics stock price reminds me on the Britsh Telecom share issue, where the price went from 50 pence to around 130 pence in the space of about two months. (Bob Beckman is reported to be using a dog to figure the market, `one bark for buy, two barks for sell'.) Secondly, the transform in Vol 3 # 10 is not a Laplace transform at all! It is really a Carson-Heaviside transform. (Thanks to all the guys in 201 for pointing this out). From Vol 3 #9 & 10, I believe requests for addition to the net.math.symbolic mailing list should be sent to lseward@randgr. Gordon Joly. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 4 Feb 85 20:39:49-PST From: Douglas Galbraith Subject: answer to Inverse Laplace Transform problem [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Several people have asked for the answer to the transform problem I put on the bboard about a week ago. So here's the solution for all of those who asked. (Sorry about the delay. I'm only here two days a week. So I don't get to my mail very often.) Just to remind everyone, the original problem was: 1 1 F(S) = --- * ---------------------------------- S exp[-A*sqrt(S)] + exp[A*sqrt(S)] The inverse Laplace transform of this equation is: +infinity -- (-1)^N f(t) = 1 + PI/4 * > -------- * exp[-(2N-1)^2*t*PI^2/(4*A^2)] -- 2N-1 N=1 I solved it with the help of the "Mathematical Handbook of Formulas and Tables" by Murray R. Speigel from the Schaum's outline series. The inverse transform is number 32.153 on page 171. For those who want to try it on their own, here are three hints. HINT #1: Convert to infinite series and infinite products. HINT #2: The original equation is also equal to: 1 1 F(S) = --- * ----------------- S cosh[A*sqrt(S)] G[sqrt(S)] HINT #3: The inverse Laplace Transform of ---------- is: S infinity / 1 | ---------- | exp[-u^2/(4*t)]*g(u)*du sqrt[pi*t] | / 0 where g(u) is the inverse transform of G(S). The original problem is a simplified version of a general equation I'm working on: 1 1 cosh[B*sqrt(S)] F(S) = --- - --- * --------------------------------------------- S S cosh[A*sqrt(S)] + C*sqrt(S)*sinh[A*sqrt(S)] where "A", "B", and "C" are real constants, and "S" is the variable. I've solved it for C=0, and I'm now working on the non-zero case. The general case looks like it's going to keep me busy a while. Good luck, Douglas Galbraith ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 4 Feb 85 04:59:13 cst From: Laurence Leff Subject: Recent Articles Electronic News Monday January 28, 1985 Page 11 The European Economic Community Commission approved 104 projects submitted to the Euyropean Strategic Program for Research and Development in Information Technology (Esprit). Although, they probably approved several projects of interest to AIer's, the only such project mentioned was a contract for "a cognitive simulator for user interface design" involving ITT of Great Britain, Logos Projetti of Italy and the Applied Psychology Unit of Cambridge University in Britain. The DEC Professional, January 1985, Page 82 Shape of Machines to Come Discusses clustering, pipelines, parallel processors, dataflow architecture, symbolic manipulation, the Japanese ICOT effort, the MCC and DARPA. Although most of this material would be known by most, if not all of this audience; of particular interest is a list of some projects at DEC and IBM. AT DEC, they have 35 separate AI/expert system projects. XSITE helps site planners prepare customer sites for new VAX installations. AI SPEAR helps DEC Field Service Engineers diagnose and prevent TU-78 tape drive failures. They also have an intelligent DCL interpreter and cDx which helps VAX managers diagnose system crashes. Dec is working on an 'AI Engine,' a high speed RISC system. It is rumored that DEC will be unveiling a parallel processor or AI machine based on the single chip MICRO-VAX II 'in the 1988 timeframe.' IBM alledgedly is marketing Epistle which reads electronic mail and summarizes messages. IBM is rumored to be soon announceing PROLOG. Also mentions the National Bureau of Standards Center for Manufacturing Engineering which has a 5000 square foot fully automated machine shop. Computer, December 1984 "Top-Down Construction of 3-D Mechanical Object Shapes from Engineering Drawings.", page 32 Discusses a natural language interface which assists with disambiguating conventional orthographic projections which are being converted into Constructive Solid Geometry representations. "Alvey reconsiders complexity of Expert Systems" Page 106 In the report of Alex d'Agapeyeff to the British Alvey many expert systems were developed at low cost by people not trained in Artificial Intelligence. Often they were developed without benefit of expert system development tools and even in such languages as FORTRAN and BASIC. Examples are: A system to analyze crash dumps (developed by two knowledge engineers and one domain expert in 20 calendar weeks). It fully analyzed 91 per cent of the dumps that the expert was able to fully analyze and partially analyzed 57% of those that the expert was able to partially analyze. British Telecom developed a system in MICRO-PROLOG on a Z-80 system for analyzing PABX power supply problems. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 30 Jan 85 17:26:40-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Report - Conditionals in Logic [Extracted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] A new CSLI Report by Jon Barwise, ``The Situation in Logic--II: Conditionals and Conditional Information'' (Report No. CSLI--85--21), has been published. To obtain a copy of this report write to Dikran Karagueuzian, CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford 94305 or send net mail to Dikran at SU-CSLI. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 4 Feb 85 00:24:27 est From: Kent Dybvig Subject: Chez Scheme => Chez Scheme Chez Scheme is an implementation of Scheme for Vaxes running 4.2 Bsd Unix. Chez Scheme supports all required and most optional features of the anticipated Scheme standard. The first Chez Scheme release will include an extensive reference manual. A Chez Scheme tutorial is in preparation for later releases. Features of Scheme: o Clean, concise dialect of Lisp o Lexically scoped (as is Common Lisp) o Full function closures (first-class, full funarg) o Tail-recursion reliably translated into iteration o Full upward/downward continuations Features of Chez Scheme: o Incremental native-code (Vax object code) compiler o Flexible user interface o Fast-loading compiled files o Very fast arbitrary precision integer and rational arithmetic o Programmable exception handlers o Support for multi-tasking (timer interrupts, continuations) o String and vector operations o Macros and structures o Engines (a process abstraction) Application programs distributed with the first release of Chez Scheme include a set operation package, a logic programming subsystem, a lazy-cons facility, and a generic matrix, vector and scalar multiplication package. Faster than many Lisp systems, Chez Scheme may be the fastest Scheme available. On the Vax 11/780, Chez Scheme is competitive with benchmarks reported for Franz Lisp and Digital Common Lisp at last summer's AAAI conference in Austin, TX. For example, Chez Scheme runs the "Tak" benchmark in 3.4 cpu seconds and the "Deriv" benchmark in 21.9 cpu seconds. The code tested contained no declarations, used generic arithmetic, and had no inlined calls. No separate compilation phase is necessary: all code loaded into Chez Scheme is compiled incrementally. Chez Scheme is available for mid-March distribution to US educational institutions only. We will send a license agreement to interested parties. There is a $400 distribution fee. We are not yet able to do foreign or commercial distributions, but contact us if you are interested. Write for a copy of the license agreement and ordering information to: R. Kent Dybvig Department of Computer Science New West Hall (035-A) University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27514 USA decvax!mcnc!unc!dyb (usenet) dyb.unc@Csnet-Relay (ARPANET) ------------------------------ Date: 4 Feb 1985 08:06:17-EST From: psm@Mitre-Bedford Subject: Boston SICPLAN seminar Boston SICPLAN (Special Interest Committee on Programming Languages) is a local affiliate of the ACM SIGPLAN group and vaguely associated with and chartered by the Greater Boston area chapter of the ACM. It normally meets once a month, usually on the first Thursday, almost always at 8 p.m., and normally at either BBN or Intermetrics. Its talks are often of interest to people working in the fields of programming languages and compilers, environments, artificial intelligence, and data/knowledge base management. Past speakers