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Date: Mon, 15 Jul 85 17:01:20 edt

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Subject: AIList Digest   V3 #93
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AIList Digest            Sunday, 14 Jul 1985       Volume 3 : Issue 93

Today's Topics:
  Games - Progress in Chess,
  Learning - Forgetting,
  AI Tools - Interlisp Comments,
  Natural Language - Aymara FAB Lab

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Date: Fri 5 Jul 85 19:28:02-EDT
From: Fred Hapgood <[email-masked]>
Subject: Progress in Chess

It is my recollection that the first good chess program, Northwestern's
CHESS 3.0, had earned a USCF rating of about 2100 in 1973. In
the subsequent twelve years quite impressive advances have been
made both in chess programs and the hardware running them. Yet
apparently all that this progress has bought has been a measly
100 rating points. What conclusions might be drawn from these
facts? One, surely, is that it might take much longer than any
of us think to build a machine that plays even 2400 chess, let
alone at world champion level.

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Date: Sun, 7 Jul 85 16:03:56 PDT
From: Richard K. Jennings <[email-masked]>
Subject: Falling Away; re Furth's message.

>  From: "furth john%d.mfenet"  >Subject: The Best Chess Program
>        To attain an independent and useful intelligence, the learner
>  must be able to discard significant portions of the means by which
>  it has arrived at its present level of ability.  The original hub
>  of its actions must *fall away* and a new one be generated.
>  So the adult forgets the involvements of childhood and the state
>  the cares of its early days.  With whatever vestiges remain, the
>  organism must take on a whole new orientation to meet new
>  needs with a closer approach to the optimum.  It is better to
>  forget the past than to live there.  The best chess program
>  will forget most everything its author ever told it to do.

    This is certainly true for persons in general.  The recent TV
    series & book entitled 'The Brain' talked about people who didn't
    seem to be able to forget very well, and the problems they had
    in normal life.

    Along these lines, it is possible to develop some rather interesting
    perspectives 'on the meaning of it all'.
    Suppose for a moment, one of the key features of our species is that
    regardless of how important person an person thinks he or she is, they

    'fall away' (read die) after a rather short period of time (on the
    cosmic scale).  If immortality could be achieved, this would not

    occur and the 'intelligence' of the species by Furth's implicit
    definition would be reduced.  Consequently, the immortality quest is
    ephemeral at best, and certainly not a quest that should be funded
    by the entire race.

                Rich.

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 7 Jul 85 19:27:40 PDT
From: Steve Crocker <[email-masked]>
Subject: Interlisp comments are first class citizens

I must have missed the first flame about comments in Interlisp, but I'll
jump in anyway.  I have used Interlisp for a decade and it's a sheer
delight to see how many good ideas have been implemented and are just
sitting there waiting for the semi-experienced user to discover them.
The method of handling comments is one of the minor delights, but a delight
nonetheless.

As has been noted, comments in Interlisp are simply functions that don't
have any useful value.  The "*" is used as the function symbol, and that
works fine, although any other symbol such as ";" or "comment" could have
been used as well.  Once you get the idea that comments are simply "useless"
functions, I find it hard to understand why there's much trouble placing
them correctly.  The prettyprinter always prints them out in an identifiable
way, and the compiler and/or DWIM package catch the majority of errors you
might make.  No similar service exists is most other languages, including
most dialects of Lisp.

One of the neat things we were able to do with Interlisp comments is adopt a
convention that each function definition contain a comment that describes
its purpose, inputs and output as its first "action."  (The compiler knows
enough to generate nothing when it sees a comment, so it doesn't take up
either time or space in the object code.)  Using the Masterscope system, we
built some tools that generate documentation for a file full of functions.
This documentation includes all of the Masterscope goodies -- who calls the
function, what variables are referenced, etc. -- and the initial comment for
the function.  All of this information is collected in a Scribe file and
turned into a substantial document.  This kind of thing is not necessary for
the programmer who's debugging a couple of functions in a context he knows
intimately, but it sure does help the next programmer or the same programmer
a year later.  This kind of tool was almost trivial to build because
comments are part of the code and not incidental frosting lost at the first
turn of the lexical analyzer.  (Anybody who thinks he has a natural language
parser that handles metaphors is invited to try that last sentence!)

There are always alternative ways of doing things and differences and taste
and style, but most of the criticisms of Lisp in general and Interlisp in
particular come from people who grew up (?) with batch compilers of
line-oriented, statement-oriented languages.  I think those are three of the
worst things that ever happened in computing, and will continue to haunt us
for another several decades.

Steve Crocker

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 8 Jul 85 09:50:16 edt
From: Eric Nyberg <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Interlisp Comments

In reply to Steven Tepper's comments in AIList #86, I would
like to make the following points about commenting Interlisp
programs.

Placing a comment in the "wrong" place may result in a comment
value being used by a function in an undesirable way. During
compilation, the compiler issues a warning whenever this sort
of situation is noticed (VALUE OF COMMENT USED).

