From csvpi@vpics1.VPI Fri Mar 22 10:27:32 1985 Date: Fri, 22 Mar 85 10:27:27 est From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI Return-Path: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a023459; 21 Mar 85 21:05 EST Date: Thu 21 Mar 1985 17:07-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 #38 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 22 Mar 85 10:21 EST AIList Digest Friday, 22 Mar 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 38 Today's Topics: Psychology - Real-Time Decision Making, Games - Mastermind Rules, Humor - Stray Parens and Brackets, Linguistics - Hangul, Programming - Fourth Generation Languages, News - Misrepresentation & Recent Articles, Seminars - Semantic Interpretation Against Ambiguity (UToronto) & Massive Parallelism (UToronto) & Category Theory (UCB), Conference - Expert Weapons Systems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 21 Mar 85 11:32:43 pst From: Cindy Mason Subject: decision making references Does anyone know of references to Real time multi-agent decision making strategies Real time single-agent decision making strategies OR Heuristics that humans use in real time situations in either group or solo problem solving? Any leads on these topics will be appreciated. Cindy Mason (clm@lll-crg) ------------------------------ Date: Thu 21 Mar 85 16:37:38-CST From: Charles Petrie Subject: Mastermind Rules Request Does anyone have the set of "if/then" rules for playing some version of mastermind? [Several algorithms and sets of rules have been published in the SIGART Newsletter. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Wed 20 Mar 85 08:16:56-CST From: Jim Miller Subject: stray parens and brackets Some of us recipients of the aforementioned stray parens here at MCC would appreciate it if the Interlisp programmers out there would set #RPARS to NIL, so that the pretty printer does not substitute square brackets for multiple parens. Many of us are working in Zetalisp, which does not recognize square brackets as anything special, and trying to infer how many parens are implied by a random square bracket is very difficult and time consuming. Thanks for your consideration in this matter. Jim Miller MCC / Human Interface ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Mar 85 09:16:13 PST From: hplabs!tektronix!jans@mako Subject: Hangul AIList Digest Friday, 15 Mar 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 34 Date: 14 Mar 85 08:14 PST From: Kay.pa@XEROX.ARPA The word "Hangul" (not "Hungal") may refer to a dialect, but that is not its main use. It is the name of the wonderfully ingenious writing system that Korean has, named after the emperor who invented it. Hangul refers not to an emperor, nor a transcription system, but the Korean language in general. Written Korean is called "Hangul" in much the same way as written English is called "English". The emperor in question is actually King Sejong. (of the Koryo dynasty???) This enlightened leader did not actually invent the language, but commissioned a team of scholars to the task. Hangul has the distinction of being the most modern natural language trascription system (ci 1400, 1477 sticks in my mind for some reason) and the only one in wide use that was designed and implemented, rather that growing from common use. Prior to it's invention, the Korean Language was written in bastardized Chineese. It's success is evident in Korea's near 100% literacy rate, which is (by far) the highest among developing nations, and is among the highest in the world. (In fact, higher than good ol' USA!) The "Golden Age" of King Sejong's reign also featured the development of Korea's modern legal system, the first modern navy in the Orient, and numerous other developments in the arts and sciences. :::::: Jan Steinman Box 1000, MS 61-161 (w)503/685-2843 :::::: :::::: tektronix!tekecs!jans Wilsonville, OR 97070 (h)503/657-7703 :::::: ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Mar 85 22:07:29 PST From: Richard K. Jennings Subject: Fourth Generation Languages Re: Comments by Touretzky. I think the gist of the matter boils down to whether languages or engineering should be taught in computer science departments. My undergraduate professors did not consider software creation to be worthy of academic credit (extreme) [course 16, MIT, 78], but in retrospect (see the discussions on SOFT-ENG) may have had a point. We just recieved an Aero from VPI. Given a task, he worked out a solution, found a machine, looked at several available languages, chose FORTRAN and wrote a program in about 4 hours to help him. The design is separate from the coding or implementation. [Since then, he became frustrated with FORTRAN, BASIC and Z-100 assembler .. and is now happily working with XLISP 1.4]. In this context how does one exploy the concept of "shells" for expert systems? If one knows that a shell is applicable, I can clearly understand (what I presume would be) Martin's argument to use it. If one is not sure, how should one's time be budgeted towards understanding the problem, understanding the shell(s), selecting a shell, and implementing a solution? Rich. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 19 Mar 85 14:19:11-PST From: AAAI Subject: Misrepresentation [Forwarded from the SRI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Recently, another incidence of someone misrepresenting themself as a AAAI employee/consultant has occurred. This person named "Judy Robbins" is calling AAAI members inquiring about their interest in attending one of the AAAI's many workshops and seminars. The AAAI does have a workshop program that focuses on well defined, narrow technical topics. No one from the AAAI office is involved directly with the coordination of any of these workshops. So, if this person calls you, please try to catch her phone number and address and send it to us. Thank you for your attention to this matter! [There was a previous incident in which someone used the AAAI name to solicit salary information. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 18 Mar 1985 11:52-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Recent Articles High Technology April 1985 41-49: Discusses DARPA Advanced Computer Research effort. This includes the AI work, past civilian spinoffs of DARPA computer initiatives, moral and social issues as well as results of interviews with researchs who have problems with DARPA's efforts 3: add from AT&T describing expert systems for phone compnay cable maintenance (which runs on the 3B2 computer), statistics (particularly regression) expert systems , silicon compilers and systems to derive new rules from existing rules in its database. ____________________________________________________________________________ Dec Hardcopy March 1985 Volume 14 no 3 43-49: AI for Micros minireviews of Golden Hill Common Lisp and Lisp/88, micro prolog, Insight, Expert System Tool Kit (running under Forth) and Expert Ease. Also includes some general AI info for those not familiar with AI. 18: evaluation of AI market potential. Estimated 1984 AI products sold $140,000,000 worth with 5 billion dollars by 1990. Another study estimated that 'overinflated product claims' and "brain drain from university to industry" would slow growth down to 50 per cent a year (1 billion in 1989). ____________________________________________________________________________ IEEE Computer February 1985 Volume 18 Number 2 (Special Issue on Hardware Description Languages) Temporal Logic for Multilevel Reasoning about Hardware Ben Moszowski Hardware Verification Fumihiro Maruyama and Masahiro Fujita (Discussed application of theorem proving and PROLOG to hardware verification.) Concurrent Prolog as an Efficient VLSI Design Language Norihisa Suzuki A Transformation Model for VLSI Systolic Design MOnica S. Lam and Jack Mostow ____________________________________________________________________________ Byte March 1985 Volume 10 No. 3 Page 10: "TI Offers AI Software for IBM PC, TI Professonal" "Texas Instruments planned to announce Arborist, a decison-analysis tool for managers, late last maonth. Arborist, an expert system that allows you to enter information in a natural-language format, sets up decision trees that can be graphically displayed. It is expected to sell for about $500.00" Page 221 "An XLISP tutorial" tutorial on a public domain version of LISP (written in C) ____________________________________________________________________________ Electronic News Monday, March 18, 1985 Page 24: PE Group named Richard W. Peebles director of research for their AI group. He was a manager of DEC's project to design office systems based upon AI technology. Page 61: Vuebotics (a company making machine vision systems) filed for Chapter 11 ____________________________________________________________________________ Electronics Week March 18, 1985 Page 48 Interview with Danny Hillis of Thinking Machines, Inc. ____________________________________________________________________________ Department of Computer Science and Engineering Southern Methodist University Dr. Chao-Chih Yang Professor Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Alabama at Birmingham Birmingham, Alabama "Representations and Implemenations of the Decision Tables" 1:30-2:30 PM Friday March 22, 1985 Decision table definiitions; some representations such as functional approach, logical approach, and relational database approach. Implementations by a LISP program and PROLOG program. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 19 Mar 85 14:09:46 est From: Voula Vanneli Subject: Seminar - Semantic Interpretation Against Ambiguity (UToronto) UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE (SF = Sandford Fleming Building, 10 King's College Road) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR - Tuesday, March 26, 3 pm, SF 1105 Professor Graeme Hirst Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto "Semantic Interpretation Against Ambiguity" A semantic interpreter must be able to provide feedback to the parser to help it handle structural ambiguities. In Absity, the semantic interpreter we describe, this is done by the "Semantic Enquiry Desk", a process that answers the parser's questions on semantic preferences. Disambiguation of word senses and of case slots is done by a set of pro- cedures, one per word or slot, each of which determines its correct sense in cooperation with the others. A partially disambiguiated procedure's remaining possibilities are well-formed Frail objects that can be seen and used by other processes, including the Semantic Enquiry Desk, just as a person can see many of the details of a partly developed "instant" photograph. It is from the fact that partial results are always well-formed semantic objects that the system gains much of its power. This, in turn, comes from the strict correspondence between syntax and semantics in Absity. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 19 Mar 85 14:11:41 est From: Voula Vanneli Subject: Seminar - Massive Parallelism (UToronto) UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE (GB = Galbraith Building, 35 St. George) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE/THEORETICAL ASPECTS/SYSTEMS SEMINAR Thursday, March 28, 11 am, GB 220 Professor Jerry Feldman Dept. of Computer Science, University of Rochester "Massive Parallelism in Nature and in Computer Science" Human brains made of millisecond components (neurons) can carry out complex perceptual tasks in less than a second i.e. in about a hundred sequential time steps. This compu- tational constraint, among others, suggests that the algo- rithms employed by nature are quite different from those of conventional AI. Several groups have been exploring the direct use of "connectionist" computational models and have obtained some promising results. The talk will describe a model of massively parallel computation, its application to problems of vision and language, and some of the issues it raises for theoretical and systems work on parallel computa- tion. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Mar 85 16:40:56 pst From: chertok%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Paula Chertok) Subject: Seminar - Category Theory (UCB) BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237B TIME: Tuesday, March 26, 11 - 12:30 PLACE: 240 Bechtel Engineering Center (followed by) DISCUSSION: 12:30 - 1:30 in 200 Building T-4 SPEAKER: George Lakoff, Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley TITLE: ``Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: A Guided Tour'' I'll be presenting an overview of what's in my new book: WOMEN, FIRE AND DANGEROUS THINGS: WHAT CATEGORIES REVEAL ABOUT THE MIND. Here's some of what the tour will cover: - Prototype effects are surface phenomena that have sources in cognitive models of four types: scalar, propositional, meto- nymic, and radial. - Why prototype and basic-level effects are inconsistent with classical theories of meaning, including all theories in which symbols (that is words, and mental representations) are taken as being given meaning by virtue of their relation to external reality. These include model-theoretic semantics, internal- representations-of-external-reality, Fodor's `semantically evaluable' representations, etc. - The logical inconsistency of model-theoretic semantics and all theories in which meaning is based on truth and reference. - How cognitive model theory gets around these problems. - Whorf and Relativism: Why there are hundreds of positions on linguistic relativity which are not totally relativistic, and why at least one such position is probably true. - Why categorization phenomena are inconsistent with a view in which (a) thought is merely a matter of symbol manipulation and (b) the mind is independent of the body. They are, however, consistent with information processing approaches in which the mind is not separate from and independent of the body. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Mar 85 11:29:58 EST From: Morton A Hirschberg Subject: Expert Systems in Government Symposium I am organizing the sessions on Weapon Systems at the upcoming Expert Systems in Goverment Symposium to be held in McLean VA, Oct 23-25. Weapons Systems topics include adaptive control, electronic warfare, star wars, and target identification. Anyone wishing to organize sessions and/or submit papers can contact me (soon). Mort mort@brl-bmd Morton A. Hirschberg USA Ballistic Research Laboratory Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD 21005-5066 AMXBR-SECAD 301-278-6661 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1.VPI Sun Mar 24 05:03:19 1985 Date: Sun, 24 Mar 85 05:03:15 est From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI Return-Path: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a002540; 24 Mar 85 2:56 EST Date: Sat 23 Mar 1985 22:49-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 #39 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sun, 24 Mar 85 05:00 EST AIList Digest Sunday, 24 Mar 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 39 Today's Topics: Policy - Sexism in AI/AIList ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu 21 Mar 85 16:40:06-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: Sexism in AI The response on this list-policy topic (Impure Mathematics/Humor/Rape/ Censorship/Sexism) clearly makes this special digest issue necessary. A few readers have complained, however, that the discussion has already been out of hand and that it is my job as moderator to reject such submissions. I therefore request that readers direct their further replies to each other rather than to the list unless they introduce AI-related issues that are not considered below. The AIList-Request@SRI-AI.ARPA mailbox is still open for administrative discussions, and copies of significant messages to that mailbox are available to interested parties. I will reply as I have time, but will not necessarily answer messages cc'd as a courtesy. It would be impossible for me to agree with more than half of the opposing views that have been expressed, but I am generally pleased with the quality of the arguments that have been presented. [My] official list policy is a composite of my own views and those that I perceive the readership to hold, so your feedback on this and other matters has been helpful in establishing digest policy. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Tuesday, 19 Mar 1985 12:58:53-PST From: robbins%lite.DEC@decwrl.ARPA (Jeff Robbins CSC/CS 523-4880) Subject: Another comment on Polly Nomial From: MOLSON::S_ROGENMOSER "Sharon Rogenmoser (CSC/CS-TSS) 523-4529 To: LITE::ROBBINS As far as the story goes, I agree with everyone that complained about it. It wasn't funny. And it wasn't just a play on mathematical terms. It very obviously associates Polly as a young woman at the beginning of the story. And the reason she had such a terrible thing happen to her was that that she was feeling 'adventurous' that day, so wandered off where she wasn't supposed to be. The story very much parallels (no pun intended) what woman are told all their lives. And the moral of the story is 'don't allow them freedom'. Don't you find it interesting that there was nothing mentioned about Curly doing anything wrong. I disagree with all the men that commented what a terrible thing censorship was. This story explains what a female should expect if she steps out of the bounds society (or the laws of mathematics) has laid down for her, just like most of our fairy tales do. The message is very much there. And as long as 'innocent' stories are allowed to circulate without question, the message will be considered true. It scares me. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Mar 1985 11:15 EST From: MONTALVO%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Polly Nomial From: Ken Laws >is<< funny, or at least witty, regardless of whether it has to be banned for social reasons. It was not so long ago that exclusively male clubs existed where women were kept out by law, the threat of violence, or ridicule. Such jokes where part and parcel of keeping up the threat of rape or ridicule which many women have experienced. They are means of excluding women from exclusively male domains, since mostly men enjoy these jokes and most women are offended by them. Some men are also threatened by these kinds of jokes; if they don't find them funny by laughing openly, their masculinity may be questioned. I feel that AIList is no place for such material because it gives the list the aura of an exclusively male club. Fanya Montalvo ------------------------------ Date: Saturday, 16-Mar-85 6:20:58-GMT From: GORDON JOLY (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: Top-Down AI. The demise of humour on the AI-Digest would indeed be a sad event. I see humour as one of the most functional and dynamic parts of the list. This follows from the thesis of `The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' by Robert Heinlein. In this fiction, the central character is `Mike' who is a self-aware computer who is trying to understand the human race. His main avenue of research is a massive analysis of jokes and non-jokes. (I hope the title of the novel is not construed as sexist!) Gordon Joly gcj%edxa@uk.ac.ucl.cs [I recall a science fiction story in which humor disappeared from the world once it was realized that jokes (as opposed to puns) were just tools of aliens studying the transmission of information in our species. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Mar 85 13:16:30 est From: Elias Israel Subject: Poly and good taste.... WARNING! Yet another two cents' worth on the same old topic follows: Normally, I wouldn't say anything, but here at Brandeis we have been grappling with this very subject. The "Women's Coalition" (a Brandeis group) is sponsoring "Women's Month" and they have addressed this recently. The point of contention seems to be about images of men and women in the mainstream of society. Some people contend that images of men and women in mainsteam societal activities now actively or passively advocate violence against women. Not just pornography, about which there has always been this complaint, but also TV, movies, magazines and, yes, even jokes have been blamed as vehicles for these images. The next point that some people make is that the existence of these images promote violence against women by creating an atmosphere in which violence against women is considered acceptable behaviour. This last point is, to my mind, less clear than many people might think. I see this question as a kind of chicken-and-egg situation. Which came first: violence against women, or depictions thereof? I think this question has to wait for some more conclusive evidence concerning the acquisition of attitudes that promote violence against women. Where do these attitudes come from? I also have a problem thinking that humour might be a significant vehicle for these images (assuming that they exist in any of the other cases, something which seems likely to be true) Humour, by its nature, says "here's a story that you should not take seriously". I don't think that the author of Poly Nomial intended to rationalize rape any more than a person might rationalize infant killing by telling dead-baby jokes. The funny part of the Poly Nomial story was that you could use mathematical terms to describe a piece of human behaviour. Alas, the behaviour depicted was also something that is regarded as distasteful and wrong, at least by most responsible adults. Herein lies the rub. Some people, when they read Poly Nomial, don't separate the linguistic games from the act that the story depicted. Understandably, this story can offend when the point of the story seems to be the act of rape rather than the wordplay. What to do, what to do? I guess the only real solution is to be careful about what we post to the net. There seems no reason in hurting people's sensibilities. At the same time, however, I think when we get offended by something that comes across the net, we should each try to be a little less sensitive. We should try "not to ascribe to maliciousness that which can be adequately explained by ignorance" (quote stolen from the 4.2BSD fortune program :-). In any case, maybe we should let Poly rest and get back to artificial intelligence (ok, an occasional joke or two would be nice too :-). ====================================================================== Elias Israel All opinions above are mine, but you know all that..... ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Mar 85 10:13 IST From: Henry Nussbacher Subject: Humor I would like to request that all seminar announcements no longer be posted in AIlist. These seminars are scheduled for places like Stanford and MIT which I can't attend and therefore I find offensive. You see, it is sort of like rubbing my nose it, saying, "Ha ha, we have this great seminar and we know you can't attend since you are located 5,000 miles away". I find this lack of sensitivity on the part of AIlist for people located in foreign countries most offensive. You may not find it offensive but I do!! Henry Nussbacher Rehovot, Israel [Please do not reply to this message until you have taken note of the subject line. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Thursday, 21 Mar 1985 11:12-EST From: mcc@Mitre-Bedford Subject: Rape Jokes and Policy What if the joke in question were a "nigger" joke, or that it were about Paul E. Nomial, as Diana Bental suggested, who was raped or sodomized by a homosexual? What if Paul E. Nomial (or Polly Nomial, for that matter) were a five year old and the story were about sexual assault on a child? Would it still be funny? And if not, why not? Would Ken Laws have included them in AIList? Would David want any of these censored? If so, why censor any of these and not the original Polly Nomial? As far as David thinking that censorship is a crime that is "far worse" than rape because "it affects so many more" --that is bullshit. I have never been a victim of a rape, either, but the statistics tell us that 50% or more of the women in the U.S. today have been victims of rape or will be at some time in their lives. Too many of my friends have been assaulted. There is a good chance that some of the women who read AIList, the wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, co-workers or girlfriends of many of the men who read AIList have been or will be victims of rape. In addition, the fear of rape is debilitating, and it affects 100% of the women in this country, and their friends, co-workers, husbands, fathers, sons... EVERYONE!!! Regarding freedom and restriction thereof, the precautions we take in an effort to avoid rape are frustratingly inconvenient and inadaquate to say the least. At school, we were ordered not to EVER jog alone because women had been raped while jogging alone at 9:00 am, 4:30 pm, and (of course) at night. I resent having to think twice about taking a course that ends at 10:00 pm. Sometimes I can't even walk to my car after dark without wishing I had a can of mace on hand. And it bugs me that I can't even read AIList without being harassed. Maryellen C. Costello mcc@MITRE-BEDFORD ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Mar 85 08:46:20 mst From: crs@LANL.ARPA (Charlie Sorsby) Subject: Re: Reply to Diana Bental Your reply to Ms. Bental makes a lot of sense to me. It seems to me that there is all to much of a tendency among people to want to BAN anything and everything that offends THEM. The rationale seems to be that it is only a "tiny" step from that which they want to ban to some [to all or to them] undesirable action by society, but it is a "huge" leap from banning what they want to banning the next logical item in the chain. And, of course, there is the widely held belief that outlawing the INSTRUMENT of an undesirable action rather than the action itself is going to save us all from the action. It doesn't matter to proponents of this approach that the item banned may well have some perfectly legitimate purpose for the majority of its users. If the item is banned, the activity will magically go away. In the case of jokes, it is only WORDS that they would have us ban to cause this magic. I am well aware of the power of words, but this is ridiculous. Charlie Sorsby ...!{cmcl2,ihnp4,...}!lanl!crs crs@lanl.arpa ------------------------------ Date: 21 Mar 85 13:52 EST From: Sheehan.henr@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Re: AIList Digest V3 #37 Diana Bental's assessment of the polynominal joke and censoring ramifcations is excellent. Tom Sheehan ------------------------------ Date: Thu 21 Mar 85 12:13:37-PST From: VARDI@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Censoring Humor The pious claims about censorship are misleading. Clearly, not every thing should appear on a bboard. I can easily come up with something that would be so offensive that the most liberal moderator would can it. I find the Poly Nomial joke very offensive to me as a man. Since I believe that there many others who find such pieces offensive, they should be kept out of AIList. I see it as the moderators duty. Moshe Vardi CSLI, Stanford University ------------------------------ Date: Thursday, 21-Mar-85 16:40:34-GMT From: JANE HPS (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: Humour Two points to add to the debate: 1. I'm surprised that so many people dismiss humour so casually as light entertainment, when it can be a particularly good way of displaying power. Would the creator of Poly Nomial care to make a sexist joke if s/he were being interviewed by a woman for a much wanted job? And if the roles were reversed? 2. I often find it illuminating, when looking at questions of sexism, to translate into another realm such as racism or religious prejudice, in which our sensitivity is not so dulled. I doubt whether clever tricks like the Poly Nomial story would be regarded as humorous if their context were something as ugly as apartheid or sending Jews to the gas chambers. Jane Hesketh ------------------------------ Date: 22 Mar 85 23:50:26 CST (Fri) From: ihnp4!utzoo!bnr-vpa!bnr-di!yali@Berkeley Subject: Discussion of rape, jokes, censorship. I agree with Ken Laws that AILIST is probably not the best forum to discuss such issues. However, since he chose to include the original Polly Nomial article in the digest, it is only fair that some follow-ups criticising that article also be allowed to appear. I also agree with Diana Bental that articles such as the one under discussion may encourage an acceptance of attitudes that lead to rape (of women) being regarded as the prerogative of a man. Moreover, I think that the humour in such an article itself depends, to some extent, upon the reader being able to identify with such attitudes. After all, why is it that one almost never sees (at least in mainstream N. American circles) jokes whose humour is based on incidents of homosexual rape of men by men? Would the readers of AILIST find such a joke as funny as the Polly Nomial article? If not, why not? Is it because such behaviour or humour is not "normal"? Is it the case then that rape of women by men is in some sense regarded as normal? Or perhaps I should be more charitable. Perhaps it is the case that such jokes are made in order to allow us to sublimate our fear of heterosexual rape, which after all is a rather common phenomenon in our society. That is, perhaps we men are all really identifying ourselves with Polly Nomial, the rape victim. Perhaps. Yawar Ali BNR, Ottawa (Canada). ihnp4!utzoo!bnr-vpa!bnr-di!yali ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1.VPI Mon Mar 25 04:06:57 1985 Date: Mon, 25 Mar 85 04:06:51 est From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI Return-Path: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a006559; 25 Mar 85 0:34 EST Date: Sun 24 Mar 1985 20:12-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 #40 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Mon, 25 Mar 85 03:55 EST AIList Digest Monday, 25 Mar 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 40 Today's Topics: Courses - AI Short Courses, AI Tools - LISP for Amdahl470/V6 or V8 & 4th-Generation Languages, Planning - Real-Time Multiagent Planning, Expert Systems - Assembly Language as Expert System, News - Opportunities in Sweden and Cambridge, Survey - Recent Articles, Seminars - Marker-Passing During Problem Solving (UPenn) & Rational Interaction: Cooperation Among Intelligent Agents (UPenn) & Vision System of Mobile Robot (UPenn) & Counterfactual Implication (UPenn), Conference - Rewriting Techniques and Applications ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 23 Mar 85 12:35:35 est From: Alan Oppenheim Subject: AI short courses I'm trying to find a TOP QUALITY 3 or 4 day short course on AI/expert systems. One that I've recently heard about is called knowledge-based systems and AI offered by Integrated Computer Systems. If anyone has attended this course, or is familiar with any other similar course I would apprciate their comments and suggestions. Please send any replies to avo@bugs-bunny. Al Oppenheim ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Mar 85 10:50 PST From: "B.S.Radhakrishna Sharma" Subject: PUBLIC DOMAIN LISP FOR AMDAHL470/V6 OR V8 CAN ANYONE SEND ME POINTERS TO ANY REASONABLY GOOD LISP AVAILABLE ON PUBLIC DOMAIN THANX, BSHARMA@WSU ------------------------------ Date: Friday, 22 Mar 85 10:24:20 PST From: tekig5!sridhar%tektronix.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: 4th generation languages >From the discussions on the above and from the March CACM, I've become intrigued by 4GL's and am seriously thinking of incorporating them in my present project. If anyone could give me pointers to where I can get hold of the technical details, I'd be very grateful. Thanks. Sridhar (arpa) sridhar%tekig5@tektronix (csnet) sridhar%tekig5%tektronix@csnet-relay (usenet) { decvax,ucbvax,ogcvax,ihnp4,allegra,purdue,psu-eea, masscomp, mit-eddie,mit-ems,uoregon,psu-cs,,uw-beaver,ucbcad ,tekred } !tektronix!tekig5!sridhar USMAIL: Tektronix, Inc., MS C1-952, PO Box 3500, Vancouver, WA 98661 ------------------------------ Date: 22 Mar 1985 21:53-EST From: gasser%usc-cse.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Real Time Multi Agent Planning I know of many good references on multi-agent planning and decisionmaking, but few that I know of address the issues of real time decisionmaking. The best overall reference I have seen is a RADC report written by people at AI&DS: "Distributed Decision Making Environments." This is easily the best survey of Distributed AI extant (Unfortunately I don't have the report with me at the moment and can't give you the number. It may be for limited distribution.) Also see the work on the Vehicle Monitoring Testbed (Lesser, Corkhill, et al. at UMASS), the Contract Net (Randy Davis and Reid Smith), the Rand Corp Air Traffic Control and RPV projects (Steeb, Cammarata, etc.- there is a real time element here), the SRI work on multiagent planning (Konolige, Appelt, Genesereth, Rosenschein). Most of these groups publish regularly in IJCAI and AAAI Proceedings since 1979 or so. Also see the reports on the annual workshops in Distributed AI in SIGART #'s 73, 80, and 84. Several people have tried to integrate time into planning - notably: Steve Vere at JPL (DEVISER) - see IEEE PAMI 5/83 pg. 246 (One of the best actual planning systems.) James Allen at Rochester: "Towards a General Theory of Action and Time" AI Journal 23 (1984) pg. 123-154. William Long, Reasoning about state from causation and time in a medical domain, Proc AAAI 83 Drew McDermott, A temporal logic for reasoning about processes and plans, Cog Sci, 6 1982, pg 101-157 Kahn, K. and G.A. Gorry: Mechanizing temporal knowledge, AI Journal, 9, 1977, pg 87-108 Gary Hendrix, Modelling Simultaneous actions and continuous processes AI Journal, 8, 1977, pg 47-68. Mark Fox's thesis and follow-on work out of CMU Robotics Institute. We have started a distributed problem solving project here at USC Computer Science as well, and are investigating temporal planning, joint planning among agents, evolutionary-opportunistic reasoning, the roles of agent models, and how agents jointly handle anomalies. Our particular focus applies knowledge from organization theory and the sociology of work to multi-agent problem solving. -- Les Gasser Asst. Professor Dept. of Computer Science, SAL-200 USC Los Angeles, CA. 90089-0782 ARPANET: GASSER%USC-CSE@CSNET-RELAY ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 23 Mar 85 16:14:58 pst From: Vish Dixit Subject: Assembly Language as Expert System I agree with Curtis Goodhart's comments on Expert systems. It raises the following questions: 1. is an Expert System simply a programming methodology? 2. must it be written in a particular language for it to be an ES? 3. Must it embody large/imprecise body of knowledge and employ heuristic/adhoc rules? 4. finaly, what is the most important charasteristic of an ES - programming style, language, or the domain? Also, there seems to be a craze for writing ES for every problem. (You know that when even the campus recruiters start asking about them.) If only programming methodology (Forward production System) is the criterion Assembly language programs would qualify to be called Expert Systems. (?) Here it goes: An assembly language program is written as a sequence of instructions of the form ... The are usualy the internal registers and some memory. The internal registers and the memory could be considered as the database (short term memory). Each instruction is simply a Rule of the expert system. The Rules are pairs. In the assembly program, the conditions and some actions are implicit to save the space. Thus the instructions ORG 2000H MOV A,B .... ORG 3000H MOV A,B ... JNZ 2000H actually stand for the rules: (PC is program counter) then then The order of these rules is immaterial. The microprocessor control simply looks at whatever rule has its condition satisfied, fetches it and executes it until it is explicitly put into Halt mode or it none of rules can be applied (PC runs over). The actions, conditions, etc are very restricted, nevertheless they are there. signed -:) USENET: ...!{sdcrdcf,randvax}!uscvax!dixit CSNET: dixit@usc-cse.csnet ARPA: dixit%usc-cse@csnet-relay.arpa MABEL: (213) 747-3684 USMAIL: EE-systems, SAL-337, Univ. of Southern Calif., Los Angeles, CA 90089-0781 ------------------------------ Date: 21 Mar 85 1808 PST From: Bengt Jonsson Subject: Possibilities to visit Sweden [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] A new research institute for Computer Sciences is now being formed in connection with the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. They are interested in furthering contacts with other research groups. Areas of interest include parallel machine architectures, logic programming, design of integrated circuits and computer networks. There is also interest if someone likes to visit Stockholm for X months of research. Persons interested in this can send a message to BXJ@SAIL ------------------------------ Date: Fri 22 Mar 85 10:33:28-PST From: Evan Cohn Subject: Free Trip to Cambridge (England) [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Each year the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory pays for a graduate student from North America to visit the Laboratory for a few weeks over the summer. By doing this we hope to learn about some of the latest research in the USA .. and to make a friend. All we expect is that the selected person will interact with relevant students and faculty members at Cambridge. We will pay travel to and from Cambridge and provide accomodation in Wolfson College plus reasonable living expenses (including hire of a bicycle). This year we can only provide accomodation between 8 July and 14 September. The selection of our summer visitor is competitive. We base our decision mainly on the research achievements and potential of the candidate, but also on the relevance of his interests to those of the people here. If you would like to apply for the visiting studentship please send a one page desciption of your current research to: Mike Gordon University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Corn Exchange Street Cambridge CB2 3QG England Please also arrange for a letter of reference on your behalf to be sent to this address. ------------------------------ Date: Sat 23 Mar 85 14:27:10-CST From: CL.SHANKAR@UTEXAS-20.ARPA Subject: Plug for FREE TRIP TO CAMBRIDGE [Forwarded from the UTexas-20 bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] I was one of the two people who made the trip out there last summer, and I must say it is a great deal. Cambridge is a wonderful little university town and the CS department is really friendly. I didn't find out everything about the dept. but their main strengths are: Networks, Dist. systems, Comp. Architecture, Prog. language theory and implementation, Natural language understanding, graphics, VLSI design automation, Program and Hardware verification, etc. The place is infested with americans, and one of these, Larry Paulson, will be visiting here in early April. It's really a fantastic experience, and I'll be glad to provide more details to anyone who is interested. Shankar ------------------------------ Date: 23 Mar 1985 09:51-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Recent Articles Electronics Week, February 4 1985 Page 28-30 "Investment Shifts in AI" Describes Corporate and venture capital funding for AI Page 51-62 Discusses many AI efforts and systems in different areas (including many that are not the usual examples given of AI successes). Also discusses AI tools. ____________________________________________________________________________ High Technology, March 1985 Page 6: short article on IBM efforts in speech recognition Page 80: shot article on Hitachi's robot hand. Based on shape-memory alloy techniques. This hand is 1/10 the previous weight and is described as being almost as good as the human hand. Page 16-25: articles on expert system shells, a one page business outlook for expert system shells, and a special article on Intellicorp. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Mar 85 19:34 EST From: Tim Finin Subject: seminar announcements (PENN) Here are descriptions of some upcomming seminars at the University of Pennsylvania. All will be given in the Moore school building (33rd and Walnut, Philadelphia). MARKER-PASSING DURING PROBLEM SOLVING; Jim Hendler (Brown) 3pm Tuesday March 26; 216 Moore School A standard problem in Artificial Intelligence systems that do planning or problem solving is called the "late-information, early-decision paradox." This occurs when the planner makes a choice as to which action to consider, prior to encountering information that could either identify an optimal solution or that would present a contradiction. As the decision is made in the absence of this information it is often the wrong one, leading to much needless processing. In this talk I describe how the technique known as "marker-passing" can be used by a problem-solver. Marker-passing, which has been shown in the past to be useful for such cognitive tasks as story comprehension and word sense disambiguation, is a parallel, non-deductive, "spreading activation" algorithm. By combining this technique with a planning system the paradox described above can often be circumvented. The marker-passer can also be used by the problem-solver during "meta-rule" invocation and for finding certain inherent problems in plans. An implementation of such a system is discussed as are the design "desiderata" for a marker-passer. RATIONAL INTERACTION: COOPERATION AMONG INTELLIGENT AGENTS Jeffrey S. Rosenschein (Stanford) 10:30 - 12:00 Thursday, April 11; 216 Moore School The development of intelligent agents presents opportunities to exploit intelligent cooperation. Before this can occur, however, a framework must be built for reasoning about interactions. This talk describes such a framework, and explores strategies of interaction among intelligent agents. The formalism that has been developed removes some serious restrictions that underlie previous research in distributed artificial intelligence, particularly the assumption that the interacting agents have identical or non- conflicting goals. The formalism allows each agent to make various assumptions about both the goals and the rationality of other agents. In addition, it allows the modeling of restrictions on communication and the modeling of binding promises among agents. VISION SYSTEM OF MOBILE ROBOT, Saburo Tsuji (Osaka University) 3pm Monday, April 1st, 216 Moore School This paper describes model-guided monitoring of a building environment by a mobile robot. The prior knowledge on the environment is used as a priori world model and constraints for image analysis. The world model is arranged in a hierarchy with three levels so as to provide coarse to fine structures of environment; 1D route, 3D work space and 2D patterns of specific obects. In the preliminary experiments, a mobile platform with a TV camera is driven around passages of a building via a given route and reports changes there to a human operator. It stops every few meters, takes pictures and finds correspondences between line features detected in the image and those in the image model generated from the work space model. Mismatched lines are further examined to detect changes in the scenes. The drawbacks in the system design are discussed, and a brief overview of hardware and software systems of a new mobile robot is described. COUNTERFACTUAL IMPLICATION; Matt Ginsberg (Stanford) 2pm Friday, May 3rd, 216 Moore School Counterfactuals are a form of commonsense non-monotonic inference that has been of long-term interest to philosophers. In this talk, I discuss the problem of deriving counterfactual statements from a predicate calculus database, and present a formal description of this derivation that allows the encoding of some context-dependent information in the choice of a sublanguage of the logical language in which we are working. The construction is formally identical to the "possible worlds" interpretation due to David Lewis. A concrete example is given which uses counterfactual implication for the purpose of diagnosing digital hardware, and the talk concludes with a discussion of possible applications of counterfactuals elsewhere in AI. ------------------------------ Date: 15 Mar 1985 1049-PST From: JOUANNAUD@SRI-CSL.ARPA Subject: Conference - Rewriting Techniques and Applications ***************************************** * First International Conference * * on * * Rewriting Techniques and Applications * ***************************************** To be held in Dijon, Burgundy, FRANCE from May, 20 to May, 22, 1985. Sponsored by NSF, CNRS, ADI Bull University of Dijon City Council of Dijon. Program Committee ***************** Jan Bergstra, Amsterdam Joseph Goguen, SRI-International John Guttag, MIT Jean-Pierre Jouannaud, Nancy (co-chairman) Pierre Lescanne, CRIN David Musser, General Electric Labs (co-chairman) Peter Padawitz, Passau David Plaisted, Chapel Hill Ravi Sethi, Bell Labs David Turner, Kent Warning: Since Dijon is a very attractive city, and welcomes many peope late spring and summer, your Hotel reservation Form must arrive no later than April 10th. No reservation can be garanteed after that date. [...] ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1.VPI Fri Mar 29 22:02:33 1985 Date: Fri, 29 Mar 85 22:02:27 est From: comsat@vpics1.VPI Return-Path: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a000441; 28 Mar 85 15:03 EST Date: Wed 27 Mar 1985 23:50-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 #41 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 29 Mar 85 21:52 EST AIList Digest Thursday, 28 Mar 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 41 Today's Topics: Applications - AI Music Composition & Language Teaching & Composition for Machine Translation, Games - GO Algorithms, AI Tools - RuleMaster, Recent Articles - Survey & Robotics, Description - Computer Science in Greece, Policy - Censorship & Replicative-Media Viruses, Seminar - Constructive Type Theory (UTexas) Conference - Commercial AI Forum ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 25 Mar 85 15:20 EST From: Eleanor Hare Subject: AI Music Composition Does anyone know of any work currently being done in composition of music? Are there any bibliographies about? Please reply direct to EOHARE@clemson (not member of this list) Eleanor Hare DCS (803) 656-3444 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 25 Mar 85 12:28 EST From: Ethel Schuster Subject: Looking for a paper I am looking for a paper that was presented at the 1980 AISB conference which was held in Amsterdam in July. The title of the paper is "A Rather Intelligent Language Teacher" by S. Cerri and J. Breuker. I would really appreciate it if anyone who has a copy of the procedings could send me a photocopy of the paper at the following address: Ethel Schuster Department of Computer and Information Science/D2 University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 ------------------------------ Date: Tuesday, 26 Mar 1985 07:01:28-PST From: sclark%nermal.DEC@decwrl.ARPA Subject: REQUEST FOR INFO A colleague and I will be presenting a paper and a workshop on machine translation at the Society for Technical Communication's International Technical Communications Conference in May. We are designing the workshop to show technical writers ways to make their writing more conducive to being translated by machine. We welcome any ideas and suggestions from the AIList community. Regards, Sharon Clark ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 26 Mar 85 08:40:31 pst From: stever@cit-vax (Steve Rabin ) Subject: GO Algorithms [Forwarded from Arpanet-BBoards by Laws@SRI-AI.] I am looking for pointers at algorithms for playing the oriental game GO, or contact with authors of computer programs which play GO. Reply to stever@cit-vax or cithep!cit-vax!stever. Thanks! ------------------------------ Date: Tue 26 Mar 85 09:55:09-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: RuleMaster Mary.Lou.Maher@CMU-RI-CIVE asked about RuleMaster in a recent digest. I found the following information on p. 107 of Expert Systems, Vol. 1, No. 2, October 1984: RuleMaster: inductive rule-generator and rule language. Primitive attributes characterising problem domain are coded in C as external routines. RuleMaster is suitable for implementing both heuristic models and deep models of expertise. For VAX machines and Unix machines in general (including SUN workstation), $15,000. Further information may be obtained from Intelligent Terminals Ltd., George House, 36 North Hanover Street, Glasgow G1 2AD, Scotland. The same company offers several other inductive rule generators for a variety of hardware systems and programming languages. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: 24 Mar 1985 21:38-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Recent Articles - Survey International J. Systems Sciences 15 (1984) no 11 1231-1246 Blesiada, Henryk "Calculating the growth function of a developmental system in the case of asynchronous elementary operations" ____________________________________________________________________________ Pattern Recogniton 17 (1984) no 2 205-210 L. Bobrowski, W. Niemiro "A method of synthesis of linear discriminant function in the case of nonseparability" ____________________________________________________________________________ Cybernetics 19 (1983) no 6 843-848 S. S. Epshtein A. L. Goralik "Information additivity conditions in object and phenomena recognition problems ____________________________________________________________________________ Podstawy Sterowania 13 (1983) Ewa Grabska no 4 279-292 Compositing nets and their application to pattern representation 203-214 Marian Loboda "Classification of strings of the sample by means of canonical systems" ____________________________________________________________________________ BOOK (in French): Laurent Miclet Structural methods for pattern recognition. Scientific and Technical Collection on Telecommunications Editions Eyrolles, Paris 1984 ____________________________________________________________________________ M. Yu Moshkov "Uniqueness of minimal tests for pattern recognition problems with linear decison rules" (in Russian) Combinatorial-algebraic methods in applied mathematics 97-109 Gorkov Gos. Univ., Gorki 1981 ____________________________________________________________________________ M. Richetin and F. Vernadat Efficient regular grammatical inference for pattern recognition. Pattern Recognition 17 (1984) no 2 245-250 259-273 A. G. Wacker "Average classification accuracy over collections of Gaussian problems - common covariance matrix case" ____________________________________________________________________________ BOOK: J. W. Lloyd Foundations of logic programming. Symbolic Computation. Artificial Intelligence Spring Verlag, NY 1984 ____________________________________________________________________________ Cybernetics 20 (1984) no 1 147-152 M. K. Morokhovets "A modified unification procedure" ____________________________________________________________________________ C. R. Acad. Bulgare Scie. 37 (1984) no 6 741-744 A. Atas Radenski "Functional Programming in the Style of Logic Programming" ------------------------------ Date: 25 Mar 1985 09:47-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Recent Articles - Robotics Electronics Week, January 21, 1985 "Robots get Smart in Japan" Discusses an organ playing automaton from Sumitomo Inc. (designed as a technological tour de force), Hitachi's mobile robot (which can climb stairs) and Toshiba's climbing robot. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 25 Mar 85 14:18:42-PST From: C Papadimitriou Subject: Computer Science in Greece Here is a piece I wrote for the EATCS Bulletin on the occasion of the 12th ICALP. [...] COMPUTER SCIENCE IN GREECE There are two Departments of Computer Science in Greece, one in the University of Patras and one in the University of Crete at Iraklion; there is also a Division of Computer Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. Departments are also being started at the University of Athens and the Athens Business School, and there are several isolated computer scientists at other Universities, such as the University of Thessaloniki. Finally, there are three newly founded Departments of Computer Technology in the Institutes for Technical Education. The most pressing problem is, of course, qualified academic personnel. Most Departments have tried to tap the Greek computer scientists of the diaspora, with varying success. Many Greek computer scientists are currently in the transition from a career abroad, typically in the U.S., to an academic career in Greece, and the ``re-entry problem'' has proven formidable. The two-year obligatory military service and its inflexible rules is not the least of the problems. In all, this is a very critical moment for Computer Science higher education in Greece. Outside Academia, there is of course a large market for computer usage, a growing software industry, and a number of hardware ventures in the making. Very recently, there has been a considerable high-level government involvement in all aspects of Informatics, via the Governmental Council for Informatics. As for research, in Patras there are research groups in Computer Architecture, Numerical Analysis, and Workstations. In Crete, the interests range from Databases and Office Automation to VLSI. In Thessaloniki, there is research activity in Logic Programming, Architecture, and Numerical Analysis. Now, in Theoretical Computer Science, there is one group at the Division of Informatics at the National Technical University of Athens, with Leo Guibas, Foto Afrati, Lefteris Kiroussis, Andreas Stafilopatis, and Christos Papadimitriou on the faculty, and a group of graduate students. There is only a two-year military service and a volume of intractable legislation between Mihalis Yannakakis and this group. The interests range from Algorithms, Complexity, Geometry, Database Theory, Automatic Program Synthesis, Combinatorial Optimization, and Parallel Computation. Also at NTUA there are faculty members with research interests in Databases, Hardware, and Logic Programming, as well as people working in related fields, such as Communication, Signal Processing, and Control. Christos H. Papadimitriou ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Mar 85 02:41:52 pst From: newton@cit-vax (Mike Newton) Subject: Rape jokes & Policy Regarding your [mcc@mitre-bedford] recent posting to AIList-Digest: I believe the words "censorship is a far worse crime for it affect so many more" were mine and not "David's". Cold hard (horrible) figures: Regarding your numbers (believing the 50% -- from what i have read 12% -- either is horrible enough) 50% of women raped times 52% of the population being female yields 26%. Vastly different than censoring everybody (100%). Though I believe the story would have been censored if it had been "a five year old" (this year's current fad) that does not mean it should be censored. I cannot guess whether Ken Laws would have censored "Paul E. Nomial", though, again, I hope he, nor anyone else, would act as a censor for (against!) me. [In point of fact, it was I who "reported" the story to AIList in the first place. Had I chosen not to do so, this would hardly be censorship. I also regard it as my duty to keep offensive or pointless material out of AIList (as a courtesy to the readership and because of Arpanet policy); some censorship is therefore unavoidable. -- KIL] Do you think rape does not affect the male part of the population? I am sure fear of rape does is not 'debilitating ... 100% of the women in this country' for I know too many women that will not let their lifes be curtailed in this manner. I also know that the reverse implication is equally false. The women that I have been close too I care about. I and a friend have gone to sessions held by the local police -- sessions that invited women and their partners to come -- and have been one of two or three males out of a group of 20. I still VERY MUCH believe against censorship. Equally, men are about 7 times more often killed by the firing of a gun than women. Should I ask that gun jokes be forbidden? Finally, your line "And it bugs me that I can't even read AIList without being harassed" leaves me with a bitter taste. Harassment implies intent, intent which I doubt the original poster, or the moderator, or any reader felt towards you. mike ------------------------------ Date: 25 Mar 85 14:10:30 PST (Monday) Subject: Censorship vs Sexism From: "Bill Wu.osbunorth"@XEROX.ARPA The response so far illustrates the diffulty of keeping cool during the discussion of a sensitive subject. Are we all scientists? Let us examine the facts and data. Those who claim that jokes on rape, such as Poly Nomial, can actually increase the number of rape please show me actual data which support your conjecture and procedures of collecting and interpreting them. Those who claim that even a small step of censorship can lead to a bigger censorship please show me actual data which support your conjecture and procedures of collecting and interpreting them. So far I only find two facts. For those who feel offended by that joke want to censor it, who gives you the right to censor when YOU feel being offended. For those who feel the joke amusing (or not offended) want to keep it, who gives you the right to speak in this forum when YOU feel like it? Why don't we let our moderator decide what to be put in the distribution list. If you do not like his policy, send a message to HIM ONLY. Bill ------------------------------ Date: Mon 25 Mar 85 17:32:35-PST From: Lee Altenberg Subject: Evolution and Polly Nomial [Forwarded from the AIList-Request mailbox, with permission. -- KIL] An evolutionary perspective on the Polly Nomial story may help in suggesting alternative actions that can be taken to end the propogation of such material which are not censorship. The Polly Nomial story can be properly viewed as an EMAIL or copy machine "virus". What persuades people to reproduce and propogate it is that it is a clever telling of a story using mathematical terms. The disturbing content (which is its meta-message that rape is exciting, adventurous, and a top choice as a topic for humor) is, for a sufficient number of people, either missed or not disturbing enough to counter the cleverness, so the story is kept "alive" in the "replicative" media. The rape content itself is not keeping the story going, because we do not see other humourous items on rape in the R-media. But the rape content seem to be an inseparable part of the story, and gets propogated along with the cleverness (like sticking ammendments on bills in Congress). But, if there were an alternative story which made just as clever use of mathematical terms, and had a fun and exciting plot, it would get propagated quite well. After one had seen the alternative story, one would not be as likely to propagate "Polly Nomial". A competing "species" might therefore take over the "niche" that "Polly Nomial" has in the R-media. My suggestion is that someone, even the original author of "Polly Nomial", come with a competing story, and throw it into the replicative media (electronic mail, bulletin boards, and copy machines) and see what happens. [Someday there will be AI (or other buzzword) systems to translate documents into alternative styles, with or without semantic modification to accentuate particular effects such as puns and alliteration. We will then be able to produce as many variants of the Poly Nomial style as we wish -- but will no longer have any interest in doing so. Such is the nature of art. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Wed 27 Mar 85 01:40:39-CST From: CL.SHANKAR@UTEXAS-20.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Constructive Type Theory (UTexas) Colloquium: David Turner, Wed. Mar. 27, Pai 3.14, 4PM Title: Constructive type theory as a programming language Abstract: Constructive type theory is a formal logic and set theory which has been developed by Per Martin-Lof as a foundation for constructive (or "intuitionist") mathematics. Curiously, it can also be read as a (strongly typed) functional programming language, with a number of unusual properties, including that well-typed programs always terminate. The talk will give an overview of the main ideas in constructive type theory from the point of view of someone trying to use it as a programming language. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 26 Mar 85 10:26:09-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: Conference - Commercial AI Forum I have received literature touting the Gartner Group's first annual forum on AI, Commercial Artificial Intelligence: Myths and Realities, May 20-22, Century Plaza Hotel, 2025 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles. The $800 seminar ($700 with payment by March 31) consists of a couple of talks and a series of panels by knowledgeable executives and corporate officers. Topics include AI in computer operations, manufacturing, financial services, office information systems, user interfaces, personal computers, and specialized hardware, as well as management and investment. For more information, contact Ashley Pearce, (203) 967-6757, Gartner Group, Inc., P.O. Box 10212, Stamford, CT 06904. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1.VPI Sat Mar 30 20:42:33 1985 Date: Sat, 30 Mar 85 20:42:26 est From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI Return-Path: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a008853; 30 Mar 85 1:37 EST Received: from SRI-AI.ARPA by SRI-AI.ARPA with TCP; Fri 29 Mar 85 21:32:44-PST Date: Fri 29 Mar 1985 21:06-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 #42 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sat, 30 Mar 85 20:36 EST AIList Digest Saturday, 30 Mar 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 42 Today's Topics: Administrivia - AIList Mailboxes, Applications - Chemistry AI Expert Systems & Spelling Check Algorithms & Planning in a Dynamic Environment & Associative Processing, Help Wanted - AI Lecturer, AI Tools - MacIntosh Lisp, Games - GO, Recent Articles - Expert System Shells & Survey, Linguistics - Development of Pidgin, Creole, and NL, Description - Edinburgh Intelligent Knowledge Based Designer System, Conference - Workshop on Expert Systems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri 29 Mar 85 09:51:10-PST From: Ken Laws Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: AIList Mailboxes I have recently been getting many messages in inappropriate mailboxes. In most cases I can deduce the sender's intention and forward to the appropriate mailbox, but it would be a help to me if readers would observe the following convention: AIList@SRI-AI.ARPA - Submissions for broadcast to the list. AIList-Request@SRI-AI.ARPA - Messages related to list administration or policy, for private reply. Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA - Messages unrelated to AIList policy. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Mar 85 12:38:12 EST From: Morton A Hirschberg Subject: Request for chemistry AI expert systems I am looking for information about expert systems in chemistry. More specifically, documentation if any exists, such as rules or flow charts. They need not be in the public domain. Of course, more information is better (prices for commercial stuff). Thanks. Mort [Some of the famous systems are Stanford's DENDRAL and META-DENDRAL for mass spectrometry and NMR analysis, SUNY(Stonybrook)'s SYNCHEM system for chemical synthesis, Stanford's MOLGEN and GA1 for DNA analysis and synthesis, Stanford's CRYSALIS for protein crystallography, UCSC's SECHS for chemical synthesis, and Rand's SPILLS for locating and identifying chemical spills. I don't know which of these are commercial systems, though IntelliCorp (formerly IntelliGenetics) has derived commercial systems from some of them. For rules and other info I would suggest that you do a search of the chemical literature or contact the universities for technical reports; the AI conference proceedings and journals would discuss mostly the data structures and reasoning methods. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 03/28/85 13:34:17 From: ADIS@MIT-MC Subject: Spelling Check Algorithms [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Does anyone know of some good references for spelling checking algorithms? Human or written references acceptable. Andy diSessa (ADIS@MC) [Check the following from Communications of the ACM: J.L. Peterson, Computer Programs for Detecting and Correcting Spelling Errors, Vol. 23, No. 12, Dec. 1980, pp. 676-687. Replys in Vol. 24, No. 5, May 1981, pp. 322 and 331-332; Vol. 24, No. 9, Sep. 1981, pp. 608-609; and Vol. 25, No. 3, Mar. 1982, pp. 220-221. P. Robinson and D. Singer, Another Spelling Correction Program, Vol. 24, No. 5, May 1981, pp. 296-297, followed by R. Nix, Experience witha Space Efficient Way to Store a Dictionary, pp. 297-298. Replys in Vol. 24, No. 9, Sep. 1981, pp. 618-619 [from a pseudonymous Joaquin Miller], and Vol. 25, No. 2, Feb. 1982, p. 159. M. Mor and A.S. Fraenkel, A Hash Code Method for Detecting and Correcting Spelling Errors, Vol. 25, No. 12, Dec. 1982, pp. 935-938. D.J. Dodds, Reducing Dictionary Size by Using a Hashing Technique, Vol. 25, No. 6, June 1982, pp. 368-370. J.J. Pollock and A. Zamora, Automatic Spelling Correction in Scientific and Scholarly Text, Vol. 27, No. 4, Apr. 1984, pp. 358-368. These papers provide references to dozens of others. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Mar 85 08:57:42 pst From: coates%usc-liddy%usc-cse.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: World models for Planning in a Dynamic Environment Does anyone know of research on representation scemes for world knowledge that facilitate planning for an agent which actually executes in a dynamic domain? I am interested in modelling an agents ability to detect anomalies iplan due to unexpected results during plan execution. Additional complications in plan enactment may occur if the world contains other agents whose behavior is unpredictable. If anyone can recommend papers on appropriate knowledge representations and/or methods for anomally detection in dynamic worlds contact me at: COATES%USC-liddy@USC-CSE.CSNET [I have sent a copy of Les Gasser's reference list. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Fri 29 Mar 85 16:14:33-PST From: MOHAN@USC-ECLC.ARPA Subject: Associative Processing I am working on identifying system software requirements for an array processor (based on associative processing and cellulaer array processing). The processor is to be used primarily for Artificial Intelligence and Image Undersatnding tasks. Main system software requirements would be in the area of a suitable language, its compiler and an operating system. (A host computer is assumed to be attatched to this processor). Some pointers to relevant work and literature will be welcome. Please send mail to me or to AIList. Thanks. Rakesh Mohan ARPA- mohan@eclc US Mail- Rm #224 Powell Hall University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90007. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Mar 85 21:23:43 pst From: jeff@aids-unix (Jeff Dean) Subject: wanted: travelling AI lecturer I've just received a request from someone at California State Polytechnic (in San Luis Obispo) for a lecture on "AI" (yes, that provides considerable leeway). Unfortunately, San Luis is a little out of the way for most of us, being halfway between SF and LA (a four hour drive from either place). However, if there are any ("qualified") folks out there who might be interested in making a presentation, please let me know. Thanks... P.S. There is no expiration date on this opportunity, but the presentation should be given during the school year. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 29 Mar 85 09:18:40-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: MacIntosh Lisp I have heard a rumor that Expertelligence of Santa Barbara has now come out with their version of a Maclisp/Commonlisp for the 512K MacIntosh, priced just below $500. I haven't checked it out, but (805) 969-7871 was given as the phone number for more information. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: 29 Mar 1985 0555-PST From: MEYERS%UCI-20A@UCI-ICSA Subject: game of GO In response to a query about Go programs: Wilcox, Bruce and Walter Reitman The Structure and Performance of the Interim.2 Go Program. IJCAI, 1979. pp.711-719. Address: University of Michigan 205 Washtenaw Place Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 Unfortunately, this is the most recent work I know of; it references most other work. Theirs is a long-term, conceptual approach. Also: David J H Brown Hierarchical Reasoning in the Game of Go. IJCAI, 1979. pp.114-116. Address: Computer Science Department Teesside Polytechnic Middlesborough, Cleveland, England Good luck! Amnon Meyers (meyers @ uci) (2-dan) ------------------------------ Date: 29 Mar 1985 09:52-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Recent Articles - Expert System Shells Infoworld April 1, 1985 page 46 Volume 7 no 13 There is a review of a revised version of "Expert Ease." This is a system which sets up a classification system based upon examples given by the user. Many feel that it is not a true "AI" system but rather a decision table development tool that is being marketed by people as an AI system for the purposes of making a fast buck. It is has dropped in price from $2,000 to $695.00 and is being marketed by Human Edge Software. The ratings are: two out of a possible four diskettes performance: good documentation: fair ease of use: good error handling: excellent support: good ____________________________________________________________________________ Electronics Week, March 25, 1985 page 35 NIXDORF has announced an expert system shell which runs on its 32-bit minicomputer, the 8832. The cost is $47,00 at current exchange rates. Nixdorf is also selling a system called Twaice which is designed to build expert systems to help diagnose malfunctioning objects. There is also a joint venture between the British Racal Electroinics and Norway's Norsk data selling an expert system shell. Matra S. A. is selling an AI system for military training. Also there are a few paragraphs on GCLisp's Golden Common Lisp. ------------------------------ Date: 28 Mar 1985 18:10-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Recent Articles - Survey ComputerWorld March 18, 1985 "Engineers behind Expert Systems" A reprint from Patel Harmon, Dave King "AI in business" ____________________________________________________________________________ JACM Vol 32 no 1 Jan 1985 1 Three Approaches to Heuristic Search in Networks A. Bagchi and A. Mahanti 28 And/Or Graph Heuristic Search methods ____________________________________________________________________________ IEEE Trans on Industrial Electronics Vol 32 No 1 Feb 85 Design and Implementation of a Binocular-Vision System for Locating Footholds on a Multi-Legged Walking Robot F. Ozguner S. J. Tsai Page 26 ____________________________________________________________________________ ComputerWorld March 25 1985 Page 11 Usefulness of micro expert systems called limited ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 27 Mar 85 18:40 CDT From: Patrick_Duff Subject: Development of Nat. Langs., Pidgin, Creole, Lang. Trans/Unders/Gener. I have a newspaper clipping which quotes Dr. Laurence McNamee, a linquistics professor at East Texas State University, as follows: "Theories on the origin of language became so rife and so romantic that in 1886 the Linguistic Society of Paris passed a resolution outlawing any more theories on this topic, a resolution that has since been reaffirmed. "The truth is that scholars simply do not know how languages developed because they have never observed one develop. We have seen many languages die, and recently even witnessed the rebirth of a language (Hebrew), but never a language from its initial stage." Can anyone elaborate on the resolutions and why the issue came up? Derek Bickerton writes in "Creole Languages" (Scientific American, July 1983, pages 116-122) that new languages have developed... "... many times over the past 500 years among the children of slaves and laborers who were pressed into service by the European colonial powers. "These laborers, who were shipped from many parts of the world to tend and harvest crops in Africa, the Indian Ocean region, the Orient, the Caribbean and Hawaii, were obliged to communicate within their polygot community by means of the rudimentary speech system called pidgin. Pidgin speech is extremely impoverished in syntax and vocabulary, but for the children born into the colonial community it was the only common language available. From these modest beginnings, new native languages evolved among the children, which are generically called creole languages. It can be shown that they exhibit the complexity, nuance and expressive power universally found in the more established languages of the world." "... scholars have noted a remarkable similarity of structure among all the creole languages. It can now be demonstrated, by considering the origin of creole language in Hawaii, that similarities among creoles cannot be accounted for by contact with other languages, either indigenous or imported. The finding suggests that what is common to creole languages may indeed form the basis of the acquisition of language by children everywhere. There is now an impressive body of evidence to support this hypothesis: between the ages of two and four the child born into a community of linguistically competent adults speaks a variety of language whose structure bears a deep resemblance to the structure of creole languages...." Besides recommending that interested parties read this Scientific American article, I'm curious about whether it would be useful to use a creole language as an intermediate language for translation, what "pidgin speech" with its "impoverished syntax and vocabulary" could tell us about how to design command languages for computer systems, whether the current state-of-the-art in natural language parsers and generators are up to the task of using pidgin or creole, etc.. After looking at some of the sample sentences in the article, it seems to me that it would be easier for a computer program to generate or understand a sentence in Pidgin or Hawaiian Creole than it would be for it to handle the English equivalent. regards, Patrick Patrick S. Duff, ***CR 5621*** pduff.ti-eg@csnet-relay 5049 Walker Dr. #91103 214/480-1905 (work) The Colony, TX 75056-1120 214/370-5363 (home) (a suburb of Dallas, TX) ------------------------------ Date: Friday, 29-Mar-85 17:06:35-GMT From: GIDEON FH (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: Edinburgh Intelligent Knowledge Based Designer System UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH DEPARTMENT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Alvey Large Scale Demonstrator Project "Design to Product" at the University of Edinburgh: The Alvey Directorate have awarded a major contract to a consortium of companies and universities: GEC Electrical Projects, GEC Marconi Research Centre, GEC Avionics, Lucas CAV, the National Engineering Laboratory and Edinburgh, Leeds and Loughborough Universities. The part of the project to be carried out at Edinburgh will involve the development of a novel Intelligent Knowledge Based Designer System. This Designer System will enable a design engineer to communicate interactively the conceptual function and form of a design, and to interface the resulting product description to a manufacturing capability. It will be implemented in POP-11, Prolog and Lisp, running in the Poplog environment, under the UNIX operating system. Further information is also to be had from tims%edxa@ucl-cs.arpa. If you are interested and have questions, don't hesitate to ask them. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 29 Mar 85 18:03:46 cst From: porter@anl-mcs (Porter) Subject: Workshop on Expert Systems Workshop on Knowledge Engineering/Expert Systems The twenty-fourth annual workshop sponsored by the Western Committee of the IEEE Computer Society will be held September 4- 6, 1985 at the UCLA Conference Center at Lake Arrowhead. The subject of the workshop is: "Knowledge Engineering: How?" Sessions are planned on knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, inferencing strategies, and programming environments. Topics of discussion include the following: Are there domain- specific approaches to knowledge acquisition? How can an expert system tell when it is in an area outside of its competence? What is the best way to choose inference strategies? How much can expert system builders help? How important are user models? How does one deal with the uniqueness of an expert's knowledge? How do questions of acquisition relate to representation and inference strategies? Due to the limited facilities, attendence will be by invitation. People working in the knowledge engineering and expert systems area are encouraged to contact the program chairperson, Greg Kearsley, Courseware, Inc., 10075 Carroll Canyon Road, San Diego, Ca 92131, (619) 578-1700 or the general chairperson, Sig Porter, Merdan Group, Inc. 4617 Ruffner Street, Box 17098, San Diego, CA 92117 (619-571-8565). (note: Greg will be out of communication until about April 20, and Sig will also be unreachable until April 8.) ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Tue Apr 2 04:06:40 1985 Date: Tue, 2 Apr 85 04:06:30 est From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a001294; 1 Apr 85 16:23 EST Date: Mon 1 Apr 1985 09:39-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 #43 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 2 Apr 85 03:58 EST AIList Digest Monday, 1 Apr 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 43 Today's Topics: Expert Systems - EURISKO & DENDRAL/META-DENDRAL & OPS5 for PCs, News - MCC's Bob Inman named to SWB's board of directors, Symbolic Math - Functionals, Meeting - NAIL Journal Club, Seminars - Plans and Situated Actions (UCB) & Models in Syllogistic Reasoning (CSLI) & Programming Descriptive Analogies by Example (MIT) & Functional Role Semantics (CSLI) & NL Understanding and Generation (CMU) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat 30 Mar 85 18:18:45-PST From: Lee Altenberg Subject: EURISKO Does anyone know who in the Stanford area is actively working with EURISKO, if anyone, now that Doug Lenat is in Texas? ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Apr 85 09:02:48 mst From: cib@LANL.ARPA (C.I. Browne) Subject: DENDRAL/META-DENDRAL Can anyone tell me where either source or object code for DENDRAL and META-DENDRAL may be obtained? SUMEX advises that they no longer either support or distribute the program, and refer me to Molecular Design Limited. While that company markets several interesting programs, neither DENDRAL nor META-DENDRAL is among them. It would be a pity if such programs have disappeared from the scene and become unavailable to sites wishing to include them in an AI library. Thank you. cib ------------------------------ Date: 30 March 1985 1049-EST From: Peter Pirolli@CMU-CS-A Subject: OPS5 for PCs I just received a flyer for a language called TOPSI which is supposed to be an OPS5 clone developed for CP/M and MS-DOS machines. Here are some quotes from the flyer: "TOPSI has the full power of the original language PLUS extensions to improve its computational and list management capabilities. Usage of memory and computer time is optimized for use on home computers." "TOPSI rule are written in a simple, legible form and compiled into a memory-efficient data structure enabling fast execution." "TOPSI's rule base and data base can be saved separately allowing a system to be exercised easilty with different data sets." "TOPSI is available on 5 1/4 in diskettes for 65k CP/M systems or MS-DOS with at least 128k of memory. It comes complete with a users manual, example programs, a tutorial section on writing your own production systems, and a 30 day warranty." The company is: Dynamic Master Systems Inc. P.O. Box 566456 Atlanta, GA 30356 [404] 565-0771 ------------------------------ Date: Sat 30 Mar 85 15:21:43-CST From: Werner Uhrig Subject: MCC's Bob Inman named to SWB's board of directors [ from the Austin American Statesman - March 30, 1985 ] Bob Inman, chairman and chief executive officer of MCC has been elected to the board of directors of Southwestern Bell Corp. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Mar 85 09:48:24 PST From: "David G. Cantor" Subject: If f(f(x)) = x^2 - 2, what is f(x)? [Forwarded from the Prolog Digest by Laws@SRI-AI.] Q: "Can a computer solve the query: "If f(f(x)) = x^2 - 2, what is f(x)? If so, how?" [This question was forwarded to the Prolog Digest a few weeks ago by Nils Nilsson. -- KIL] The solution is essentially contained in the article by Michael Restivo in the March 20 issue of Prolog Digest. The nth Tchebycheff Polynomial may be defined as n n T (x) = u + v , n where u = (x + d)/2, v = (x - d)/2, with d = sqrt(x * x - 4). It is easy to check that, when n is an integer, the powers of d cancel and hence that the above functions are really are polynomials. These polynomials satisify numerous identities. The pertinent one here is that T (T (x)) = T (x) . m n m * n This can be verified by elementary algebra (note that u * v = 1). It holds certainly for all complex numbers m and n, subject to choosing appropriate branches of the mth and nth power as well as the square root, in the complex plane. The function f(x) = T (x) sqrt(2) then satisfies f(f(x)) = T (T (x)) sqrt(2) sqrt(2) = T (x) sqrt(2) * sqrt(2) = T (x) 2 = x * x - 2, and hence solves the original problem. As to how a computer could solve this: It need only search the mathematical literature to find a paper by Michael Fried giving all solutions to the functional equation (due to Issai Schur): F (F (x)) = F (x) . m n m * n Fried shows that, under very general conditions, the solutions are either n F (x) = x or F (x) = T (x) , n n n as given above. The computer then need only recognize that the given function f(x) = T (x) . 2 Alternatively it could recognize the latter first, and be led to study identities of the Tchebycheff polynomials. -- David G. Cantor ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 29 Mar 85 12:13:39 pst From: Jeff Ullman Subject: NAIL! (Not another implementation of Logic!) Journal Club [Forwarded from the Stanford BBoard by Laws@SRI-AI.] There is a meeting of people interested in implementation of database systems with a "knowledge" component, i.e., a logical language providing access to a database. We primarily read and present papers, and present our own ideas on the subject. The first Spring meeting is 1PM Weds. 4/3, in 252MJH, and subsequent meetings are Wednesdays, 11AM in 301MJH. You can get on the nail list by mailing to mailer@diablo a message with *subject heading* add to nail ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Mar 85 14:45:45 pst From: chertok%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Paula Chertok) Subject: Seminar - Plans and Situated Actions (UCB) BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237B TIME: Tuesday, April 2, 11 - 12:30 PLACE: 240 Bechtel Engineering Center (followed by) DISCUSSION: 12:30 - 1:30 in 200 Building T-4 SPEAKER: Lucy Suchman, Intelligent Systems Laboratory, Xerox PARC TITLE: ``Plans and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication'' Researchers in Cognitive Science view the organization and significance of action as derived from plans, which are prere- quisite to and prescribe action at whatever level of detail one might imagine. Mutual intelligibility on this view is a matter of the recognizability of plans, due to common conventions for the expression of intent, and common knowledge about typical situations and appropriate actions. An alternative view, drawn from recent work in social science, treats plans as derived from situated actions. Situated actions as such comprise necessarily ad hoc responses to the actions of others and to the contingencies of particular situations. Rather than depend upon the reliable recognition of intent, successful interaction consists in the collaborative production of intelligibility through mutual access to situation resources, and through the detection, repair or exploitation of differences in understand- ing. As common sense formulations designed to accomodate the unforseeable contingencies of situated action, plans are inherently vague. Researchers interested in machine intelli- gence attempt to remedy the vagueness of plans, to make them the basis for artifacts intended to embody intelligent behavior, including the ability to interact with their human users. I examine the problem of human-machine interaction through a case study of people using a machine designed on the planning model, and intended to be intelligent and interactive. A conversation analysis of "interactions" between users and the machine reveals that the machine's insensitivity to particular circumstances is both a central design resource, and a funda- mental limitation. I conclude that problems in Cognitive Science's theorizing about purposeful action as a basis for machine intelligence are due to the project of substituting plans for actions, and representations of the situation of action for action's actual circumstances. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 27 Mar 85 17:18:44-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Models in Syllogistic Reasoning (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, April 4, 1985 2:15 p.m. CSLI Seminar Redwood Hall ``Manipulating Models in Syllogistic Reasoning'' Room G-19 Marilyn Ford, CSLI Discussion leader to be announced Johnson-Laird has argued that reasoners do not use formed rules of inference in solving problems involving syllogistic reasoning, but rather that they come to a solution by manipulating mental models. I will show that while this certainly appears to be true, a number of details of Johnson-Laird's theory appear to be incorrect. An alternative theory will be presented. --Marilyn Ford ------------------------------ Date: 28 Mar 1985 12:06 EST (Thu) From: "Daniel S. Weld" Subject: Seminar - Programming Descriptive Analogies by Example (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] AI REVOLVING SEMINAR Programming Descriptive Analogies By Example Henry Lieberman Before making programs that can perform analogies by themselves, we can attack the more modest goal of being able to communicate to the computer an analogy which is already understood by a person. I will describe a system for "programming by analogy", called Likewise. This new approach to interactive knowledge acquisition works by presenting specific examples and pointing out what aspects of the examples illustrate the more general case. The system constructs a general rule which abstracts out the important aspects so the rule can be applied to "analogous" examples. Given a new example, the system can then construct an analogy with the old example by trying to instantiate analogous descriptions which correspond to the descriptions constructed for the first example. If a new example doesn't fit an old concept exactly, a concept can be generalized or specialized incrementally to make the analogy go through. The operation of the analogy system on a typical concept learning task is presented in detail. Tuesday April 2, 1985 4:00pm 8th floor playroom ------------------------------ Date: Wed 27 Mar 85 17:18:44-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Functional Role Semantics (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, April 4, 1985 4:15 p.m. CSLI Colloquium Redwood Hall ``Two Cheers for Functional Role Semantics'' Room G-19 Ned Block, Massachusetts Institute of Technology There are two quite different frameworks for semantics: REDUCTIONIST approaches attempt to characterize the semantic in non-semantic terms. NON-REDUCTIONIST approaches are more concerned with relations among meaningS than with the nature of meaning itself. The non-reductionist approaches are the more familiar ones (eg., Montague, the model-theoretic aspect of situation semantics, Davidson, Katz). The reductionist approaches come in 4 major categories: 1. Theories that reduce meaning to the mental. (This is what is common to Grice and Searle.) 2. Causal semantics--theories that see semantic values as derived from causal chains leading from the world to our words. 3. Indicator semantics--theories that see natural and non-natural meaning as importantly similar. The paradigm of meaning is the way the rings on the tree stump represent the age of the tree when cut down. (Dretske/Stampe, and, in my view, though not in Barwise and Perry's, Situations and Attitudes) 4. Functional role semantics--theories that see meaning in terms of the functional role of linguistic expressions in thought, reasoning, and planning, and in general in the way they mediate between sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. After sketching the difference between the reductionist and non- reductionist approaches, I will focus on functional role semantics, a view that has independently arisen in philosophy (where its sources are Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use, and pragmatism) and cognitive science (where it is known as procedural semantics). I will concentrate on what theories in this framework can DO, e.g., illuminate acquisition of and knowledge of meaning, principles of charity, how meaning is relevant to explanation of behavior, the intrinsic/observer-relative distinction, the relation between meaning and the brain, and the relativity of meaning to representational system. The point is to give a sense of the fertility and power of the view, and so to provide a rationale for working on solutions to its problems. Finally, I will sketch some reasons to prefer functional role semantics to the other reductionist theories. A copy of a paper which the talk draws on will be in the Ventura reading room. --Ned Block ------------------------------ Date: 29 March 1985 1352-EST From: Theona Stefanis@CMU-CS-A Subject: Seminar - NL Understanding and Generation (CMU) [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Name: NL Seminar Date: 3 April Time: 11:00-12:00 Place: WeH 7220 The Janus System: Coordinating Understanding and Generation Norman K. Sondheimer USC/Information Science Institute Technology for natural language understanding and generation differs significantly. In cases where they have both been employed in the same system, the results have been an impression of a system that could not understand what it could say. As part of ARPA's Strategic Computing Initiative, researchers at USC/Information Sciences Institute and Bolt Beranek and Newman have begun the design of a system that may be able to avoid these problem. The system employs the ATN parsing, KL-ONE based semantic interpretation, and the NIGEL systemic grammar generator. Much of the integration of understanding and generation will come from a large domain knowledge base developed in the NIKL (New Implementation of KL-One) knowledge representation language. This talk will be a short, informal look at the goals of the effort and the system's initial design. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Tue Apr 2 04:11:40 1985 Date: Tue, 2 Apr 85 04:11:30 est From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a004031; 2 Apr 85 3:09 EST Date: Mon 1 Apr 1985 22:47-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 #44 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 2 Apr 85 04:00 EST AIList Digest Tuesday, 2 Apr 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 44 Today's Topics: Linguistics - Sexism in English, Opinion - Sexism in AIList, Psychology - Imprinting & Humor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 31 Mar 1985 1952-PST (Sunday) From: nessus@mit-eddie.UUCP (Doug Alan) Newsgroups: net.women Subject: Hofstadter on sexism in the English language [Forwarded from net.women by Miriam Blatt .] [Excerpted from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The most interesting work of writing I have seen on sexism in the English language is by Douglas Hofstadter (writing under the name William Satire) and is called "A Person Paper on Purity in Language". It can be found in his wonderful book "Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern". Hofstadter is strongly in favor of removing sexism from our language and writes about it in this paper using biting sarcasm. Included at the end of this message is an excerpt from the paper (included without permission -- I don't think Hofstadter would object). Doug Alan mit-eddie!nessus Nessus@MIT-MC [I presume that this message is socially acceptable and of some relevance to an AIList issue on the psychology of sexism. It has to do with AI only in that it touches on linguistics and psychology and was written by Doug Hofstadter, so I have reduced the extract to a single representative paragraph. Anyone thinking of replying to this message should bear in mind that sexist language was discussed for many months in Human-Nets a couple of years ago; I am unaware of any single issue resolved by the debate. -- KIL] Most of the clamor, as you certainly know by now, revolves around the age-old usage of the noun "white" and words built from it, such as "chairwhite", "mailwhite", "repairwhite", "clergywhite", "middlewhite", "Frenchwhite", "forwhite", "whitepower", "whiteslaughter", "oneupswhiteship", "straw white", "whitehandle", and so on. The negrists claim that using the word "white", either in on its own or as a component, to talk about *all* the members of the human species is somehow degrading to blacks and reinforces racism. Therefore the libbers propose that we substitute "person" everywhere where "white" now occurs. Sensitive speakers of our secretary tongue of course find this preposterous. There is great beauty to a phrase such as "All whites are created equal." Our forebosses who framed the Declaration of Indepedence well understood the poetry of our language. Think how ugly it would be to say "All persons are created equal.", or "All whites and blacks are created equal." Besides, as any schoolwhitey can tell you, such phrases are redundant. In most contexts, it is self-evident when "white" is being used in an inclusive sense, in which case it subsumes members of the darker race just as much as fairskins. [...] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 30 Mar 85 21:54:10 est From: BostonU SysMgr Subject: Sexism, censorship and degrees of reaction I have resisted thus far but now I give in to an opinion on the Sexist Joke issue: I for one am offended by such public displays of locker-room humour. On the other hand, I am offended by censorship. The obvious solution to such a situation like this comes from the realization that one cannot utilize as powerful and hard to apply instrument as the 'law' for obnoxious and 'potentially' dangerous behavior (the law is always very cautious when words like potentially have to be used.) The 'law' I equate here with the moderator being asked to filter such jokes. The error comes from the desire for authoritative revenge, either from the police or a moderator. In a situatiion like this you are quite powerful enough as human beings to correct this situation. I simply suggest that it be left at the level of: 1. If something offends you tell the offender and, if appropriate, the net audience. 2. Remember the individual involved. Next time something comes up about that person you will know their character is probably suspect, or at the very least, their sense of judgement. I for one would feel severely punished if someone so seriously suspected my character. An entire audience like this would be crushing. Never doubt your power as a human being, nor that the power of your words and opinions are at least as powerful as the ones that offended you. Don't look so quickly to others for solutions. [Before the flames start I am not advocating this for something like a violent act like rape...call the cops and have the beast caged, they're paid to do that.] -Barry Shein, Boston University I ain't afraid o' no paradox ------------------------------ Date: 28 Mar 85 12:18:15 PST (Thu) From: Jeff Peck Subject: linguistics, humor, the subconsicious, pathogenic 'memes' The meta-message of pollynomials... The humor (if any) in this story is based on the differences between the syntactic level (mathematical language) and the semantic level (a story about rape). This story allows one to write, publish, and read this story and always say, in the back of the mind (at the other level) "this only a play on mathematical terms", and therefore one can talk about, think about, accept and even enjoy this story about violent rape without having to expose oneself as a sexist psychopath; it is (was) socially acceptable. Now, there are some people who don't yet understand why this story is objectionable, they see it as just a harmless little play with words. And perhaps those people really are not tuned into hearing it at its true semantic level. That is no excuse, because the semantic message of the story can still be learned subconsciously. [There is a second level of meaning which says "it is ok to write, publish, and read this type of material without comment, under the guise of 'humor'."] The objectionable elements of this story center around the rape myths which are expressed quite blatently. These myths are: "She wanted to get raped", "She deserved to get raped", "She had no choice but to allow the rape", "She enjoyed getting raped", "The rapist is not to be blamed", "The rapist is to be admired". And the moral of the story states quite clearly that rape and fear of rape should be used to control freedom. For those who contend that stories such as these are really harmless, please consider this: The story was written to be harmless mathematical/linguistic humor, and yet, all these myths are expressed in the story, without even trying; obviously THE AUTHORS KNEW ALL THESE MYTHS, AT LEAST AT A SUBCONSCIOUS LEVEL. And I suspect that they did not pick them up in a textbook or a course on rape myths; THEY WERE LEARNED BY READING OR HEARING STORIES JUST LIKE THIS! And now, a few words about humor and censorship. As I mentioned above, the humor (socio-linguistic survival value) of this story is based on the switching between levels of meaning. The masquerade of mathematical/linguistic wordplay allows this story to easily enter the social--literary--cognitive system. (and it is a masquerade, just try publishing this under the subject line: "rape humor"). A vivid analogy comes to mind; this story (and others like it) interact with the system much as a virus interacts with biological systems. [This analogy is similar to the "memes" presented in Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene"] The story is wrapped in a double protective cover of humor and mathematics so it can slip past the usual antibodies of sensitivity or sensability. But underneath this coating is a cognitive "DNA sequence" (meme) which when injected into and nutured by the host, produces attitudes and behaviours which protect and perpetuate both the pathogen (the story) and the disease (rape and fear). Those who are surpised by the flaming about the publication of this story, perhaps don't realize that over the past twenty years, parts of our societal organism have developed antibodies for this particular virus. So, should it be published? Maybe, but not as humor; it should be quoted (mention vs use) as an example of vicious pseudo-humor. If must always be presented in the context of its reality, its disguise must be removed. The alternative is to publish it naively, and as in the case of the AIList, it may become a relatively innocuous "vaccine". The flurry of commentary is, in fact, nothing more or less than the swarming of antibodies to this virus, to engulf it, and label it as the pathogen that it is. And now, maybe a larger segment of the population will be able to detect the antigens of rape myths. There are those who will fight for the rights of viruses to reproduce and otherwise express themselves, but in this case, I think it can be shown that the organism as a whole will be healthier if this infection can be eradicated. Jeff Peck (peck@sri-spam) PostScript: For those who still claim that Polly Nomial is not a story about rape, please reread the first paragraph: "our heroine is accosted by villain..." Even without this statement of the plot, anyone who refuses to accept that this is a story about rape is simply failing to acknowledge the distinction between syntax and semantics, the use of allegory and metaphor. This story was not generated just by conjoining mathematical phrases, it was clearly written to use all those phases to describe a rape. That is an important point, this story did not spring from the pen (or keyboard) of "anonymous", it was written by a person, or more likely, a team of persons, who thought that it would be funny. This story reflects the attitudes and enlightenment of those people at that time, in that society; and they clearly believed that rape was humorous, justifiable [!!! -- KIL], etc. In today's society such attitudes must be exposed and identified as sick. [Very cleverly put, but under the syntactic sugar is a questionable premise: that anyone who enjoyed reading the story (even if female?) is a "sexist psychopath". I found humor in the word play and novel semantic mappings in spite of the subject matter; perhaps I am just more sensitive to linguistic patterns than to social concerns, at least in the intellectual context of AIList peer discussion -- that doesn't mean I'm "sick" (I hope). I think there is general agreement that the plot of the item (as opposed to its "message" or "intention", perhaps) concerned rape, that rape is abhorrent and a serious social problem and not a joking matter, that any message with intent to denigrate, subjugate, or offend is offensive, that the piece had little to do with AI, that it would have been more palatable if run with a commentary discussing its linguistic merits and decrying its subject matter, and finally that it would have been better for all concerned if I had kept it out of AIList. A reasonable amount of protest, or "sensitization", was in order. That having been done, let's get back to the theme of this list. AIList is a forum for discussion of AI and information science; it has little capacity for social subversion or reform. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1985 03:11 EST From: MINSKY%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Imprinting and Humor I don't think rape-jokes are a good idea, either. In fact this is discussed tangentially in Chapter 294 (seriously -- the chapters are only 1 page long) of my almost-finished Society of Mind book. ***************************************************** TIME-SPANS of MEMORIES Contemplate the plight of a mother with a new infant! The baby will demand her time and attention for many years -- and sometimes she may wonder why. ["Why must I do all this?" "How could this baby justify such sacrifice."] Then various answers might come to mind: ["Because it will repay you some day,"] or ["This is to carry on our race"]. But these are not the arguments that end the questioning; all cultures recognize that mother-love is far from rational. Instead, an instinctive attachment-bond is formed, which then protects itself from change. The final reason to keep nurturing that child is simply, ["Because I love it."] The problem is still a real one, and there are frequent, secret, tragedies in which a mother's frustration and strain overwhelms those attachment bonds and all the other personal pleasures and social compulsions that come with rearing a child. But rather than stray off to talk about those other matters; let's focus on the nature of the mother-child bond itself. I'll argue that it's based upon a special kind of memory. We often think of all our memories as much the same in character, and all stored in the same huge container. But certain kinds of memories [ought] to be less changeable than other kinds. For example, because human infants are so utterly dependent on their parent's sustenance, our species had to evolve attachment-bonds which last at least for several years. This is seen in many other animals as well, in the form of what psychologists call "imprinting" -- the kind of learning in which an infant animal learns to recognize its parent. These special memories are very swiftly formed -- and then they're very slow to change. It can be very difficult to get those babies to transfer their attachment to foster-parents. On the other side, there are similarly rigid constraints of parents' attachment to their babies. Many adult mammals will eject alien babies from their nests, if they have not been involved in the normal process of attachment shortly after birth. The parent-child bondage, too, forms rapidly and decays slowly. These are not our only long-persisting person-bonds. There are many animal species in which an individual will choose a mate and then remain with it for all the rest of life. Many people do that, too. And of the ones who don't do that, something rather similar instead: they keep on changing person-mates but choose from those of similar appearance or character -- as though they cannot change some underlying stereotype. And on a shorter scale of time, many persons find themselves enslaved by unwanted infatuations and one-way bonds that can't be made to go away -- because the parts of the mind which do not desire those attachments are unable to control the parts of minds which made them. It's little use to complain about this; the slowness of those memory-systems evolved to suit our ancestors' requirements, not our own. We all know, too, the seemingly inexorable time-span of mourning. It often takes a year or more to manage and accept the separation or loss of those we love. This, too, could be a product of the slowness of attachment-change. Perhaps this, too, explains the prolonged, mourning-like depression that follows sexual or other forms of personal assault. No matter that the unwelcome intimacy of violence may be brief; it nonetheless affects one's attachment machinery, however much against one's wish. And then, because those agencies are do inherently slow, recovery involves a profound and prolonged disturbance to ordinary social relations. And since that happens inside agencies we can't control, it does not help very much for the victim to view the incident "rationally" -- since that can only slowly bring those sluggish mechanisms back to their normal states. It is the worst of injuries, to lose the use of precious sections of one's mind. ------- Then a chapter on Freud's theory of jokes and censors concludes: Why does humor seems so humorous when it is actually concerned with unpleasant, painful, and disgusting subjects? There's nothing very "funny" at all about most jokes - except, perhaps, in the skill and subtlety with which their dreadful content is disguised; the joke itself is often little more than ["look at what happened to somebody else; now, aren't you glad that that wasn't you"?] The censor theory not only explains this, but also why jokes are usually not so funny when heard again. That is because, each time, those censors learn a little more, and become harder to fool. Then why do certain kinds of jokes, particularly those about forbidden sexual subjects, seem to remain persistently funny to so many people? Our theory suggests that the censors in that area area must be peculiarly inept at continuous learning: the peculiar robustness of sexual humor means that the censors of sexuality are among the "slow learners" of the mind, like retarded children. In fact, we could argue that they literally [are] retarded children -- that is, frozen remnants of our earlier selves. But why should these particular censors stay unchanged so long? We saw, in [S257B] one reason why it could be good to stop some agency from learning more, and we'll see more such arguments in [S295]. There are good reasons why our sexual censors should be slow to change their ways. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Wed Apr 3 04:47:08 1985 Date: Wed, 3 Apr 85 04:47:02 est From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a010698; 3 Apr 85 2:55 EST Date: Tue 2 Apr 1985 22:22-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 #45 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Wed, 3 Apr 85 04:34 EST AIList Digest Wednesday, 3 Apr 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 45 Today's Topics: Administrivia - Short Vacation, Query - PRIME Installations, Games - GO, Expert Systems - Process Control & Database Systems, Opinion - Living Programs, Humor (if any) - Subjective C & Machine Forgetting, Seminars - Adaptive Algorithms (SU) & Generation of Expert Systems from Examples (Northeastern) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat 30 Mar 85 20:00:43-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: Administrivia - Short Vacation Expect about a ten-day interval between this digest and the next. I'll be attending an SPIE conference, among other activities, and I haven't yet trained my computer to issue the digest automatically. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: TUE 2 APR 85 1240 MEZ From: U02F%CBEBDA3T.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA (Franklin A. Davis) Subject: Any PRIME installations doing AI research? We are interested in exchanging tools, compilers, & hints with any PRIME users who see this note. Our research includes computer vision using a CAD model, robotics & collision detection, and expert systems. Please contact me directly. Thanks. -- FAD Institute for Informatics and Applied Mathematics University of Bern, Switzerland ------------------------------ Date: 2 Apr 85 09:25:08 PST (Tuesday) From: LLi.ES@XEROX.ARPA Reply-to: LLi.ES@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Re: game of GO Steve, Lester Buck at shell!buck@ut-sally.arpa sent out a fairly extensive bibliography on computer Go to Usenet net.games.go. I only have a hardcopy of that message dated 1/14/85. If you can't get in touch with him and can't get someone to retrieve that file from Usenet, I can make a copy for you. Leonard Li. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 2 Apr 85 15:30:17-CST From: David Throop Subject: Small Expert Sys & Process Control I just returned from the AIChE conference & Petroleum Exposition in Houston. I saw a single-loop process controller from Foxboro there. It's advertised as the first AI technology to come out as a commercial process control product. It's a hardwired expert system for dynamically resetting the loop control parameters. It has seven rules. Now I'm currently taking an Expert System course in which the term project involves building an ES with ~100 rules, and a 7 rules system doesn't seem that impressive. However, the competition at the show was not pooh-poohing it, at it did seem to do some pretty good level control on the demo system they'd rigged up. Research has focused on systems between 100 and 3000 rules. But I remember that working in a engineering office, people often wrote 30 line FORTRAN programs for one shot calculations, throwing the code away after we'd generated our one-time-use output. As we develop robust Expert System tools with ties to good editors and explanation facilities we may find that there are many areas where the control and decision process is best expressed (and developed) in an ES, even though the knowledge in the program fits in less than a dozen rules. These will include systems where the "expert" knowledge is not expert at all, but just well expressed in the production rule form. There was not much AI activity shown there. The process industries are very interested in the AI technology (the oil companies showed up in force at AAAI 84) but almost nothing has been published, or come out as a product package. The most obvious areas of development are AI in process design (engineering databases etc) and in process control. What seems to be holding things back? The ES packages out there don't seem to be talking to any of the engineering database formats already in place. And there are some very tough representational & computational problems to work on for process control. Expert systems would have a tough time matching the well developed supervisory programs already in place out there. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 2 Apr 85 11:49:46-PST From: MARCEL@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Living Programs It's no secret that what a body does for its living is sometimes obvious even when the body is not working at its living. After an operating systems course I was once caught behaving like a scheduler, starting longer jobs (a coffee pot) earlier and at low priority, then time-sharing my CPU between my homework, my TV and my brother. Obviously, that's a simplistic example; the effect can be much more subtle. Programming brings with it: 1. an assumption that all problems are solvable (all bugs can be "fixed"); 2. sharper programming "techniques" yield better programs sooner; 3. reason is adequate for all aspects of the task; 4. issues are polarized (the program works or it doesn't, this algorithm is or is not faster than that); 5. every functional goal can be achieved by correct analysis of conditionals in branches and loops. In short, software gives us a world which may be very complex, but in which we can still feel a sense of control denied us in day-to-day life. After all, we created the machinery in the first place. I contend that a good many of us (eg myself until a while ago) take the assumption of control away with us from our programs. This applies especially to "hackers", meaning people who spend much of their time programming as opposed to doing conceptual design first. It might apply less to AIers faced with the problem of human intelligence, though we tend to believe that machines will be intelligent someday (read: the problem is solvable, we have better languages now, and sufficient analysis will tell us what intelligence is). Question: am I right about the false sense of power; have I misdiagnosed the cause; and how much is AI the projection par excellence of this illusion? Marcel@SRI-AI (M.Schoppers) ------------------------------ Date: 1 Apr 1985 09:22-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Recent Articles - Expert Database Systems >From the 1985 SIGMOD Conference Program, May 28 to May 31, 1985 Austin Texas May 30, 1985 4-5:30 3DP1 Panel: Expert Database Systems (Workshop Review) Chairperson Larry Herschberg May 31, 1985 9:30 - 11:00 P. M. D. Gray "Efficient Prolog Access to CODASYL and FDM Databases" J. D. Ullman "Implementation of Logical Query Languages for Databases" ------------------------------ Date: 1 Apr 1985 16:05:34 EST (Monday) From: PSN Development Subject: subjective C [Forwarded by Susan Bernstein .] Subjective C, a new programming language. Recently researchers in the computer language field have shown much interest in subject oriented languages. Subjective programming languages draw upon concepts developed in the fields of subjective probability and philosophical subjectivism to enrich the field of programming semantics. `Subjective C' is such a language based on the programming language C. Subjective C grew out of the AI concept of DWIM, or "do what I mean". The subjective C compiler infers the mood of the author of the input program based on clues contained in the comments in the program. If no comments (or verbose identifiers) are present, the programmer is judged to have insufficiently thought out his problem, i.e. to have insufficiently specified the computation to be performed. In this case a subjective diagnostic is issued, depending on the compiler's own mood. Assuming comments or other mood indicators are present, an amalgam of inference techniques drawn from various reputed-to-be-successful expert systems are used to infer the author's mood. A trivial example of a mood revealing comment with accompanying program text is the following: a = a - 1; /* add one to a */ A too simple analysis of the dichotomy between apparent meaning of the statement and accompanying comment is that one of them is in error. A more insightful analysis is that this program should not be allowed to work, even if no syntax errors occur in it. Accordingly, subjective compiler should hang the system, thus inducing the programmer to quit for the night. More interesting cases occur when there is no conflict between program text and commentary. It is these cases where Subjective C is shown to be a significantly richer language than normalcy. Some examples of mood-implying comments found in actual programs are the following: ; Here we do something perverse to the packet. Beats me. In this case, the comment reveals that the programmer does not care what the code does, except that he wants it to be something that subsequent programmers will be shocked by. The compiler uses a variation of its mood-inference techniques to generate code that is suitably perverse by systematically generating actions and evaluating them against the criteria it has synthesized. blt ; hold the mayo The Subjective C compiler evaluates the indicatory content of this comment to discern that the programmer is undoubtedly hungry. Code will be generated that will crash inexplicably, thus inducing the programmer to go to the candy machine and pig out, which is what he wanted in the first place. Subjective C is neither a superset nor a subset of "normal" (if one can apply the term) C, known in subjective parlance as normalcy. However, there is an extensive intersection, if meanings of programs are ignored. The central thesis of research in the field of subjective languages is that the meanings of programs are far more subtle than first appears to the reader (or author). Some examples of mood revealing comments in well known C programs include the following: /* I've been powercoding much too much lately. */ and, /* WARNING: modify the following at your own risk. */ Students of program complexity will be interested to note that the algorithms used for mood inference are of greater complexity than NP complete, which is of one of the first known practical applications of this class of computations. The exact characterization of this class of problems is not yet fully explored, but some initial theoretical results will be published by certain graduate students, real soon now, and no later than next August when their fellowships run out. The subjective C compiler, called "see", will be available (relatively) shortly on all bbn unix systems. Comments can be directed directly to the compiler itself, in the usual fashion. ------------------------------ Date: 1 Apr 85 13:42:23 EST From: CHOMICKI@RUTGERS.