over the last 16 months have included Marvin Minsky, Seymour Pappert, Bob Morgan, Pam Zave, Doug Hofstadter, Richard LeBlanc, Barry Boehm, Adele Goldberg, Mahadevan Ganapathi, Frank Belz, Norm DeLisle, Mark Miller, Richard Gabriel, Maurice Wilkes, Tom Love, and Ray Buhr. Its next talk is scheduled for this Thursday, February 7: ACM GREATER BOSTON CHAPTER SICPLAN Thursday, February 7, 1985 8 P.M. Bolt Beranek and Newman, new auditorium 70 Fawcett St., Cambridge The Design of the Digital Orrery by Gerald Jay Sussman MIT I will talk about the Orrery, a special computer for high-speed, high-precision, orbital mechanics computations. The people who were involved in the design and construction of the Orrery are James H. Applegate, Michael R. Douglas, Yekta Gursel, Peter Hunter, Charles L. Seitz and Gerald Jay Sussman. On the problems the Orrery was designed to solve, it achieves approximately 10 Mflops in about one cubic foot of space while consuming 150 watts of power. The specialized parallel architecture of the Orrery, which is well matched to orbital mechanics problems, is the key to obtaining such high performance. In this talk I will explain the scientific reasons for building the Orrery. I will discuss the design, construction, and programming of the Orrery. I will show how the design of a computer is really a problem of software engineering. I will also show a few preliminary results of a 110 million year integration of the outer planets using the Orrery. ACM GREATER BOSTON CHAPTER SICPLAN Dear Colleague, Our February speaker, Gerry Sussman, is a professor at MIT, where he is very active in AI research. He is probably best known for his work on the Scheme dialect of Lisp and for the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which he coauthored with Harold Abelson and is now using for what has become a fairly famous programming course for incoming MIT freshmen. The Orrery system that he will describe in his talk is an attempt to investigate the extent to which massively parallel computer architectures and algorithms can be used to help solve hard scientific problems. Mitch Wand, who is currently visiting Brandeis, has agreed to give our March talk. The talk on his Semantic Prototyping System is tentatively scheduled for March 7 in the Intermetrics atrium. Our group customarily meets informally for dinner at Joyce Chen's restaurant, 390 Rindge Ave., Cambridge at 6:00 P.M. (just before the meeting). If you wish to come, please call Carolyn Elson at Intermetrics 661-1840 as early as possible so we can make the appropriate dinner reservation. Peter Mager chairperson, Boston SICPLAN ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 8-FEB-1985 06:55 To: RETRIEVAL,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a003103; 8 Feb 85 2:25 EST Date: Thu 7 Feb 1985 22:21-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #16 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 8 Feb 85 06:53 EST AIList Digest Friday, 8 Feb 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 16 Today's Topics: AI Tools - Scheme for MS-DOS & IBM VM/CMS Lisp & SUN PSL & ADA and LISP Standards, Applications - Command and Control, Seminars - The Totality of Knowledge (SU) & Logic and Functional Programming (CSLI) & AI and Distributed Computing (MIT) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 6 Feb 85 18:22:48 PST From: Richard K. Jennings Subject: Scheme for MS-DOS Is there a source of documentation for Scheme, and an implementation for small MS-DOS machines? Would appreciate any information on this topic. Rich. AFSCF/XRP PO Box 3430 Sunnyvale, CA 94088-3430 (408) 744-6427 AV: 799-6427 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 6 Feb 85 9:04:33 EST From: Pierre duPont Subject: IBM VM/CMS Lisp I am trying to locate information about what Lisp interpreters and/or compilers are available on IBM VM/CMS mainframes. So far, the only one I have identified is from IBM, and as yet I know very little about it. I am interested in any flavor of lisp, preferrably Common Lisp, and would like to get the names of companies, people, or whatever, who have experience with or know about VM/CMS Lisps. Thanks, - Pierre pdupont@bbn-unix.arpa ------------------------------ Date: 06 Feb 85 11:59:58 PST (Wed) From: peck@sri-spam Subject: AI, Lisp, Graphics on SUN computers? I would like to hear from anyone using SUN computers who can supply answers or comments on any of these issues: Is Franz the only (best) lisp available? Has anyone used the Maryland Flavors to create useful tools/extensions? Any support for sun graphics (windows, menus,etc) a la Interlisp-D? Any differential reports of Prolog (Quintus) vs Lisp ? Any obvious alternative to SUN? (vendor in same class (Tektronix?)) Worst or hidden problems, pitfalls, gotcha's, etc. > Can real AI development (even applications) be supported on SUN's? < ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 6 Feb 85 14:36:22 MST From: kessler%utah-orion@utah-cs (Robert Kessler) Subject: Re: AI, Lisp, Graphics on SUN computers? (Long Message) > I would like to hear from anyone using SUN computers > who can supply answers or comments on any of these issues: > Is Franz the only (best) lisp available? We have finally finished porting Portable Standard LISP (PSL) to yet another machine. This time it is now running on the SUN. Initial timing measurements indicate that its speed is somewhere between a Vax 750 and 780 (all running PSL), and about twice as fast as Franz running the REDUCE algebra system test on Suns. We are now running the Gabriel benchmarks to discover where it fits in the set. For more details see the announcement at the end of this message. > Has anyone used the Maryland Flavors to create useful tools/extensions? PSL provides support for a simple flavors package that seems quite useful. However, the current version has no inheritance. > Any support for sun graphics (windows, menus,etc) a la Interlisp-D? We have oload working which allows you to call externally compiled routines (like other c sources). So the interface should be easy to add (but we haven't done it). > Any differential reports of Prolog (Quintus) vs Lisp ? None that I know of. > Any obvious alternative to SUN? (vendor in same class (Tektronix?)) PSL also runs on Apollo's and HP Series 200 (both 68K based machines). We have also ported a simple "educational" version to the 128K Macintosh which is used in a beginning programming class. We plan on moving at least the Standard LISP subset and compiler to the 512K mac (so if you want to go really cheap...... :-) ) > Worst or hidden problems, pitfalls, gotcha's, etc. We had a lot of problems with the Sun port. Some were hardware related, others were differences between Unix 4.2 on the Sun and on the Vax. After we get some more experience using PSL on the machine, maybe we could report more. > > Can real AI development (even applications) be supported on SUN's? < I think so, as long as you can get one with enough memory. Some of our applications running on HP 9836's (which doesn't have virtual memory) really fly (better than a 780 in speed). So, memory is really a key to a fast machine. > Bob. PSL 3.2 for the SUN Workstation We are pleased to announce that Portable Standard LISP (PSL) version 3.2 is now available for the Sun workstation. PSL is about the power, speed and flavor of Franz LISP or MACLISP, with growing influence from Common LISP. It is recognized as an efficient and portable LISP implementation with many more capabilities than described in the 1979 Standard LISP Report. PSL's main strength is its portability across many different systems, including: Vax BSD Unix, Vax VMS, Extended Addressing DecSystem-20 Tops-20, Apollo DOMAIN Aegis, and HP Series 200. A version for the IBM-370 is in beta test and two Cray versions are being used on an experimental basis. [...] PSL is in heavy use at Utah, and by collaborators at Hewlett-Packard, Rand, Stanford, Columbia and over 250 other sites. Many existing programs and applications have been adapted to PSL including Hearn's REDUCE computer algebra system and GLISP, Novak's object oriented LISP dialect. These are available from Hearn and Novak. For more information, contact: Utah Symbolic Computation Group Secretary University of Utah - Dept. of Computer Science 3160 Merrill Engineering Building Salt Lake City, Utah 84112 ARPANET: CRUSE@UTAH-20 USENET: utah-cs!cruse ------------------------------ Date: 7-Feb-85 19:41:45-PST From: jbn@FORD-WDL1.ARPA Subject: Lisp standards? One correction; Ada subsets are NOT approved by DoD; see ANSI/MIL-STD 1815a-1983, section 1.1.2. There are no approved subsets, and no approved supersets. Before there were any validated Ada compilers, the AJPO was somewhat