The printing of comments as "**COMMENT**" during pretty printing
is the system default. Mr. Tepper was too quick to flamethrow
before checking his Interlisp manual on this. There is a variable
called **COMMENT**FLG which controls this behaviour. If **COMMENT**FLG
is NIL, comments are printed. Otherwise, the value of **COMMENT**FLG
is printed (initially set to "**COMMENT**"). There is also a function
called PP* {nlambda*} which performs a PP with all comments expanded.
I refer Mr. Tepper and others interested in reading about the comment
facility to Sections 6.8.1 - 6.8.4 in the Interlisp-D manual (I'm
afraid my comments don't apply to older versions of Interlisp). For
info on how to change the font used for comments, see section 6.8.5.

The rest of Steven's complaints about the position and font used for
comments can all be remedied by resetting various parameters that
control the format of comments (see the above sections). If one takes
the extra time to set up his/her programming environment the way he/she
likes it, it is possible to have the comments just about anywhere (and any
size). It seems that there are many user "hooks" in Interlisp-D that
allow this sort of customization. It is too bad that the documentation
is sometimes very difficult to understand, even when tracked down.

I disagree with Steven's conclusion that Interlisp "discourages"
comments. The *default environment* handles comments in a discouraging
way, but a few lines of code in the init file can remedy the situation.

Eric Nyberg
GTE Laboratories
[email-masked]

------------------------------

Date: Tue 9 Jul 85 02:51:46-CDT
From: Werner Uhrig  <[email-masked]>
Subject: A visit to the Aymara FAB Lab [DDJ July 85]

[ from Dr. Dobb's Journal, July 1985 - "Of Interest" by Michael Swaine]

A VISIT to the FAB Lab
=======================

--- A blip of 'deja vu' struck as I read in the March IEEE Software
about IVAN GUZMAN DE ROJAS and his plan for doing natural-language
translation via the peculiarly algebraic Andean Indean language Aymara.
Yes, trivial recall was working perfectly; halfway down the Andean peak
of press releases on my desk I found the announcement of the opening
of the AYAMARA FAB LAB in Sunnyvale.
A coincidence worthy of a drive down the peninsula.

DEAN NORMAN, director of the lab, ... explained that Guzman, discovering
the Aymara, lacking irregular verbs and gender, was an unprecedentedly
logical language (although its logic was not standard two-valued logic),
had succeeded in codifying the algorithmic structure of it syntax.
For the first time, someone had expressed a natural language in software.
Wasn't Guzman, I asked, considering the application of his achievement
in the design of translation machines, the notion being that computerized
Aymara could serve as the bridge in a multilanguage translation system?

Right, Norman answered, although at AFL they were taking the process in a
somewhat different direction.  Did I recall the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from
linguistics?  I did, more or less: that language delimited the thinkable
thoughts, and thus our culture and perceptions.  Under normal conditions
we see only those distinctions for which we have words.  In cultures in
which green is not a major linguistic division of the spectrum, it is also
not a primary perceptual division.

Norman nodded.  The principle can be applied to any language-processing
system, natural or artificial.  Curious as it might sound, the Aymara-
speaking software would, to a certain extend, think like an Aymaran.  With
it's multi-valued logic, it would make distinctions that would never occur
to a New York stock-broker; with its lack of grammatical gender, it would
fail to make distinctions the stockbroker would unconsciously make.
And Aymaran is only the easiest language, not the only one, to which
the principle can be applied.  Employing Guzman's translation techniques,
it would be possible to develop front-end packages that, with the proper
filtering out of Aymaran values and perceptions, would embody pure
upper-class British perceptions or ancient Greek thought processes.  We
could examine the way judges in ancient Sumeria examined evidence.

That, Norman explained, was what they were up to at AFL: just as the
developers of expert systems were trying to capture the knowledge of
selected individuals in software, AFL was trying to capture the style
of thinking, the intellectual spirit of whole cultures.  I mulled that
over.  Wouldn't there be a great advantage, I asked, in combining the two
approaches, developiong a system with a specifiable style of thinking?
Couldn't one develop, say, a machine with the knowledge of a high-energy
physicist and the spirit of a 12th-century Mandarin?  Or the knowledge
of a modern statesman and the intellectual style of the first Continental
Congress?  But Norman suddenly looked uncomfortable and said that he
couldn't discuss details of ongoing projects.

[given that I quote verbatim a large junk of text here, I feel it proper
 to make a plug for DDJ, one of the very few worthwhile commercial
  computer magazines:  DDJ appears monthly, subscription is $25/year,
  airmail Canada $46, other countries $62
  and if your technical newsstand doesn't have it you should ask for it.
  DDJ, PO Box 27809, Sand Diego, CA 92128
  call (800)321-3333 and (619)485-9623 or 566-6947 for subscription
  problems (not having one is a problem, right?  ;-)

  disclaimers galore - Werner ]

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End of AIList Digest
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