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Machine Forgetting (Rutgers) Jan Chomicki, a Ph.D. student in our department, agreed to give a talk about MACHINE FORGETTING. His research interests in AI are pretty recent, in fact they date from today morning. The talk starts at 2:50 pm and ends at 1:30 pm. The place is Hill-402: if too many people arrive, we will move into a smaller room. Considering many things, the topic of the talk among others, you should not expect the speaker to be there. The abstract follows: Machine Forgetting We argue that there is no learning without forgetting. At least, by learning a man forgets how stupid he used to be. Current research in Machine Learning, cf.(...), doesn't take this phenomenon fully into account. We develop a Theory of Forgetting Functor(TFF). For a class of systems, called Sclerotic, forgetting is monotonic. However, as our everyday experience indicates, there also exist non-monotonic forgetting systems. TFF is one of the variants of a more general Theory of Limited Resources (TLR). Others include: Theory of Incompetence, Theory of Not Understanding etc. We implemented a general program, the Forgetting Daemon, that makes any other program forget about its original purpose, e.g. sorting numbers. We conjecture that this program may provide a high degree of domain independence in AI systems. Take the expert system for diagnosing soybean diseases, run it through the Forgetting Daemon and the expert system will totally forget about soybeans. However, it will also forget about everything else. We plan to remove this problem in the second version of our system. A facility of Selective Forgetting will be provided. The user will define what to forget by means of production rules and/or menus. Methodologically, we see several avenues for further research: 1.Example- and Pattern-driven Forgetting. 2.Forgetting Without an Explanation and its relationship with Random Forgetting. 3.Forgetting Without a Trace vs.Reversible Forgetting. 4.Meta-forgetting: I forgot what I forgot what... We would have formalized our concepts, but we are pretty certain that some graduate student at MIT or Stanford has been working on it for a few years already. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 1 Apr 85 14:17:46-PST From: Carol Wright Subject: Seminar - Adaptive Algorithms (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford SIGLUNCH distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.] DATE: Friday, April 5, 1985 LOCATION: Chemistry Gazebo, between Physical & Organic Chemistry TIME: 12:05 SPEAKER: Lawrence J. (Dave) Davis, Ph.D. Texas Instruments Computer Science Laboratory. Knowledge Based Systems Branch. Dallas, Texas. TITLE: Applying Adaptive Algorithms to Epistatic Domains Abstract: In his 1975 book ADAPTATION IN NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL SYSTEMS, John Holland proposed a technique for carrying out search in large solution spaces that is based on the process of natural evolution. Among the important points in the book is Holland's proof that the search process can be greatly accelerated if certain sorts of mutations (CROSSOVER mutations) are used. Interest in probabilistic search techniques, and the Holland techniques in particular, has grown quite strong in the last two years. The talk will begin by describing procedures Holland and his students used in their early work, and then will move to the topic of recent innovations. Holland has shown that when adaptive algorithms are used to search certain kinds of extremely large spaces, they will converge on a "good" solution fairly quickly. Such problem spaces are characterized by a low degree of interaction between components of solutions. A host of classical search problems, however, are oriented toward solutions that are highly interactive. The talk will describe some new techniques for applying adaptive algorithms to epistatic domains, while retaining some of the strength of Holland's convergence proof. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Apr 85 13:54 EST From: Ramesh Astik Subject: Seminar - Generation of Expert Systems from Examples (Northeastern) AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF EXPERT SYSTEMS FROM EXAMPLES Steve Gallant Wednesday, April 10, 4 p.m. Botolph Bldg, First Floor A process for generating an Expert System from Training Examples (and/or Rules) will be described. The Knowledge Base for such a system principally consists of a Matrix of integers called a Learning Matrix. Given a set of Training Examples, a Learning Matrix may be generated by various means including the Pocket Algorithm (a modification of Perceptron Learning). The resulting Learning Matrix is then combined with a Matrix Controlled Inference Engine (MACIE) to produce a true Expert System. This talk will focus on how MACIE interprets the Learning Matrix in order to perform forward chaining, backward chaining, and likelihood estimates. Presented by: The College of Computer Science Northeastern University Boston, Ma. 02115 Information: 437-2462 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Thu Apr 18 07:11:52 1985 Date: Thu, 18 Apr 85 07:11:46 est From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a024870; 16 Apr 85 3:35 EST Date: Mon 15 Apr 1985 23:02-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 #46 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Thu, 18 Apr 85 07:08 EST AIList Digest Tuesday, 16 Apr 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 46 Today's Topics: Administrivia - AIList is Back, Requests - Hopfield's Neuron Modeling & La Jolla Machine Translation & IBM PC LISPs & Distributed Problem Solving & Models of Negotiation & Knowledge Exploration & Exert Legal Systems, Seminars - Linguistic Plans (BBNG) & Representing Objects (UPenn) & The Bodily Basis of Meaning (UCB) & Scientific Problem Solving (Rutgers) & The Model Theory of Shared Information (CSLI) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon 15 Apr 85 22:54:35-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: AIList is Back Did you hear the one about the bum on the park bench? He was a top man in the computer field, but he took a two-week vacation and fell behind. Twenty new readers have signed up for direct distribution of the list since April 2, including several at new sites. There were about 80 messages in the AIList mailbox (after I read the bboards and forwarded a few items), as well as 40 messages each in the AIList-Request mailbox and my own mailbox. [My accumulated physical mail consisted of only a dozen items, nearly all junk.] Could someone unplug the network while I catch up? -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Mon 8 Apr 85 19:58:10-EST From: MCCOWN@RADC-TOPS20.ARPA Subject: Query on Hopfield's work Does anyone know of any TR's (or any info at all!) on John Hopfield's work at CIT on neuron modelling and memory? Please send any pointers to MCCOWN@RADC-TOPS20. Thanks. Michael McCown ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 9 Apr 85 08:10:13 pst From: Curtis L. Goodhart Subject: Computer Translation of Natural Languages Does anyone know of a company or R&D group in La Jolla, California that is working on computer translation of natural languages? Curt Goodhart (goodhart@nosc on the arpanet) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 11 Apr 85 08:17 CDT From: Eric_Tannenbaum Subject: How about them Lisp compilers....? To Anyone out there... I was wondering if anyone knows of a Lisp compiler for the IBM PC and how I could get one (including the price) as I am interested in some home AI projects. Also, could you tell me how good and/or bad they are. If there aren't any Lisp compilers out there in AI land, how about letting me know about what popular Lisp interpreters there are for the IBM PC (and price, too?). Since I'm new to the Lisp PC market place, I'll appreciate any and all comments. Thanks! Please reply to: CSNET address: erict @ ti-eg ARPANET address: erict % ti-eg@csnet.relay Again, thanks for the info. Eric Tannenbaum ------------------------------ Date: 11 Apr 1985 14:50-EST From: gasser%usc-cse.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: DPS at Clarkson U A notice in March COMPUTER (pg 139) about an 8 university AI consortium funded by the Air Force mentions research in "distributed problem solving at Clarkson University." Can anyone (at Clarkson or elsewhere) tell me what's going on there in the realm of DPS? -- Les Gasser Asst. Professor Computer Science Dept. SAL-200 USC Los Angeles, CA. 90089-0782 ARPANET: gasser%usc-cse@csnet-relay ------------------------------ Date: Wednesday, 3 Apr 1985 07:54:01-PST From: cashman%how.DEC@decwrl.ARPA Subject: Formal models of negotiation I would appreciate pointers to any work which has been done on formal models of negotiation between people. I am familiar with David Lowe's work on the representation of debate, Reid's and Davis' contract net protocol, and Flores' and Ludlow's paper "Doing and Speaking in the Office." Anything else? -- Paul Cashman Cashman%what.DEC@DECWRL.ARPA ------------------------------ Date: 4 Apr 1985 1030-EST From: Amsel-Sdsc@CECOM-1.ARPA Subject: Knowledge Exploration KNOWLEDGE EXPLORATION DOD Computer Scientist conducting a study of information flow which will culminate in an analysis of the Knowledge - Information processing involved in a large hi-tech research and development environment. Request assistance and dicussion on any of the following topics: 1. Definition of knowledge. 2. What constitutes knowledge? (How to identify it) 3. Relationship of data, information and knowledge. 4. How does one collect or engineer knowledge? (Collection mechanism) 5. Mathematical representation of knowledge. (Formula with rationale) 6. Software and Hardware relationships to knowledge. 7. How to represent knowledge? (ex: What form or which computer language) 8. Difference between knowledge engineer and knowledge scientist. 9. Methods of controlling knowledge. 10. Who should have access to knowledge within an organization? 11. Relationship of networking to knowledge. 12. Fifth generation concept of knowledge. 13. General comments on knowledge. Charles E. Woodall (SNAIL MAIL) BOQ Box 122 Ft. Monmouth, NJ 07703 Office: (201)544-3294 Home: (201)389-3598 (ARPA/MILNet) [woodall]:AMSEL-SDSC at CECOM-1.ARP ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Apr 85 16:53:47 EST From: John Kastner Subject: Expert Legal Systems Does anyone know of a CS Department in which there is current work on, or a serious interest in, expert systems applied to the practice of law? An acquaintance of mine, currently at the University of East Asia, Macau, would like to do his Doctorate in this field. He is an Associate Professor of Management Science with a strong background in law. Maurice Karnaugh ARPAnet: KARNO.YKTVMZ.IBM-SJ@CSnet-Relay ------------------------------ Date: 5 Apr 1985 13:30-EST From: Brad Goodman Subject: Seminar - Linguistic Plans (BBNG) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] BBN Laboratories Artificial Intelligence Seminar Series Speaker: Diane Litman University of Rochester Title: "Discourse and Plan Recognition - A Model of Subdialogues in Conversation" Date: Tuesday, April 16, 1985 10:30 a.m. Location: 3rd Floor Large Conference Room 10 Moulton Street Cambridge, MA One promising approach to analyzing dialogues has involved modelling the goals of the speakers. In other words, participants in a conversation are viewed as accomplishing goals via plans containing the utterances of the conversation as actions in the plan. In general, these models work well as long as the topic follows the plan structure closely, but they have difficulty accounting for such interrupting subdialogues as clarifications and corrections. To address this problem, a plan-based natural language system incorporating both task and discourse knowledge has been developed. In particular, a new model of plan recognition is used to construct a hierarchy of task plans and meta-plans via the process of constraint satisfaction. The plan recognition model has also been extended using results from work in discourse analysis. Such an approach accounts for interrupting subdialogues and various surface linguistic phenomena while maintaining the advantages of the plan-based methodology. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 9 Apr 85 11:01 EST From: Tim Finin Subject: Seminar - Representing Objects (UPenn) REPRESENTING, REASONING ABOUT AND MANIPULATING OBJECTS BY A COMPUTER John E. Hopcroft (Cornell) Thursday, April 16; 216 Moore School, University of Pennsylvania The areas of CAD/CAM and robotics require computer representations of physical objects. These representations must support automatic design tools, analysis packages, high level reasoning and object manipulation. This talk will discuss potential applications, problems that must be overcome and important directions in developing the engineering science base needed to support the design, simulation, testing and debugging of sophisticated objects. An example of a major problem is that the actual construction of a computer representation of a physical object such as a crankshaft is a major undertaking. Thus interactive physical object editors will play an important role. The use of automatic surface generation in constructing solid models will be illustrated. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 10 Apr 85 16:31:59 pst From: chertok%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Paula Chertok) Subject: Seminar - The Bodily Basis of Meaning (UCB) BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237B TIME: Tuesday, April 16, 11 - 12:30 PLACE: 240 Bechtel Engineering Center (followed by) DISCUSSION: 12:30 - 1:30 in 200 Building T-4 SPEAKER: Mark Johnson, Philosophy Department, Southern Illinois University TITLE: ``The Bodily Basis of Meaning and Imagination'' The idea that human rationality is an abstract, disembodied, formal structure is deeply rooted in the Western Philosophical tradition and is manifested most recently in model-theoretic and Davidsonian semantics. According to this view, meaning is an abstract relation between symbolic representations (either words or mental representations) and objective (mind-independent) real- ity. Meaning is thus a matter of objective senses and has nothing to do with how human beings understand their experience. And rationality is a rule-governed manipulation of the symbols that express meaning. In this whole picture nothing is said about the role of bodily experience, either in the emergence of meaning or in our reasoning about our world. But it is a fact that we humans do have bodies, and it would be rather strange if this fact didn't have some important bearing on what we experience as meaningful and how we make sense of our world in a rational fashion. I suggest that there are recurrent preconceptual structures in our bodily interactions with our environment that are the basis for human meaning. These are structures of our perceptual activity and bodily movements that are metaphorically extended to structure more abstract, non- physical domains. So I am claiming that our more `abstract' rea- soning is grounded in a concrete reasoning via metaphorical con- nections. My argument is based on an analysis of the experience and meaning of balance. ------------------------------ Date: 11 Apr 85 14:44:13 EST From: Smadar Subject: Seminar - Scientific Problem Solving (Rutgers) [Forwarded from the Rutgers bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] III Seminar Title: Problem Solving in a Qualitative Scientific Domain Speaker: Don Ploger Time: Tuesday, April 16, 1985, 11:00am - 12:00pm Place: Hill Center, room 423 Don Ploger is a Ph.D. candidate in the psychology department. He will describe his ongoing dissertation research. An abstract follows: A research scientist is typically able to solve problems and explain phenomenon in his area of expertise. The primary purpose of this study is to develop a methodology for studying this performance in a qualitative scientific domain. The domain chosen is intermediary metabolism, an important area of biochemistry. Reasoning in this domain involves large amounts of knowledge which is richly structured, but is not mathematical. It therefore differs sharply from the scientific domains that have been previously studied in cognitive psychology. In the study, expert biochemists and first-year medical students thought aloud as they solved a problem, and then gave an explanation for the phenomenon. Analysis of the resulting verbal protocols employed representations of the domain knowledge that are consistent with textbooks in the field. Two particular representations are considered in detail: biochemical mechanisms, which are explicitly represented in texts, and level of knowledge, which are usually implicit. Examples of the analysis will be presented for three subjects: an expert, a successful novice, and an unsuccessful novice. Particular attention will be given to the difference between problem solving and explanation among subjects. The purpose of the study is to make explicit important features of human performance, and it differs in many respects from work in AI. However, the general approach is compatible with certain recent trends in the development of expert systems. The study provides a view of how humans use a "first principles" approach. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 10 Apr 85 17:26:31-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - The Model Theory of Shared Information (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] LOGIC SEMINAR ``On the Model Theory of Shared Information'' Jon Barwise, CSLI April 16, at 4:15, Room 381 T (Math Corner) The traditional model-theoretic approach to the problem of shared understanding (public information, common knowledge, mutual belief) has been through an iterated hierarchy of attitude reports (c knows that b knows ... that c knows that P), mirroring the iterated hierarchy in set theory and higher-order model theory. In this talk I want to show that Aczel's work on non-wellfounded sets gives us a new tool for a ``direct'' model-theoretic approach through situations. I will go on to state some approximation theorems that show to what extent the hierarchy approach does and does not add up, in the limit, to the direct approach. The results raise a number of interesting model-theoretic questions that only arise in the context of non-wellfounded sets. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Thu Apr 18 07:22:12 1985 Date: Thu, 18 Apr 85 07:22:06 est From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a001118; 17 Apr 85 0:41 EST Date: Tue 16 Apr 1985 20:26-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 #47 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Thu, 18 Apr 85 07:14 EST AIList Digest Wednesday, 17 Apr 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 47 Today's Topics: Bindings - Walter Reitman, Request - Advanced AI Programming Topics, AI Tools - RuleMaster & Lisp for IBM PC & GCLISP Review, Expert Systems - Articles & Comparative Report, Publications - Flores' & Lisp Conferences Proceedings, Conference - IJCAI-85 Registration & Housing, Seminars - A Relational Database with Logic Programming (SRI) & Phrase Structure and Parsing (BBN) & Expert Systems at Lockheed (SU) & The Japanese Lisp Machine (SU) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 3 Apr 85 15:43:54 EST From: David_West%UMich-MTS.Mailnet@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA Subject: Bindings - Walter Reitman Walter Reitman, whose address was given as here in AIlist v3 #42, in fact moved east a few years ago. We are currently forwarding his mail to 25 Oak St., Rumson NJ I am not sure whether he continued to work on Go after leaving here. David West (David_West%umich-mts.mailnet@mit-multics.arpa) MHRI, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. ------------------------------ Date: 16 Apr 85 16:31:38 EST (Tue) From: Carlo J. Rodriguez Subject: Advanced AI Programming Topics Hello! I was wondering if I could stir up some interest on the part of some of the more experienced programmers and designers that follow the AIList to share some of their knowledge of programming techniques and structures, data structure implementations and favorites tricks, shortcuts and other similar tidbits with those among us less experienced in this magic. Topics such as information hiding, graph structure applications, parsing techniques and other similar methods typically employed in AI programming are the types of things I'd like to see discussed. It would be nice to see some real hard-core, nitty-gritty technical information exchange. Let us all know what you think about this topic. --- Carlo J. Rodriguez aka: carlor@mitre ------------------------------ Date: 10 Apr 85 15:37:28 EST From: Mary.Lou.Maher@CMU-RI-CIVE Subject: RuleMaster I recently attended a training session for RuleMaster at Radian Corporation. RuleMaster is an expert system development tool that allows the programmer to put the knowledge in the form of examples and RuleMaster will induce the rules. RuleMaster essentially accepts rules in the form of decision tables and induces an efficient IF THEN representation. The decision tables form a hierarchy of modules and allow variable declaration and access to external programs or databases. RuleMaster was developed with consultation problems in mind and may possibly be used for robotic control. I found a few limitations that would make it difficult to use RuleMaster for design problems (one of which is the requirement that you have to declare all your variables before execution). ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 16 Apr 85 10:22:42 BST From: Fitch@ucl-cs.arpa Subject: Lisp for IBM PC The number is growing, but I reckon the best is UOLISP from Jed Marti (Marti@Rand-unix on arpa net). It has a compiler, screen editor and other goodies. I have seen it run a large part of the REDUCE algebra system, which for a PC is good going. Alternatives are Golden Common Lisp and MuLisp (Stoutemyer in Hawaii) ------------------------------ Date: Tue 16 Apr 85 12:53:10-PST From: Ken Laws Subject: GCLISP & Expert Systems Articles For information on GCLISP, see Jonathon Amsterdam's review in the May issue of Popular Computing. The same issue also features overview articles about AI and expert systems, and a review of four AI books. (Mike Nicita and Ron Petrusha liked Expert Systems by Paul Harmon and David King, didn't like The AI Business by Winston and Prendergast, and had mixed comments about Into the Heart of the Mind by Frank Rose and The Cognitive Computer by Schank and Childers.) For a business view of expert systems, see Exploring Expert Systems, by Elisabeth Horwitt, in Business Computer Systems, March 1985, pp. 48-57. The article concludes with a list of vendors of expert-system hardware, software, and services. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Fri 12 Apr 85 14:55:27-PST From: Mark Richer Subject: report on ES tools I have written a report (for a class) on five software tools for building knowledge-based systems: ART, DUCK, KEE, S1, and SRL. The report is based on written information I have collected and demos I have seen of KEE and S1. (Unfortunately no hands-on experience). Nevertheless, several people have found the paper imformative so I am offering it to others. Send me your US mail address if you are interested. I will wait a little while and if there aren't too many requests I'll mail you a copy. Otherwise, I'll make arrangements to post somewhere on the net where you can ftp it. (Actually it was written with Macintosh word, and another alternative is to send me a floppy with a self-addressed mailer). mark ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 16 Apr 85 09:30:57 PST From: Charlie Crummer Subject: Flores Publications (AIList Digest V3 #46) Reply to Paul Cashman: More by Flores that you might not have seen: "Management and Communication in the Office of the Future" (dissertation) 'Understanding Computers and Cognition' with Winograd You can get these through Hermenet Inc. in the SF Bay area (415) 474-3400. --Charlie ------------------------------ Date: 11 Apr 85 1225 PST From: Yoni Malachi Subject: Lisp conferences proceedings [from SIGACT News] ACM SIGPLAN has republished the conference proceeding of previous Lisp conferences. Price Order No. Members Others 1980 Lisp Conf. 552800 $15 $21 1982 Lisp Conf. 552820 $18 $26 1984 Lisp Conf. 552840 $20 $27 Ordering address (prepaid) ACM Order Dept. P.O.Box 64145 Baltimore, MD 21264 ------------------------------ Date: 09 Apr 85 09:38:31 PST (Tue) From: Phil Klahr Subject: IJCAI-85 Registration -- Please post The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence will be meeting in Los Angeles (at UCLA) August 18-23, 1985. Conference brochures (including registration information) have already been mailed out. If you have not received one, or would like extras, contact IJCAI-85 c/o AAAI 445 Burgess Drive Menlo Park, CA 94025 415-328-3123 or 415-321-1118 Registration will be limited to 5,000 people. Based on early projections, up to 7,000 people may wish to attend, so early registration is highly encouraged (if not necessary). As a bonus, early registrants will receive a substantial reduction in registration costs. Through June 28, registration fees are $175 ($80 for students); for registrations received after June 28 but prior to July 26, fees will be $225 ($100 for students); and for on-site registration (if available), fees will be $275 ($125 for students). Substantial reductions for early tutorial registrations are also in effect. Further information on the technical conference, the tutorials, the exhibition, and housing can be found in the conference brochure. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 11 Apr 85 14:01:06 PST From: Phyllis O'Neil Subject: IJCAI-85 housing The UCLA Guest House is booked up for IJCAI-85. Many residential suites and residence hall rooms are available, as well as hotel rooms. Mail your IJCAI Housing Bureau Reservation Form with the deposit as soon as you can, to be assured a room for IJCAI-85. ------------------------------ Date: 11 Apr 1985 1524-PST From: GOGUEN@SRI-CSL.ARPA Subject: Seminar - A Relational Database with Logic Programming (SRI) [Forwarded from the SRI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] CSL SEMINAR SERIES: 17 April 1985 at 2pm in EL381 EXTENDING A RELATIONAL DATABASE WITH LOGIC PROGRAMMING FACILITIES H. van Emde Boas - Lubsen, IBM INSDC, Uithoorn Netherlands P. van Emde Boas, IBM San Jose, on leave from IIW/FVI, Univ. Amsterdam C.F.J. Doedens, Univ. of Amsterdam, while at IBM-INSDC Uithoorn Netherlands The observation that there exists a strong connection between the Relational Database Model on the one side, and a convincing interpretation of Logic Programs on the other hand has been made frequently. The real issue is how to exploit this connection in order to let Logic Programming share the fruits of years of research and development in Database technology. Various groups have worked on the problem of interfacing Logic Programming and Relational Databases by giving the logic programming system access to an existing Database system, or by incorporating Database facilities into the Logic Programming System. Our approach is radically different: we incorporate Logic Programming Facilities into an existing Database system by extending the functionality of the latter. In the presentation we illustrate this strategy by defining a simple subset of PROLOG. Our prototype system translates programs from this subset into high level code for the Database System Business System 12, a commercially available relational Database system for time sharing use developed at IBM-INSDC, Uithoorn, the Netherlands. Facts are translated into rows which are inserted in Database tables. Clauses are compiled into View definitions and goals are represented by Database queries. The existing BS12-API language provides a powerful view mechanism, allowing us to design this translation. The query generated by compiling the goal statement is processed by the BS12 system, and all answers generated are returned to the Prolog system without further need for interfacing. The subset of PROLOG presently covered by our system excludes several important facilities. They will be discussed together with the required enhancements both to our interface and the existing BS12 system needed for incorporating these features. We also compare our work with projects performed by others. Disclaimer This presentation contains reference to, or information about, possible future enhancements to IBM products (Business System 12). Such reference or information must not be construed to mean that IBM intends to implement these enhancements. The contents are entirely the responsibility of the authors and reflect their personal opinion. ------------------------------ Date: 11 Apr 1985 12:17-EST From: AHAAS at BBNG.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Phrase Structure and Parsing (BBN) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] BBN's next AI seminar is at 10:30 on Thursday, April 18, in the 3rd floor large conference room at 10 Moulton Street. Craig Thiersch, of the University of Connecticutt and the University of Koeln, will speak on "Scrambling, the "VP node" and the nature of projections". His abstract: This talk consists of two parts: the first deals with several linguistic problems, illustrated by a specific example from the structure of German; the second discusses the effect which the resolution of these problems has on (1) the nature of phrase- structure, and (2) applications to parsing. In the past, parsers have quite generally assumed that one needed separate "packets" for different constituent types, NP, VP, S, etc. which had rather different structures from one another, in spite of attempts to reduce them to a common structure. If my arguments are correct, there is only one constituent type, XP, and its structure is uniform; the "satellites" of the Head are licensed by it and given interpretations which vary little from constituent to constituent. This isolates and minimizes the difference between constituents, and locates the few differences where they belong, namely in the lexicon. The parser itself, on the other hand, is the same for all constituents, and "expects" the same structure for all. This means that given a particular place in the parse tree, the parser has a more complete set of expectations. This presumably would be particularly useful in processing fragmentary or garbled utterances, as in speech rather than text processing. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 12 Apr 85 09:00:51-PST From: Elliott Levinthal Subject: Seminar - Expert Systems at Lockheed (SU) [Forwarded from the SRI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The next seminar will take place Wednesday, April l7, in Terman 2l7 from 2:l5 - 3:30. Speaker: J.R. Zumsteg Advanced Software Laboratory Topic: "An Overview of Engineering Expert Systems Research at Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory Expert system technology has progressed to the point where it can be used to assist engineers and designers during the design and analysis of aerospace structures. Because structural design and analysis relies heavily on computer-based modelling, an engineering expert system must be able to utilize existing application programs. The software interface required to provide this capability must set up the input for the program, run the program, and extract the needed results from the output of the program, in much the same manner as a human expert would use the progeram. In addition, the knowledge base of the expert system must include facts and rules to decide when and how to use an application program during the course of a design or analysis. Two engineering expert systems have been under development at the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory for over a year. The Composites Design Assistant (CDA) uses a PROLOG-based expert system framework, which has been interfaced to the RIM relational database manager and the ADVLAM laminate analysis code, to assist an engineer in the design of sandwich panels. The Buckling Expert uses the Lockheed Expert System (LES), an expert system framework, written in analysis code and the PANDA shell design code during the analysis of a cylindrical shell. The design and operation of these engineering expert systems, along with the software and logic issues encountered during their development, will be described. An example of each system in use will also be presented. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 15 Apr 85 16:03:46-PST From: Carol Wright Subject: Seminar - The Japanese Lisp Machine (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford SIGLUNCH distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.] DATE: Friday, April 19, 1985 LOCATION: Chemistry Gazebo, between Physical & Organic Chemistry TIME: 12:05 SPEAKER: Shigeki Goto Musashino Electrical Communication Laboratory, NTT, Japan Visitor SU Computer Science Department TITLE: Japanese Lisp Machine ELIS and it's Language TAO NTT is a Japanese telephone company. Electrical Communication Laboratories are often called "Japanese Bell Labs". At the Feburary 15 Siglunch, Professor Feigenbaum spoke about NTT's new Lisp machine being ten times faster than Symbolics 3600. This talk is a follow up on his talk, and will cover the following points: 1) A brief overview of NTT, and Research activities at Electrical Communication Laboratories. 2) Lisp Machine ELIS: It is safe to say that ELIS is at least six times faster than Symbolics 3600. Because the interpreter is implemented fully by microcode, interpreted code runs faster than most dedicated machines. 3) A dialect of Lisp: TAO Although TAO looks like Zetalisp, it takes in features of Prolog and Smalltalk. Users can program by selecting and mixing the programming paradigms. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Sat Apr 20 23:00:17 1985 Date: Sat, 20 Apr 85 23:00:10 est From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a020819; 20 Apr 85 2:55 EST Date: Fri 19 Apr 1985 22:59-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 #48 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sat, 20 Apr 85 05:10 EST AIList Digest Saturday, 20 Apr 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 48 Today's Topics: Requests - AI in Agriculture & GCLisp on a TI, Reports - ES Tools Paper, Bindings - Walter Reitman, Program - Expert Legal Systems, Discussion - Knowledge and Information, Linguistics - Hangul and Cherokee, Opinion - Policy & Humor & Emotions & Duplicating Humans ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed 17 Apr 85 11:57:58-PST From: Peter Friedland Subject: AI in agriculture I have a friend who has just been hired by the US Dept. of Agriculture to explore advance computer applications, including AI, to problems in agriculture. If anybody has any information about existing systems or research in this area, please send it to FRIEDLAND@SUMEX (or publish on the AILIST). Thanks, Peter ------------------------------ Date: 18 Apr 85 9 32 CST From: Douglas young Subject: GCLisp Please can anyone tell me if there is a way of being able to use Golden Common Lisp on a TI Professional ( equipped with 512k )? Thanks. Douglas Young ( University of Manitoba ) young%uofm-uts.cdn%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa ------------------------------ Date: Fri 19 Apr 85 15:53:14-PST From: Mark Richer Subject: es tools paper I have gotten an incredible number of responses for the ES paper I have offered. I didn't realize that that many people even read AIList. As a result I will have it made into a Stanford Knowledge Systems Lab (KSL) paper. I am saving all the addresses and will have copies mailed out asap. If you are in a rush to get this information let me know ... if the 'emergency' cases are small in number I can send out a photocopy of the Macintosh output right away. I will also try to make an announcement about the mass mailing so you should have to worry about whether you got missed. mark ------------------------------ Date: 17 Apr 1985 14:22-EST From: BATES@BBNG.ARPA Subject: address for Walter Reitman In the latest issue of the AIList newsletter, someone mentioned that Walter Reitman's address was unknown. Here it is, in case you'd like to publish it: Dr. Walter Reitman Palladian Software Inc. 41 Munroe Street Cambridge, MA 02142 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 85 08:14 EST From: Carole D Hafner Subject: Expert Legal Systems Responding to John Kastner's request in AILIST V3 #46: Northeastern University in Boston is in the process of developing a new program in Law and Computer Science. Although we are not ruling out work on traditional "computer law" issues (software protection, liability of computer system vendors, privacy, etc.), our primary interest is the use of computers to model and/or enhance the process of "legal reasoning" - whatever that is!! Thus, legal expert systems, natural language processing and intelligent legal retrieval systems are the areas we want to develop. We are very interested in hearing from potential graduate students who want to work on AI and Law - and also potential faculty! Don Berman Carole Hafner School of Law College of Computer Science berman%northeastern@csnet-relay hafner%northeastern@csnet-relay Northeastern University Boston MA 02115 ------------------------------ Date: 18 Apr 85 10:12:47 PST (Thu) From: Jeff Peck Subject: RE: Knowledge Exploration (some suggestions) A good overview of the problem of defining "information" is in "Theories of Information" [edited] by Machlup and Mansfield (John Wiley 1984). Its a thick volume, with articles by a large number researchers in information science/computer science/cognitive science, but reading just the prologue and epilogue will give you a good overview of the current thinking about Information and Knowledge. In particular, it will warn you about trying to extend from the Shannon definition of the word, which generally tends to confuse the user, (and the English language). Machlup is biased toward the position is that Information is what is told from one human to another; all other uses are derived metaphorically from that usage. Personally, I would suggest that Information and Knowledge are related just as Communication and Memory; Information is Knowledge in transit, or conversely, Knowledge is stored Information. Knowledge is what you "Know", Information is what you don't know; it's what you want to get so that you may Know something. In this case, we can agree in principle with Shannon, that the amount (or value) of information in a signal/symbol is related to the amount of NEW knowledge we recieve. "Datum", as Machlup points out, is latin for "given"; So, in any context in which a particular object is not the result of immediate inference or derivation, that information or knowledge may be considered as data. Inference and analysis may then proceed from data to derive new knowledge, new "knowns" from the "givens". These "knowns", when transmitted to a new process, then become the "givens" for the next round of analysis. So, data is analysed to create knowledge, which is transmitted as information, and may then again become data and knowledge. This explains the relationships, based on function, context and point-of-view, but leaves open the question of the type or kind of object information is, or the means of representation for these objects. The bottom line, I think, is that all of these (info, knowledge, data) must be seen in the context of their use: the purpose of intelligence is to make (good) decisions. The memories, beliefs, inferences, predictions, expectations, etc., that are used to make an "intelligent" choice, or an "informed decision", are knowledge. Whether something is knowledge can only be judged by its relationship to decisions that must be made. I suggest that any theory of knowledge must include a theory of decisions and utility. * for those philosphers who still beleive in "true, justified belief" as the definition of knowledge, I submit that "true, justified belief" is just a special case of "things that are useful in making good decisions". I suggest that the latter is the more fundamental and more useful concept. peck@sri-spam ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 5 Apr 85 8:58:13 EST From: Bruce Nevin Subject: Hangul and Cherokee Sorry, Jan Steinman, at least one elegant writing system is more recent than that of Hangul: in the early 1800s, Sequoya (aka George Guess) invented a very sophisticated syllabary for the Cherokee language. Each of its 85 characters represents one of the possible syllables of the language. This writing system enabled the Cherokees to write down their elaborate system of laws and to publish newspapers in their language. They still do publish Cherokee newspapers, though they disbanded as a tribe in 1906. Their legal tomes still await scholarly study, many in possession of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. A bit of history: the Cherokees were quite successful farmers and businesspeople, a nation with a republican form of government (not to be confused with the present GOP!) under a written constitution. Then gold was discovered in their territory. A treaty obtained from a small group in the tribe was claimed to be binding on the whole tribe. Their autonomy as a nation was upheld by the US Supreme Court, and the tribe overwhelmingly repudiated the treaty, but the State of Georgia used military force and President Andrew Jackson refused to intervene, hence the `Trail of Tears' from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama to Oklahoma. (Occurs to me that `Improper Mathematics' could well be rewritten to this tune!) Devanagari, used to write Sanskrit and its descendants, and many other languages influenced by the spread of Buddhism, is also a syllable- oriented script, but does have distinct marks for vowels. I should be surprised if it did not influence King Sejong's scholars. Bruce Nevin bbncch.arpa ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Apr 85 23:57 EST From: Paul Fishwick Subject: A final note on humor... In response to the "Special Issue on Humor" of the AI bboard, I would like to make some comments concerning the somewhat involved treastises presented therein: > I simply suggest that it be left at the level of: > > 1. If something offends you tell the offender and, if > appropriate, the net audience. [Ok, agreed -pf] > 2. Remember the individual involved. Next time something > comes up about that person you will know their > character is probably suspect, or at the very least > their sense of judgement. > > I for one would feel severely punished if someone so seriously > suspected my character. An entire audience like this would be > crushing. This sounds like something from a CIA primer. Can we not voice our opinions freely without mass condemnation? I for one would feel "severely punished" if I could not voice what I felt without constantly being concerned about being "crushed." > So, should it be published? Maybe, but not as humor; it should be > quoted (mention vs use) as an example of vicious pseudo-humor. If > it must always be presented in the context of its reality, its > disguise must be removed. Then the author presents metaphors relating to viruses, pathogens, antigens and DNA sequences which I find quite entertaining but highly romantic. The part about removing disguises reminds me of one of the earlier comments made by someone: namely, that we should remove disguises associated with cartoons since they often contain violent acts. And, heaven forbid that we should watch slap-stick. I found "Freud's Theory of Jokes and Censors" interesting. It might suggest an inquiry into the meaning of 'funny'. What exactly does 'funny' mean? I would be interested in someone would give me a definition of 'funny' (no Webster's interpretations, please). Amazingly enough, these heated discussions about humor might have some relevance to AI after all...A computational model which would relate to humor: I can see it now - If only I could attach a voice box to my PC and come up with an algorithm (I would stick it in the corner of my living room with a microphone so that it could listen-in at parties....) [I believe that both McCarthy and Minsky have published papers on humor. -- KIL] The point is that many people found Polly Nomial hilarious and many people found it disgusting. The question is: can we look across the fence and appreciate someone else's point of view (not necessarily changing our own view)? There is nothing wrong with either view. Now, lets get back to some AI, shall we? -paul ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1985 09:47 EST From: BATALI%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Midnight Theorizer From: MINSKY Perhaps this, too, explains the prolonged, mourning-like depression that follows sexual or other forms of personal assault. No matter that the unwelcome intimacy of violence may be brief; it nonetheless affects one's attachment machinery, however much against one's wish. So the suggestion is that the rape-victim feels bad because she has formed an attachment-bond to her attacker? The same "mechanism" is involved as in the formation of her attachment-bonds to other people? So she feels bad not because she has been raped, but because her rapist has then left her? Is there a shred of evidence that any rape victim has ever felt this way? Is this theory somehow suggesting that there really isn't much of a difference between rape and seduction and falling in love? Is it being assumed that fear, pain and loss of self-esteem is not enough to "explain the prolonged depression" that follows sexual assault? [Surely the phrase "affects one's attachment machinery" should be interpreted as "damaging" or "adversely affecting" the mechanism. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 15-Apr-85 16:50:04-BST From: GORDON JOLY (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: Street Speak The current debate over censorship and jokes in the AI Digest leads me to think that there is something fundamentally wrong. If your are trying to mimic the human mind, you have do both sides of the brain. But if you are using a computer, you can only duplicate the logical thought process and not the emotional thought process. Gordon Joly aka The Joka. ------------------------------ Date: Tuesday, 16-Apr-85 10:06:40-BST From: GORDON JOLY (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: Man as Machine Hardware = Brain Firmware = Instinct Software = Intelligence. "If man is any sort of a machine he is a learning machine" Jacob Bronowski on The Ascent of Man. Gordon Joly ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Sun Apr 21 04:22:02 1985 Date: Sun, 21 Apr 85 04:21:56 est From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a023931; 20 Apr 85 20:43 EST Date: Sat 20 Apr 1985 16:59-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 #49 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sun, 21 Apr 85 04:16 EST AIList Digest Saturday, 20 Apr 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 49 Today's Topics: Bindings - HPP now Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Recent Articles - AI Report & Survey, Robotics - Occupational Fatality, AI Literature - AI Journals & Mathematical People, Request - NCARAI Seminar Series, Workshop - AI and Statistics ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed 17 Apr 85 15:43:54-PST From: Bruce Buchanan Subject: STANFORD KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS LABORATORY *** NOTICE OF NAME CHANGE *** HEURISTIC PROGRAMMING PROJECT --> KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS LABORATORY COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT STANFORD UNIVERSITY Upon entering our third decade of AI research, the group formerly known as the DENDRAL Project (1965-1972) and the Heuristic Programming Project (1972-1984) announces the creation of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory (KSL). The overall research directions will remain the same but scientific direction and administration will be distributed among the five collaborating, but distinct, subgroups listed below. A central KSL administration will coordinate activities among the subgroups and between the KSL and outside agencies, corporations, and the university. Thomas Rindfleisch will serve as Director of the KSL. 1. The Heuristic Programming Project group, Prof. Edward A. Feigenbaum, principal investigator. The current foci of the HPP include: studies of blackboard systems, machine and system architectures for concurrent symbolic processing, and models for knowledge discovery. Executive Director: Robert Engelmore. Research scientists: Harold Brown, Bruce Delagi, Peter Friedland, H.Penny Nii, and Byron Davies. Consulting Professor: Richard Gabriel. 