tolerant of the use of the Ada name regarding compilers that were incomplete, but the official policy appears on the inside cover of the Ada standard; ``Describing, advertising, or promoting a language processor as an ``Ada'' processor is equivalent to making a voluntary statement of conformance to ANSI/MIL-STD-1815A. ... Those persons advertising or otherwise promoting a language processor asserted as being a standard Ada processor ... are required to provide the AJPO with evidence sufficient to demonstrate conformance with the Ada standard. ... Misuse of the trademark (Ada) may lead to legal action.'' That seems to cover it. As for Common Lisp, the amusing thing about the Lisp community is that all the recent dialects are being promoted as ``standard''; we have Common Lisp, Portable Standard Lisp, and the old Interlisp. None of these are ANSI or ISO standards. All are huge. And all assume an environment suitable for program development (as opposed to an embedded system). What we really need is an agreed-upon minimal Lisp in which portable programs can be written if desired, and for which everyone agrees that the semantics of the primitives are uniform. Larger dialects would be supersets of this base. As yet, we don't even have agreement on the semantics of (car nil). John Nagle ------------------------------ Date: 6 Feb 1985 1001-EST (Wednesday) From: trwatf!maverick@seismo.ARPA (Mark D. Grover) Subject: re: Command and Control applications In response to Araman's question, there certainly *are* applications of expert systems in Command and Control. The prob- lem (which you've probably already run into) is that researchers of this application rarely publish anything which would be useful to other designers. In my view, this is due to a combination of the competition among defense contractors, the practical (ap- plied vs. basic research) flavor of the work, and the lack of return-value from publishing to the sponsors of the work. Occasionally there are write-ups in the military service jour- nals, but the only place you'll find information that is truly helpful to designers will be in the traditional AI journals (for those applications which have not yet hit the opera- tional stage). Of course the government AI labs publish useful basic research of good quality, but such systems have gen- erally not been developed for the rigorous conditions of an operational environment. Anything that has reached that stage, I'd love to know about. The closest thing I know is Infer- ence Corp's Navex system for NASA using ART. (Aviation Week, 9/17/84, p. 79). TRW has produced fielded prototypes for certain C3I applications but has not yet published details. I face these problems constantly (both in trying to do research and figuring out where, when and what I should pub- lish). I would favor a government clearinghouse (like NTIS) specifically for research software distribution (especially half-baked solutions that could be picked up and improved by oth- ers). This should work at all appropriate classification levels, but unclassified software could be stressed. Most of the C3I work with which I am familiar relies heavily on planning, constraint checking, and deduction. Other than that, I can only say that the success has been mixed. I believe this is due more to the paucity of researchers working on fieldable defense solutions than to the maturity of AI. There is much that is promising in produc- ing intelligent adjuncts to command, and we are working seriously to provide them. -- MDG Mark D. Grover Advanced Technology Facility TRW Defense Systems Group 2751 Prosperity Ave. Fairfax, VA 22031 (703) 876-8184, -8036 ARPA: trwatf!maverick@SEISMO UUCP: ...!{decvax,ihnp4,allegra}!seismo!trwatf!maverick ------------------------------ Date: Wed 6 Feb 85 10:09:17-PST From: Renate Kempf Subject: Seminar - The Totality of Knowledge (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford SIGLUNCH distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.] DATE: Friday, February 8, 1985 LOCATION: Chemistry Gazebo, between Physical and Organic Chemistry TIME: 12:05 SPEAKER: Pierre Bierre Clairvoyant Systems sensory learning machine research ABSTRACT: The Totality of Knowledge Would it be possible, in a few words or a single illustration, to capture and enclose all the knowledge both existing now and in the indefinite future? The field of AI stands to benefit by coming to grips with the totality of that which it claims to study. Having a way to once-and-for-all embrace all knowledge will help AI researchers blaze the trail beyond limited-domain systems in future work. The practical payoff will be knowledge systems where the user steers the conversation at the human-machine interface without running up against artificially imposed domain boundaries. Once more, the same fluidity will apply to knowledge transmission among intelligent machines. Come munch on lunch while Pierre attempts to throw a lasso around everything that will ever be known. [For a detailed introduction to this week's SIGLUNCH topic, see "The Professor's Challenge," The AI Magazine, Winter 1985, pp. 60-70. I would take the central thesis to be that the future of AI is in learning systems that build up concepts from their own experiences (including formal instruction) rather than in expert systems with knowledge bases supplied by AI theoreticians. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Wed 6 Feb 85 17:20:59-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Logic and Functional Programming (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] 2:15 p.m., 2/14 CSLI Seminar Redwood Hall ``Logic and Functional Programming'' Room G-19 Joseph Goguen, CSLI Discussion will be led by Fernando Pereira We begin by reviewing what logic and functional programming are, indicating basic aspects of their programming styles, applications and implementations. We then show how to enrich logic programming with some features of current interest in programming methodology, maintaining both logical rigor and efficient implementation. The first and most important feature is functional programming; full logical equality provides an elegant way to combine the power of logic programming (including logical variables, pattern matching and automatic backtracking) with functional programing (supporting functions and their composition, as well as strong typing and user definable abstract data types). An interesting new feature that emerges here is a complete algorithm for solving equations containing logical variables; this algorithm uses ``narrowing,'' a technique from the theory of rewrite rules. The underlying logical system here is many-sorted Horn clause logic *with* equality. A useful refinement is ``subsorts,'' which can be seen as an ordering relation on the set of sorts (usually called ``types'') of data. Finally, we provide generic modules by using methods developed in the specification language Clear. These features make up a language called Eqlog; we illustrate them with a program for the well-known Missionaries and Cannibals problem, and with some simple examples from natural language processing. --Joseph Goguen ------------------------------ Date: 6 Feb 1985 16:31 EST (Wed) From: "Daniel S. Weld" Subject: Seminar - AI and Distributed Computing (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Gul A. Agha Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Computing TUESDAY 2/12/85 4:00pm 8th floor playroom To take advantage of the parallelism available in distributed systems, many programming languages incorporate concurrency. Unfortunately, distributed systems often exhibit pathological behavior: Problems such as divergence, deadlock, and the Brock-Ackerman anomaly make it difficult to program using concurrent constructs. The talk will describe a model for actors which addresses such problems. Actors are particularly relevant to computation in A.I. For example, actors permit dynamic reconfigurability and extensibility. We will show how the actor model supports abstraction and compositionality in the context of open, evolving systems. A simple actor language, called SAL, will be defined for illustrative purposes. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 10-FEB-1985 11:57 To: RETRIEVAL,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a001844; 9 Feb 85 21:16 EST Date: Sat 9 Feb 1985 17:06-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #17 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sun, 10 Feb 85 11:53 EST AIList Digest Saturday, 9 Feb 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 17 Today's Topics: Games - Cubic, Machine Translation - German to English Translator, Information Science - Sublists & DDC & Telesophy Project & Xerox Notecards & Online Dictionary, News - Recent Articles & AI on TV, Culture - AI Sociology & The Sirens of Titan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 06 Feb 85 0936 PST From: Yoni Malachi Subject: The game Cubic The work you refer to was done by Oren Patashnik who is now a Computer Science PhD student at Stanford. I forwarded the message to him. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 8 Feb 85 09:09:20-PST From: Mark Kent Subject: German to English translator? [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] This may be silly, but I feel that somewhere there must exist a German to English translator program. Nothing fancy (no Artificial Intelligence required) but just a word for word literal translation. The resulting phrases need not make sense. This could be used as follows: suppose you had a book on disk in German, and you were going to translate it to English (and you are fluent in both German and English) then it would save a lot of typing if most of the words were already in the english file. Even if some phrases were garbage, it would be easy to kill the line(s) and type the desired phrase. Anyone know of such a program on any system? Thanks, -mark ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 5 Feb 85 12:57 EST From: Ed Fox Subject: Sublists - response to Laws msg of 30 Jan and request for wishes Ken Laws mentioned the fact that people wish to have portions of the AILIST digests sent to them. This is essentially a filtering operation, related to the SDI (selective dissemination of information) problem being handled by many information retrieval systems. At VPI we are presently involved in a research project related to this, and welcome comments and involvement. The idea is to study electronic mail messages and digests like AILIST, and to implement means to allow people to find useful information either in new issues or retrospectively by searching past issues. We will build an intelligent automatic analysis system that will create knowledge representations for AILIST messages, and a search system to allow users to find messages in the collection. Users will be able to define profiles, describing what they are interested in, and each new digest will then be split up so that most relevant items are presented first, and least relevant items are either discarded or made to appear later in a ranked list. Users will also be able to ask specific questions and be given a list of messages that are possibly relevant. To make this realistic, we need user profiles and questions, and in order to see if automatic methods perform properly, need users to indicate which messages are indeed relevant to each question. We welcome specific questions and interest statements. Perhaps more important at this time, however, would be to have wish lists like: find messages that announce seminars or conferences recognize RFPs or contract work requests list papers cited about a specific topic extract bibliographic items or newspaper extracts relating to ... Later on we will have a crude version of the planned system running and will be better able to handle specific queries and possibly let people try to use it. This investigation relates to retrieval for offices, or for mail or conferencing systems. Please send comments, wishes, suggestions, etc. to fox.vpi@csnet-relay Thanks, Ed Fox. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 8 Feb 85 21:01:29 PST From: Richard K. Jennings Subject: DDC For those of you with a clearance and a certified "need to know", the Defense Documentation Center (DDC) serves as a repository of DoD technical (and I suppose other) information. Both DoD agencies & their contractors are encouraged to use it, and they provide a suite of bibliographic services as does NASA. NASA libraries are open to the public, and in the Bay area Ames (at Moffett) is a treasure trove. Taxes support these services, so use them. Rich. ------------------------------ Date: 1 Feb 85 23:59:08 GMT From: bambi!schatz@topaz (Bruce R. Schatz) Subject: description of Telesophy Project [Forwarded from the WorkS list by Laws@SRI-AI.] The following project may be of interest to readers of net.works : Telesophy literally means "wisdom at a distance". The goal of the Telesophy Project is to build a system which makes obtaining information as transparent as telephony makes obtaining sound. The system could be viewed as a "WorldNet" browser, which lets one navigate an underlying information space. The information units in the space can contain any type of data and the system hides their actual physical location. In addition to these retrieval facilities, there are also storage facilities for generation of new items from old. The system thus supports the notion of an Information Community, permitting the users to browse for AnyThing AnyWhere and share their findings with others. These notions are old desires, undoubtably familiar to the readers of this newsgroup. What is new is that these problems seem finally about to break because of coming mass availability of new technology. In particular, because of the speed and transmission characteristics of optical fibers, it is now feasible to consider the idea of building what is logically a single computer physically distributed over a wide area. This potentially worldwide single computer provides the hardware upon which an operating environment permitting the transparent fetching and manipulation of uniform objects can be built. My dream is a worldwide information community, a greatly generalized USENET. I work for Bell Communications Research, the central research organization for the local telephone companies (like Bell Labs before the divestiture). The fiber optic telephone network of the near future will likely obtain end-to-end speeds much closer to gigabits/second than the current kilobits. To utilize this, I have been investigating the architecture of a Telesophy System. Thus far, a long paper has been written describing the underlying philosophical and technological issues. I am now actively seeking colleagues to help build a first version on a local-area network of Apollo workstations. For more information, please contact me at one of the following addresses (a fuller description has been posted to net.jobs): Bruce Schatz physical: Bell Communications Research 435 South Street, Room 2A275 Morristown, New Jersey 07960 phone: (201) 829-4744 USENET: bellcore!bambi!schatz ARPAnet: bellcore!bambi!schatz@BERKELEY ------------------------------ Date: Sat 2 Feb 85 13:14:20-EST From: Wayne McGuire Subject: Xerox NoteCards [Forwarded from the Human-Nets Digest by Laws@SRI-AI.] Apropos the recent discussion about idea processors and general purpose personal assistants appears below a message from Info-Mac about Xerox NoteCards. Can anyone here offer any further information about this product? Date: 24 Jan 1985 7:05:38 EST (Thursday) From: Mark Zimmerman Subject: Xerox NoteCards on Mac? To: info-mac@sumex I just saw a demo of Xerox's NoteCards system and want to tell people about it, so we can start working on a version for the Mac! NoteCards is like an extension of the desktop metaphor: your screen has windows on electronic index cards, each of which can contain text, pictures, etc., and links to other cards. Links can be of various types: references/sourcing, argumentation, proof, refutation, consequences, etc. Cards can be filed in boxes, which can contain other boxes, etc. One can display graphically the links between cards, to get an overall view of the information, or zoom in to look at all the gory details when needed. Esther Dyson wrote about NoteCards in the 31 Dec 84 issue of her newsletter, RELease1.0 ... see that for further impressions. Perhaps if there are experts at Xerox PARC or elsewhere listening they can correct/extend my comments. The Mac's TE and windowing should do a fair fraction of the work for a Mac version/analog of NoteCards ... I am dreaming about writing up a first hack at it in MacFORTH. NoteCards is sort of a multidimensional ThinkTank (or rather, ThinkTank is a 1-dimensional shadow of NoteCards) ... it looks likely to be a great tool for gathering/organizing/presenting complicated data. (Besides other features described above, one can ask NoteCards to search along various types of links to find various items, reorganize links, embed pointers to other cards within the text/picture on a card, etc.) Best, Zimmermann at MITRE ------------------------------ Date: 11 Dec 84 08:05:34 EST From: Don Subject: Online dictionary server at SRI-NIC [Forwarded from the Rutgers BBoard by Laws@SRI-AI.] [I have only recently regained access to this bboard, so this message has been delayed for a couple of months. It describes a software system that I had not run across before. -- KIL] If you have Arpanet-Access privs, you can now access an online copy of Webster's 7th dictionary. The program's name is WEBSTER. It can be used to get definitions or to check spelling. Note: escape and question mark work! Don [I have reproduced most of the associated help file below. -- KIL] Invoke the [Rutgers] program by "@WEBSTER word-to-define" or @WEBSTER Word: If the word is found, Webster will then provide the complete dictionary entry for the word including definitions, pronunciation, and derivation. If the specified word was not found, Webster will try to find close matches, as if you spelled the word wrong. The possibilities are numbered and typed out. To select one of them, you can just give its number. Additionally, Webster can match words using wildcards. The character "%" in a word mean match exactly one character, so "w%n" matches "win", "won", "wan", etc. The character "*" matches ZERO OR MORE characters, so "a*d" matches "ad", "and", "abound", "absentminded", and so on. Any number of wildcards can be used, and in any arrangement. and "?" are used the same way in Webster as in most programs. tries to complete what you have typed so far, and "?" lists those words that match your partial word. If what you have given is a unique abbreviation for a word, will typed out the rest of the word. If what you typed is ambigious, it beeps and does nothing. For example, Word: plur? Maybe you mean: ----- 1. plural 2. pluralism 3. plurality 4. pluralization 5. pluralize 6. pluri- 7. pluriaxial Word: pluri? Maybe you mean: ------ 1. pluri- 2. pluriaxial Word: pluriaxial -------------- Where the underlined parts are typed by the user, and rest by Webster. Note that wildcards and /? can be used together, for example Word: plu*x ------------- Word: pluriaxial ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 Feb 85 04:44:08 cst From: Laurence Leff Subject: Recent Articles Fribourg, Laurent Oriented equational clauses as a programming language J. Logic Programming 1(1984) 2 165-177 Tseitlin, GE Structured programming in symbolic multiprocesing Cybernetics (19) 1983 no 5 614-625 Oscar E. Lanford Computer Assisted proofs in analysis Mathematical Physics VII Phys. A 124 (1984) no 1-3 465-470 Science 85, March Machinations of Thought Pages 38-45 General Article on AI with emphasis on discussion of question "Could a machine think?" The Black Knight of AI Page 46-51 Article about Richard Dreyfus, who is a philosopher who is arguing that machines cannot think and there is something called intuition that cannot be captured by a computer. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 6 Feb 85 10:28:34 pst From: Craig Cornelius Subject: AI article in Science 85 [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The newest issue of Science 85 contains two articles on AI, with vignettes on two Stanford profs: Bruce Buchanan and Terry Winograd. It's interesting reading. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 8 Feb 85 03:03:38-CST From: Werner Uhrig Subject: AI on TV (in NEW TECH on PBS) KLRU, the local PBS affiliate, has recently started a very interesting program at 5pm Sunday afternoons, titled NEW TECH. Last Sunday, Feb 3, mainly concentrated on projects of Kurzweil Enterprises. one of the 3 Kurzweil companies seems to concentrate on text-readers, and the work being discussed mentioned a reader under development and test which can read over 100 fonts at amazing speeds. A second company is producing electronic musical equipment, and Mr. Moog of Moog-synthesizer fame has recently joined Kurzweil. Stevie Wonder was extensively featured as he serves as kind of a "guinea-pig" for the company. He is using model #1 of their synthesizers to produce his music and his recent song "The Woman in Red" was produced by him on this equipment. Given that Stevie is blind, being able to produce all his own sound-tracks and mixing the results is a considerable feat. Special I/O devices for the use of the handicapped are being developed thanks to Kurzweil's support of Stevie Wonder. Another song by Wonder used in the feature was: "Having Computer Fun". I noted down a reference to "CompuServe" and "The Source Public Area 125 Dired" but I only remember now that something is being discussed in these 2 commercial online electronic media, relevant to the musical equipment. If you have a video-recorder, this show is definitely worth recording while you're out having fun in the park (-: PS: my TV-program for Thursday, Feb 7, showed as topic for the Donahue-show "Computer Sub-culture". well, it wasn't on, postponed it seems due to more a more "urgent" topic: the New York subway-vigilante. I am trying to find out when this topic will be discussed. thought some of you fellow-TV-junkies might be interested ------------------------------ Date: Wed 6 Feb 85 10:03:24-PST From: C.S./Math Library Subject: A Sociological Look at AI Research [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The following is the introduction to an article by James Fleck which appeared in Sociology of the Sciences, Volume VI, 1982, pp.169-217. The title of the article is Development and Establishment in Artificial Intelligence. In this paper, I discuss the role played by scientific establishments in the development of a particular scientific specialty, Artificial Intelligence, a computer-related area which takes as its broad aim, the construction of computer programs that model aspects of intelligent behaviour. As with any discussion of a scientific specialty, the identification of what is involved is not unproblematic, and the above serves as an indication rather that a definition. While the term Artificial Intelligence is used in a variety of ways, there is a discernable group (perhaps approaching the degree of commonality to be called a community) of researchers who recognize the term as descriptive of a certain sort of work, and who, if they themselves are not willing to be directly labelled by the term, can locate themselves with respect to it. Unfortunately, there is little or no commonly available literature that systematically charts the scope of this area. It is worthwhile, therefore, to consider the distinctive socio-cognitive characteristics of research in AI as a prelude to a fairly specific discussion of the social and institutional processes involved in the development of the area, thus providing a basis for exploring the usefulness and applicabiligy of the concept of establishment. The article includes an interesting chart showing the movement of AI researchers during the 1960's and 1970's among the main centers of AI research: SRI, CMU, Stanford, and MIT. If you are interested in this article, I have a copy of it in the Math/CS Library. Harry Llull ------------------------------ Date: Mon 4 Feb 85 18:42:28-EST From: Wayne McGuire Subject: _The Sirens of Titan_ I recently read for the first time Kurt Vonnegut's _The Sirens of Titan_, and came across the following spooky, dystopian view of AI: Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren't anything like machines. They weren't dependable. They weren't efficient. They weren't predictable. They weren't durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others. These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame. And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn't high enough. So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too. And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be. The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn't really be said to have any purpose at all. The creatures thereupon began slaying each other because they hated purposeless things above all else. And they discovered that they weren't even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, "Tralfamadore." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1959 (1976 printing). Pp. 274-275. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: CSVPI 10-FEB-1985 05:01 To: RETRIEVAL,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a002856; 10 Feb 85 4:06 EST Date: Sat 9 Feb 1985 22:56-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #18 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sun, 10 Feb 85 04:58 EST AIList Digest Sunday, 10 Feb 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 18 Today's Topics: Seminars - The Bertrand Constraint Language (Oregon) & Insights on Searching (CMU) & Motion Planning Algorithms (SU) & Triangle Tables for Robot Actions (SU) & Robot Mind-Body Synapse (CSLI), Conferences - Genetic Algorithms & Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thursday, 7 Feb 85 15:03:05 PST From: wm@tekchips Subject: Seminar - The Bertrand Constraint Language (Oregon) Oregon Graduate Center Department of Computer Science and Engineering Colloquium February 22, 3:30 pm, Main Seminar Room Bertrand, a General Purpose Constraint Language Wm Leler Computer Research Laboratory Tektronix, Inc. Constraint languages and constraint satisfaction techniques are making the problem solving abilities of the computer available to a wider audience. For example, simple spread-sheet languages such as VisiCalc allow many different financial modeling problems to be solved without resorting to programming. In a conventional language the programmer must specify a step-by-step procedure for the language interpreter to follow. In a constraint language, programming is a descriptive task. The user specifies a set of relationships, called constraints, and it is up to the constraint satisfaction system to satisfy these constraints. Unfortunately, constraint satisfaction systems have been very difficult to build. Bertrand is a general purpose language designed for building constraint satisfaction systems. Constraints are solved using rewrite rules, which are invoked by pattern matching. Bertrand is similar in expressive power to relational languages such as Prolog, but without any procedural semantics. Its lack of procedural semantics makes Bertrand especially attractive for execution on parallel processors. This talk will review several example constraint satisfaction systems built using Bertrand with applications in graphics, design, and modeling. There will also be some discussion of the language issues involved in the design of Bertrand. ------------------------------ Date: 8 Feb 85 18:49:38 EST From: Steven.Shafer@CMU-CS-IUS Subject: Seminar - Insights on Searching (CMU) [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Tyson@SRI-AI.] Type: AI Seminar Speaker: Hans Berliner Topic: Superpuzz and Some Insights on Searching Dates: 12-Feb-85 Time: 3:30 pm Place: WeH 5409 Most solutions in any complex domain require some non-intuitive moves that violate good heuristic rules. When a combination of search procedure and evaluation function requires that the search keep finding "good" moves or else abandon the current branch, the search takes on an undesirable breadth-first character. This research indicates that it is possible to define evaluation functions that allow continuing a branch that encounters some non-intuitive moves by giving credit for earlier "good" moves. We define an "adventurousness coefficient" that determines the ratio of acceptance of non-intuitive moves to "good" moves, and show that greater adventurousness is desirable as the depth of solution increases. Further, adventurousness has an even greater payoff when a constraint satisfaction method exists that can terminate unsolvable branches. Our domain for this study was Superpuzz, a very difficult solitaire puzzle. Four search paradigms, each the best of its kind for non-adversary problems, were investigated. These are: Depth-first with branch and bound and iterative deepening (DF), A*, Best-first with a simple evaluation function (BF1), and Best-first with a complex evaluation function (BF2). All methods except BF2 use the same knowledge, and each of these methods is tested with and without the use of a constraint satisfaction procedure, all on the same sets of progressively more difficult solitaire problems. As expected, the most informed search (BF2) does better than the less informed as the problems get more difficult. Constraint satisfaction is found to have a pronouncedly greater effect when coupled with the most informed algorithm (BF2). BF1, which uses the same knowledge as A* and DF but has a greater adventurousness coefficient, far outperforms these paradigms in terms of work required at about a 5% reduction in the quality of the (otherwise) optimal solution. Adventurousness can be thought of as a primitive form of planning, in which no specific goal is enunciated but the cohesion of a set of moves in "making progress" is being measured. The desired degree of adventurousness appears to depend on the domain, evaluation function, and constraint satisfaction method used. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 4 Feb 85 15:13:05-PST From: Andrei Broder Subject: Seminar - Motion Planning Algorithms (SU) [Forwarded from the SRI-AI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] AFLB Seminar 2/14/85 - Prof. Micha Sharir (Tel Aviv) "Motion planning algorithms - a survey" We discuss the problem of planning automatically a continuous motion of a given robot system B having k degrees of freedom, from an initial position to a final desired position. During the required motion B has to avoid certain obstacles whose geometry is known. In abstract terms, the problem is reduced to that of calculating the connected components of the (k-dimensional) manifold FP of all free positions of B, and is thus a problem in "computational topology". In the talk we will survey the main results in this area as developed during the last four years. Some of the topics of the talk (as time will permit) will be: (1) We show that the problem is solvable in time polynomial in the geometric complexity n of the obstacles, provided that k is fixed. (2) The problem is PSPACE-hard if k is arbitrary, even for very simple systems. (3) Efficient solutions exist for several simple systems. We will describe some of them. (4) Review of the main solution techniques. (5) Spin-off problems in computational geometry. (6) Variants of the problem: motion planning with a gripped object, motion planning in the presence of moving obstacles, optimal motion planning, etc. ***** Time and place: February 14, 12:30 pm in MJ352 (Bldg. 460) ****** ------------------------------ Date: Wed 6 Feb 85 21:19:30-PST From: Gio Wiederhold Subject: Seminar - Triangle Tables for Robot Actions (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Tuesday, February 12, 1985 at 4:15 in Terman Auditorium Nils J. NILSSON Chairman, Stanford Computer Science Department will present: TRIANGLE TABLES: A Proposal for a Language for Programming Robot Actions Structures called ``triangle tables'' were used in connection with the SRI robot SHAKEY for storing sequences of robot actions. Since the original motivation for triangle tables still seems relevant, I have recently elaborated the original concept and have begun to consider how the expanded formalism can be used as a general robot programming language. This talk will describe this new view of triangle tables and how they might be used in a language that supports asynchronous and concurrent action computations. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 6 Feb 85 17:20:59-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar Summary - Robot Mind-Body Synapse (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] SUMMARY OF F-4 MEETING ``Robot Design: In Search of the Mind-Body Synapse'' Stan Rosenschein, CSLI For purposes of the discussion, the term ``robot'' was taken refer to a collection of (man-made) sensors and effectors connected through a computer controller. To lend an air of reality to the discussion, a ``hands-on'' display was given of an ultrasonic rangefinder, a small CCD camera, a battery-operated robotics kit including a motorized gripper, and a small computer. The challenge facing the robot designer is how to assemble these (or similar) components to build a device capable of complex and interesting behaviors. The most complex and difficult part of the robot design task is programming the controller. Many AI researchers have sought to manage this complexity by developing computational abstractions based on some version of commonsense belief-desire-intention (BDI) psychology--the ``folk'' theory of mind. In addition, they have tended to adopt a ``representationalist'' tactic in which the components of mental state (beliefs, desires, intentions) are realized as symbolic structures to be manipulated by the program. Another approach, one based on an abstract correlational theory of information-bearing states in automata, was put forward as an alternative. There was much discussion on the utility of belief-desire-intention psychology, especially in its ``representationalist'' form, as a framework for building robots. ------------------------------ Date: 7 Feb 85 13:44:23-CST (Thu) From: "John J. Grefenstette" Subject: Conference on Genetic Algorithms Call for Papers International Conference on Genetic Algorithms and Their Applications An International Conference on Genetic Algorithms and Their Applications, sponsored by Texas Instruments and the U.S. Navy Center for Applied Research in AI (NCARAI), will be held on July 24-26, 1985 at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Authors are invited to submit papers on all as- pects of Genetic Algorithms, including the following topics: theoretical foundations of Genetic Algorithms; machine learning using Genetic Algorithms; classifier systems; ap- portionment of credit; Genetic Algorithms in function optim- ization and search; experimental applications. Authors are requested to submit three copies (hard copy only) of a full paper by May 1, 1985 to the program chair- man: Dr. John J. Grefenstette Computer Science Department Vanderbilt University Box 73 Station B Nashville, TN 37235 Papers will be refereed by the Program Committee, and au- thors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by May 20, 1985. Camera ready copies are due by June 21, 1985. Ac- cepted papers will be published in the Conference Proceed- ings. Morning sessions of the conference will be devoted to presentations of the accepted papers. Afternoon sessions will be devoted to panel discussions of the general themes raised in the morning sessions. There will be no registration fee, but for planning purposes all attendees are asked to register by June 1, 1985. Regis- tration information may be obtained from: Dr. Stephen F. Smith Robotics Institute Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 sfs@CMU-RI-ISL1 (412) 578-8811 Conference Committee ---------- --------- John H. Holland University of Michigan (Conference Chair) Lashon B. Booker NCARAI Kenneth A. De Jong NCARAI and George Mason University John J. Grefenstette Vanderbilt University (Program Chair) Stephen F. Smith C-MU Robotics Institute (Local Arrangements) ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 2 Feb 85 16:26:43 cst From: Austin Melton Subject: Conference - Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics [Forwarded from the SRI-AI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] CALL FOR PAPERS AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT CONFERENCE ON THE MATHEMATICAL FOUNDATIONS OF PROGRAMMING SEMANTICS DATE AND SITE SPONSORS Iowa State University April 11 and 12, 1985 Kansas State University Kansas State University The University of Kansas Manhattan, Kansas 66506 The University of Nebraska Wichita State University The conference will be a forum for computer scientists and mathematicians jointly to discuss current research and possible directions for future research in both programming language semantics in general and the mathematics used in programming semantics in particular. From these discussions the computer scientists will have first-hand exposure to the mathematical ideas which might prove fruitful for future work, and the mathematicians will gain insight for future work by seeing how their results can be applied and by seeing what types of mathematical results are needed for future work in programming language semantics. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following: theory of complete partial orders and continuous lattices, topological and categorical approaches to semantics, formal and descriptive aspects of semantics notations The following computer scientists and mathematicians will be speaking at the conference: Dr. Dana Scott, Carnegie-Mellon University Dr. Horst Herrlich, University of Bremen, West Germany Dr. Adrian Tang, The University of Kansas Dr. George Strecker, Kansas State University Dr. Stephen Brookes, Carnegie-Mellon University Dr. Carl Gunter, Carnegie-Mellon University Authors are invited to submit five copies of extended abstracts (approximately two pages double spaced) describing recent advances in programming semantics or related mathematics. The first page of the abstract should include all authors' names, mailing addresses, and telephone numbers. Graduate students are also encouraged to submit abstracts. The submission deadline is March 11, 1985. Authors will be notified of acceptance by March 22, 1985. Five copies of the extended abstracts should be submitted to: Prof. Austin Melton or Prof. Robert Wherritt Computer Science Department Department of Mathematics and Statistics Fairchild Hall, 121 Box 33 Kansas State University Wichita State University Manhattan, Kansas 66506 Wichita, Kansas 67208 USA USA or via CSNET austin%kansas-state@csnet-relay Abstracts of the accepted papers and the invited addresses will be available to all conference participants at the start of the conference. The conference proceedings will be published after the conference and mailed to all the participants. ... FOR MORE INFORMATION about the conference or accommodations please contact Professor Austin Melton or Ms. Robin Niederee: Kansas State University Computer Science Department Fairchild Hall, 121 Manhattan, Kansas 66506 913-532-6350 CSNET austin%kansas-state@csnet-relay or robin%kansas-state@csnet-relay The registration fee is $35 (students $5). Meals are included in the $35.00 registration fee. Students may purchase meals for an additional $20.00. PLEASE REGISTER AND MAKE MEAL RESERVATIONS BY APRIL 8, 1985. Registration and meal reservations may be made via CSNET (austin%kansas-state@csnet-relay or robin%kansas-state@csnet-relay) with payments being made at the conference. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: COMSAT 12-FEB-1985 00:19 To: JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a006967; 11 Feb 85 3:17 EST Date: Sun 10 Feb 1985 22:34-PST Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #19 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 12 Feb 85 00:13 EST AIList Digest Monday, 11 Feb 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 19 Today's Topics: Machine Translation - Slocum's System, Publications - Manual of Intensional Logic, Seminars - Algebraic Specifications (CSLI) & Massively Parallel Natural Language Processing (BBN) & Belief, Awareness, and Limited Reasoning (CSLI) & The Logical Data Model (SU), Conferences - Evolution and Information & SCCGL Conference on General Linguistics ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun 10 Feb 85 17:35:14-PST From: LOUROBINSON@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Machine Translation Regarding a German/English translator: How about Jonathan Slocum's program developed for Siemens? Slocum is now at MCC in Austin courtesy of the University of Texas. Good luck. Lou Robinson ------------------------------ Date: Wed 6 Feb 85 17:20:59-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Lecture Notes - Manual of Intensional Logic [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] FIRST VOLUME OF CSLI LECTURE NOTES The first in the series of CSLI Lecture Notes has just been published. Entitled ``Manual of Intensional Logic,'' the 75-page book by Johan van Benthem constitutes a graduate course that the author taught in the Winter of 1984 while at CSLI. ``Intensional Logic as understood here,'' the author writes in the Introduction, ``is a research program based upon the broad presupposition that so-called `intensional contexts' in natural language can be explained semantically by the idea of `multiple reference.' '' Unlike CSLI Reports, the Lecture Notes will be sold for a nominal fee to defray part of production costs. The price of ``Manual of Intensional Logic'' is $5, and it may be purchased at the Stanford Bookstore or by writing to Dikran Karagueuzian at the Center. A 25% discount is offered to all members of the CSLI community or to anyone ordering three or more copies to be used for instructional purposes. California residents should add sales tax. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 6 Feb 85 17:20:59-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar Summary - Algebraic Specifications (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] SUMMARY OF AREA C MEETING ``Algebraic Specifications in an Arbitrary Institution'' Andrzej Tarlecki Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Edinburgh The pioneering papers on algebraic specification used many-sorted equational logic as a logical framework in which specifications were written and analyzed. Nowadays, however, examples of logical systems in use include first-order logic, higher-order logic, infinitary logic, temporal logic, and many others. Note that all these logical systems may be considered with or without predicates, admitting partial operations or not. This leads to different concepts of signature and of model, perhaps even more obvious in examples like polymorphic signatures, order-sorted signatures, continuous algebras, or error algebras. The informal notion of a logical system for writing specifications has been formalized by Goguen and Burstall who introduced for this purpose the notion of institution. The first and presumably most important application of this notion is its use in the theory of algebraic specifications. It turns out that most of the work on algebraic specification, especially concerning specification languages, may be done in an institution-independent way. We briefly present a collection of simple but very powerful specification-building operations and give their semantics in an arbitrary institution. In this context we outline a very simple and mathematically elegant view of the formal development of programs from their specifications. The notion of institution is also used to formulate (and prove) some model-theoretic results at an appropriately general level. We show how to generalize to an arbitrary institution a Birkhoff-type characterization of quasi-varieties as implicational classes. This result may be used to prove that Mahr and Makowsky's characterization of standard algebraic institutions which strongly admit initial semantics holds for arbitrary institutions satisfying a number of technical assumptions. Finally, we briefly outline some problems concerning the notion of institution itself. We discuss the need for some tool for constructing new institutions and for combining institutions (``putting institutions together''). We also indicate possible generalization of this notion which would provide a mold for richer semantical systems than just collections of sentences with a notion of their truth. ------------------------------ Date: 8 Feb 1985 14:58-EST From: Brad Goodman Subject: Seminar - Massively Parallel Natural Language Processing (BBN) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by JCMA@MIT-MC.] Massively Parallel Natural Language Processing Professor David L. Waltz, Thinking Machines and Brandeis University Date: 10:00 a.m. Tuesday, February 19, 1985 Place: Newman Auditorium BBN Laboratories Inc. 70 Fawcett Street Cambridge, Ma. This talk will describe research in developing a natural language processing system with modular knowledge sources but strongly interactive processing. The system offers insights into a variety of linguistic phenomena and allows easy testing of a variety of hypotheses. Language interpretation takes place on an activation network which is dynamically created from input, recent context, and long-term knowledge. Initially ambiguous and unstable, the network settles on a single interpretation, using a parallel, analog relaxation process. The talk will also describe a parallel model for the representation of context and of the priming of concepts. Examples illustrating contextual influence on meaning interpretation and "semantic garden path" sentence processing, along with a discussion of the building and implementation of a large scale system for new generation parallel computers are included. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 6 Feb 85 17:20:59-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Belief, Awareness, and Limited Reasoning (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] 12 noon, 2/14 TINLunch Ventura Hall ``Belief, Awareness, and Limited Reasoning'' Conference Room Ronald Fagin, IBM San Jose Research Laboratory Possible-worlds semantics for knowledge and belief do not seem appropriate for modelling human reasoning since they suffer from the problem of what Hintikka calls ``logical omniscience''. This means that agents are assumed to be so intelligent that they must, in particular, know all valid formulas. Moreover, each agent's knowledge is also closed under deduction, so that if an agent knows p, and if p logically implies q, then the agent must also know q. Unfortunately, this is certainly not a very accurate account of how people operate! People are not logically omniscient for several reasons, including (1) Lack of awareness: how can someone say that he knows or doesn't know about p if p is a concept he is completely unaware of? (2) People are resource-bounded: they simply lack the computational resources to deduce all the logical consequences of their knowledge. (3) People don't focus on all issues simultaneously: it is possible for a person to have distinct frames of mind, where the conclusions drawn in distinct frames of mind may contradict each other. Some new logics for belief and knowledge are introduced which model these phenomena, so that, in particular, agents need not be logically omniscient. This talk represents joint work with Joe Halpern. --Ronald Fagin ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 5 Feb 85 09:08:22 pst From: Gabriel Kuper Subject: Ph. D. Oral - The Logical Data Model (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Gabriel M. Kuper The Logical Data Model: A New Approach to Database Logic 9AM, 7 Feb. 985 Building 420 (Psychology), Room 41 We propose a mathematical framework for unifying and generalizing the three principal data models, i.e., the relational, hierarchical and network models. Until recently most theoretical work on databases has focused on the relational model, mainly due to its elegance and mathematical simplicity compared to the other models. Some of this work has pointed out various disadvantages of the relational model, among them its lack of semantics and the fact that it forces the data to have a flat structure that the real data does not always have. The Logical Data Model (LDM) combines the advantages of both approaches. It models database schemas as directed graphs, in which the leaves correspond to the attributes, and the internal nodes to connections between the data. Instances of LDM schemas consist of r-values, which constitute the data space, and l-values, which constitute the address space. This enables us to deal with instances of cyclic structures, but still get a first-order theory. We define a logic on LDM schemas in which integrity constraints can be specified, and use it to define a logical, i.e. non-procedural, query language that is analogous to Codd's relational calculus. We also describe an algebraic, i.e. procedural, query language and prove that the two query languages are equivalent. These languages have a novel feature: not only can they access a non-flat data structure, e.g. a hierarchy, but the answers they produce do not have to be flat either. Thus, the language really does have the ability to restructure data and not only to retrieve it. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 6 Feb 85 17:20:59-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Conference on Evolution and Information [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] CONFERENCE ON EVOLUTION AND INFORMATION A conference on Evolution and Information with major support from CSLI will be held at Stanford this April 19-21. The specific focus of the conference will be on the use of optimality models both in biology and in the human sciences. Papers will be contributed to the conference by biologists, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists. Apart from addressing problems and limitations of optimality models within biology, an important aim of the conference will be to explore the relevance of biological results, either factually or methodologically, to other areas of inquiry. Papers to be discussed at the conference will be circulated about a month before the meeting. Contributors will be asked to give a brief summary of their papers at the conference sessions but papers will not be read. Therefore, anyone who would be interested in seeing the papers in advance, or would like any further information about the conference, should contact John Dupre, Philosophy, Stanford University (415-497-2587, Dupre@Turing). ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 5 Feb 85 20:13:24 pst From: li51x%sdcc3@SDCSVAX Subject: SCCGL Conference on General Linguistics CALL FOR PAPERS SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CONFERENCE ON GENERAL LINGUISTICS APRIL 20-21, 1985 The Conference will be held at the University of California, San Diego. Papers from any of the subdisciplines of linguistics are eligible. Graduate students are especially encouraged to participate, and abstracts will be refereed anonymously. Please provide 10 copies of your single-page titled anonymous abstract, and include an index card with the fol- lowing information: Paper title (matching that on abstract) Author Address Phone number (including area code) Please send abstracts to the address below before 28 February 1985. Chilin Shih SCCGL Linguistics, C-008 UCSD La Jolla, CA 92093 Information about meals and accommodation will be mailed later. For further information call (619) 452-3600, Chilin Shih, Carol Georgopoulos, or Diane Lillo-Martin. You may reach Chilin at sdcc6!ix226@UCSD.arpa. Please use SCCGL as the subject heading. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************