2. The HELIX Group, Prof. Bruce G. Buchanan, principal investigator. The main foci of this group are machine learning, transfer of expertise, and problem solving. Other faculty and research scientists are Paul Rosenbloom, James Brinkley, William Clancey, and Barbara Hayes-Roth. 3. The Medical Computer Science Group, Prof. Edward H. Shortliffe, principal investigator. Research on and application of AI to medical problems. Research scientist: Larry Fagan. 4. The Logic Group, Prof. Michael R. Gensereth, principal investigator. Research on formal reasoning and introspectivie systems. Research scientist: Matt Ginsberg. 5. The Symbolic Systems Resources Group, Thomas C. Rindfleisch, director. Research on and operation of computing resources for AI research, including the SUMEX facility. Asst. Director: William J. Yeager. Address correspondence to: Knowledge Systems Laboratory Computer Science Dept. Stanford University 701 Welch Rd., Bldg. C Palo Alto, CA 94304 ------------------------------ Date: 5 Apr 1985 10:28-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Contents, AI Report The Artificial Intelligence Report, April 1985, Volume 2 no. 4 "FDA Looks at Medical Software" describes a move within the FDA to classify medical software (including medical expert systems) as medical devices subject to improvement "The NSF Supercomputer Centers" "Sun Microsystems" announced the availability of the following AI products for their workstations: Quintus Prolog, Lucid Common Lisp, Software Architecture and Engineering Inc.s' Knowledge Engineering System, Smart System Technology's Duck. Also includes information on Sun's philosophy with respect to AI and some prices for some of their products and general corporate aims. "Teknowledge joins FMC" describes investments by FMC and others in Teknowledge. "A $50 Million Give Away" describes HP's planned donations to Universities for AI work. "A Commerical AI Forum" describes a forum being sponsored by the Gartner Group. "The Japanese AI Market" describes work by Nichiman Co in importing Symbolics 3600 machines and other AI software to Japan. "Expo 85: Tsukuba Japan" States that the American pavillion in Japan (whose theme is AI) has good technical information but lacks the flash and glitz of Japanese exhibits. Announcements of AI products for the IBM PC Logicware announced availability of PC/MProlog which is execution compatible with unspecified DEC and IBM mainframe computers. Artelligence of Dallas, Texas is selling a PC version of OPS5 called OPS5+($3,000) California Intelligence announces XSYS, an expert system shell, for $1000. (It is similar to the SeRIES-PC system developed at Stanford) KDS Corporation announced KDS AUTOLOGIC Review of the NATO Advanced Study Institute workshop. These are available in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, volume 11 of NATO ASI Series, series F- Computer and Systems Sciences published by Springer VErlag Review of IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence Conference, Dec 5-7 1985. They are available from IEEE Computer Society (order no 624) Review of Artificial Intelligence in Maintenance, sponsored by the Department of Defense October 4-6 1983. ------------------------------ Date: 3 Apr 1985 09:37-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Recent Articles Datamation, April 1, 1985 Volume 31 no 7 Reader's Forum - Hacker meets Star War's. This was written by John M. Morris of Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute in Rome New York. He claims that IIT has developed a "set of software metrics -- measurements of such things as the complexity of programs -- for use with LISP programs." They also found that "AI programs can meet commercial software standards without neglecting the hackers' creative artistic spirit." and that the usual software development cycle can be modified for AI development. No documentation or references for these claims were provided in the article. ____________________________________________________________________________ Infoworld, January 28, 1985 Volume 7, Issue 4 Review of Exsys, an expert system based on a taxonomic approach Rating: two out of a possible four diskettes. Performance: good Documentation: fair Ease of Use: Fair Error Handling: Excellent Support: Good Pages 43-44 Review of Expert Ease: This is superseded by a review of a newer release of their product which I summarized earlier Review of Expert Choice: page 45-50 This is a decision support system based on Professor Saaty's "Analytic Hierarchy Process" Rating: two out of four possible diskettes performance: good documentation: good ease of use: fair error handling: Excellent support: four ____________________________________________________________________________ Electronics Week, February 11, 1985, page 45 "Upstart Vendor Makes Waves in Japn's Robot Market" Talks about Dainichi Kiko Co. which is a small company that is growing very fast by using novel control circuits to compensate for the weight of the robot arm when moving it, and by selling turnkey systems. ____________________________________________________________________________ Computer World, April 1, 1985 page 45 Article describing Arthur D. Little's efforts in Artificial Intelligence applications, particularly to data processing. ____________________________________________________________________________ Electronics Week December 17, 1984 page 17-18 "AI Transforms CAD/CAM to CIM" describes efforts by CAM-I to integrate engineering work-stations and automated factories using expert systems. Also describes work by Westinghouse Electric Corp to apply expert systems to hybrid circuits, magnetic dervices, printed circuits, array products. Computervision has a system which refers to past experiences and classifies parts into categories. They did not call the system AI based at the time but it can now be considered an AI system. ____________________________________________________________________________ Computer Products March 1985 Intellimac announces the following systems for its IN/7000 series ADA development super-minis: Common Lisp, Lisp-To-ADA Translater, an expert system shell, a CAI system for LISP ____________________________________________________________________________ Computer Products Page 34 March 1985 Frey Associates Inc. announces Themis V1.1 that provides a natural language in.terface to ORACLE Relational Database and VAX DATATRIEVE. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Apr 85 10:35:51 cst From: Richard Smith Subject: Occupational Fatality Associated with a Robot Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Center for Disease Control, Atlanta Vol. 34, No. 11, March 22, 1985. "On July 21, 1984, a 34-year-old male worker in Michigan was operating an automated die-casting system that included an industrial robot. At approximately 1:15 p.m., he was found pinned between the back end of the robot and a 4-inch-diameter steel safety pole used to restrict undesired arm movement by the robot. The robot stalled, applying sustained pressure to the chest of the operator, who experienced cardiopulmonary arrest... the worker was admitted comatose to a local hospital, where he died 5 days later." The report provides additional details. Apparently the operator climbed around the safety bars and was trying to clean up metal scrap on the floor when he got pinned by the robot. The operator was thought to be fairly competent, but had a practice of sneaking into the robot's work envelope every so often. He evidently didn't anticipate the motions of the back of the robot as well as he anticipated the gripper motion. The company has since installed a chain link fence around the work cell. According to the CDC this is the first robot-caused fatality in the U.S. The report also mentions that 2 fatalities have occured in Japan. Robot related injuries occur most often while a robot is being programmed or repaired, unlike this case. Back issues of M&M Weekly Report are availible from the publisher, Massachusetts Medical Society, Waltham, MA. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 3 Apr 85 12:08:37-PST From: C.S./Math Library Subject: New Journals In The Math/CS Library [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The following is a list of some of [Stanford Library's] more recent subscription purchases: Abacus Computers and Artificial Intelligence (Czechoslovakia) Expert Systems: the international journal of knowledge engineering ICOT Journal Digest: Fifth Generation Computer Systems Integration: the VLSI Journal Journal of Automated Reasoning Journal of Logic Programming Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing Journal of Pascal, Ada & Modula-2 Macworld Tech Journal; for IBM Personal Computer Users Technology and Sciences of Information; cover to cover translation of Technique et Science Informatiques HL ------------------------------ Date: Wed 17 Apr 85 12:04:19-PST From: C.S./Math Library Subject: Mathematical People--New Book in the Math/CS Library [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Mathematical People by Albers and Alexanderson (QA28.M37 1985) has arrived in the Math/CS Library and is on the new books shelf for sign-ups. This is the book that includes interviews with Don Knuth, Persi Diaconis, and George Polya all of Stanford. Interviews of the following people are also included: Garrett Birkhoff, David Blackwell, Shing-shen Chern, John Horton Conway, H. S. M. Coxeter, Paul Erdos, Martin Gardner, Ronald L. Graham, Paul R.Halmos, Peter J. Hilton, John Kemeny, Morris Kline, Benoit Mandelbrot, Henry O. Pollak, Mina Rees, Constance Reid, Herbert Robbins, Raymond Smullyan, Olga Taussky-Todd, Albert W. Tucker, Stanislaw M. Ulam, and Reminiscences of Solomon Lefschetz by Albert W. Tucker. Harry Llull ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 85 09:08:24 est From: Dennis Perzanowski Subject: NCARAI Seminar Series CALL FOR PAPERS The Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelli- gence (NCARAI), a branch of the Naval Research Laboratory located in Washington, D.C., sponsors a bimonthly seminar series. Seminars are held on alternate Mondays throughout the year (except summers). The seminars are intended to pro- mote interaction among individuals from the military, governmental, industrial and academic communities. Topics span the various research areas and issues in Artifi- cial Intelligence with special interests in: *Expert Systems *Knowledge Representation *Learning *Logic programs and automated reasoning *Natural Language processing *New generation architectures Presentations last for approximately one hour, followed by a fifteen-minute question-and-answer session. Speakers in- vited from the academic community are provided with a per diem and an honorarium. Please send 3 copies of a 200-250 word abstract to: Dennis Perzanowski Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence Naval Research Laboratory -- Code 7510 Washington, DC 20375-5000 ARPANET address: DENNISP@NRL-AIC.ARPA Telephone: (202) 767-2686 (AV) 297-2686 The committee will consider new and interesting work, as well as promising work in progress. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 9 Apr 85 17:15:24 pst From: gluck@SU-PSYCH (Mark Gluck) Subject: Workshop - AI and Statistics WORKSHOP ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND STATISTICS April 10-12, 1985 AT&T Conference Center, Princeton, NJ General Chair: William Gale AT&T Bell Laboratories Murray Hill, NJ Annie G. Brooking The Analysis Phase in the Development of Knowledge- Based Systems Keith A. Butler Use of Psychometric Tools for Knowledge Acquisition: James E. Corter A Case Study Thomas Ellman Representation of Statistical Computation: Toward Expert Systems with a Deeper Understanding of Statistics Douglas Fisher Methods of Conceptual Clustering and their Relation to Pat Langley Numerical Taxonomy John Fox Decision Making and Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems William B. Gale STUDENT Phase I - A report on Work in Progress David J. Hand Patterns in Statistical Strategy Stephen C. Hora Learning Rates in Supervised and Unsupervised Intelligent Systems Laveen N. Kanal Problem Solving Methods for Pattern Recognition G. R. Dattratreya R. Wayne Oldford Implementation and Study of Statistical Strategy Stephen C. Peters Robert I. Phelps Artificial Intelligence Approaches in Statistics P. B. Musgrove Darryl Pregibon A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Statistical Strategy Steven Salzberg Pinpointing Good Hypotheses with Heuristics D.J. Spiegelhalter A Statistical View of Uncertainty in Expert Systems Ronald A. Thisted Representing Statistical Knowledge and Search Strategies for Expert Data Analysis Systems ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Tue Apr 23 04:27:02 1985 Date: Tue, 23 Apr 85 04:26:56 est From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a005917; 23 Apr 85 2:24 EST Date: Mon 22 Apr 1985 22:02-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 #50 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 23 Apr 85 04:19 EST AIList Digest Tuesday, 23 Apr 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 50 Today's Topics: Administrivia - Lost Messages, Machine Translation - La Jolla, Application - AI in Agriculture, Seminars - Transformation of Functional Equations (MIT) & Programming with Recurrent Equations (Penn) & Representation, Aesthetics, Learnability (SU) & The MIT Mobile Robot Project (Penn) & ARLO: Representing Representation Language (MIT), Humor - Representation Lunches & The Traveling President Problem ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon 22 Apr 85 20:44:07-PST From: Ken Laws Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Lost Messages SRI-AI had a bad system crash Sunday morning; mail sent to AIList or AIList-Request that morning may not have gotten through. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: 19 APR 85 14:16-N From: PETITP%CGEUGE51.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA Subject: Machine translation at La Jolla [In answer to request from goodhart@nosc AIList Digest v3 #46] Hi! The people you are looking for in La Jolla are probably working on SYSTRAN, a commercial machine translation system. Here is their address: P. Toma WTC Inc 7854 Ivanohe Avenue PO Box 907 La Jolla, Ca 92037 Tel: 619/459-3471 Other commercial systems I know of in the States are the Weidner System and the ALPS system, both companies are located in Provo, Utah. (I could get more for you if you are interested). But none of those are proper research projects, and are based on linguistically and computationnally "old" ideas. A more advanced project is METAL, developed at the Linguistic Research Center, University of Texas, in Austin. You can contact Rebecca Root (LRC.ROOT@UTEXAS.ARPA) to get more information about it. In Europe there are the SUSY project (Saarbruecken,Germany), and the GETA project (Grenoble, France), and the EUROTRA project of the European Economic Communities, to which many european universities collaborate. Here at ISSCO in Geneva we are working on EUROTRA. And of course there is many Japanese projects but I don't know much about them. A good introduction to machine translation is a paper by Jonathan Slocum, presented at COLING-84 in Stanford: "Machine Translation: its History, Current Status an Future Prospects". If you can't get a copy of the proceedings, I think it was also published as a report by the LRC in Austin. Last year ISSCO organised a tutorial on machine translation and a book will be published by Edinburgh University Press. Dominique Petitpierre (PETITP@CGEUGE51.BITNET) ISSCO 54 route des acacias CH-1227 GENEVA (Switzerland) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Apr 85 08:23 EST From: kyle.wbst@Xerox.ARPA Subject: Friedland's request about AI in agriculture Some years ago, Control Data Corp in Minneapolis had a New Business Ventures Unit that included various software systems for the farmer and Agribusiness industry. You might check with them to see what is going on in that area with them now. Also at about that same time frame they got on board a former SRI type who had background with SRI's early AI efforts. I don't know if there was any connection between that person and the farm stuff though. Earle Kyle. ------------------------------ Date: Tue,16 Apr 85 16:16:24 EST From: Robyn D. Spencer Subject: Seminar - Transformation of Functional Equations (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] DATE: April 22, 1985 TIME: Lecture 3:30 p.m. PLACE: NE43-3rd floor conference room TRANSFORMATIONS of HIGHER-TYPE FUNCTIONAL EQUATIONS VIA THE COMPUTATION OF RETRACTS Richard Statman Carnegie-Mellon University Functional equations occur in diverse branches of logic and computer science. In type theory with the axiom of choice, every formula is equivalent to one which asserts that a functional equation has a solution with the given parameters. In theorem proving, unification problems are simply functional equations which one wants to solve in all models. In programming language semantics, programming constructs, such as fixed point operators, are represented as solutions to functional equations. The general functional equation Fx=Gx where operators F,G have type A -> B can be transformed one with operators of type C -> D while preserving all solutions, when there is a surjective H of type C -> A and an injective J of type B -> D. The transformed equation is J(F(Hy))=J(G(Hy)) We shall show that this transformation can be carried out in every model if and only if A is a retract of C and B is a retract of D in every model. There is a retract from C onto A if and only if the equation lambda z. y(xz) = I is solvable for some y in C -> A and x in A -> C. This equation is solvable in every model if and only if it is solvable in the term model of beta-eta conversion. Thus transformations of the above type can always be carried out by lambda terms. We shall give some further information about when this type of transformation can be carried out including bounds on the size of A as a function of the size of C. The decision problem (unification problem) is open. HOST: Albert Meyer ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 17 Apr 85 21:06 EST From: Tim Finin Subject: Seminar - Programming with Recurrent Equations (Penn) PROGRAMMING WITH RECURRENT EQUATIONS Boleslaw Szymanski (University Pennsylvania) 3:00pm April 23, 1985, 216 Moore School, Univ. of Pennsylvania Software development tools proposed for new generation of computers are based on assertive programming, where a program is expressed as a set of assertions. There are two basic notations used in assertive programming: Horn clauses of logic programming (e.g. PROLOG) and conditional equations used in so called definitional or equational languages. Equational languages are natural and convenient complements of PROLOG-like languages for such applications as programming dataflow machines and modelling complex systems. This talk focuses on languages based on recurrent equations. Finite- difference approximations to systems of partial difference equations lead to such recurrence equations. Our experience indicates that such languages are general purpose. Description of many algorithms is greatly simplified when presented in such a form. The talk presents new results of the MODEL project. Three MODEL language processor components: Compiler, Configurator, and Timing System will be discussed. The emphasis will be on the following problems: 1) optimization of programs generated by the MODEL compiler, 2) programming parallel and/or distributed computations with Configurator 3) use of temporal relations for scheduling parallel components 4) distributed termination of a solution to simultaneous equations, 5) real-time software development using Timing System. Future research will also be outlined. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 17 Apr 85 17:11:18-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Representation, Aesthetics, Learnability (SU) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, April 25, 1985 4:15 p.m. CSLI Colloquium Redwood Hall ``The Representational Basis for Everyday Aesthetic Room G-19 Experience -- A Motivational Constraint on Learnable Systems of Knowledge'' Tom Bever, Columbia University and CASBS ``The Representational Basis for Everyday Aesthetic Experience -- A Motivational Constraint on Learnable Systems of Knowledge'' The structure of everyday aesthetic judgements depends on computations of mental representations and relations between representations. Examination of objects of everyday aesthetic preference (e.g., simple rhythms, shapes, and songs) affords a definition of the aesthetically satisfying experience: such experiences involve the formation of incompatible representations and their resolution within the framework of an overarching representational system. The enjoyment of such experiences follows from the extent to which they are like solving a problem during normal cognitive development. Indigenous systems like language must have formal properties that stimulate aesthetically satisfying experiences as an immediate motivation for the acquisition of abstract structures. That is, we learn a multi-levelled representational structure for language because it is fun. --Tom Bever ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 85 14:59 EST From: Tim Finin Subject: Seminar - The MIT Mobile Robot Project (Penn) THE MIT AI LAB MOBILE ROBOT PROJECT - Rodney A. Brooks (MIT) 3pm April 25, 23 Moore School, Univ. of Pennsylvania We are interested in a number of questions relating to intelligent mobile robots. These include the following. (a) How to combine a number of early vision modules into a robust vision system which can operate under a wide range of conditions and a wide range of scenes through redundancy of perceptions. (b) How to make reliable maps given that all sensors produce error laden readings, and control of the robot is also a source of error. (c) How to apply model-based vision techniques to the landmark selection and recognition problems. (d) How to make a robot control and planning system which is competent and robust enough to allow an autonomous vehicle to operate for long periods with absolutely no assistance from a human. In support of these goals we are building a mobile robot which will operate autonomously for a number of hours at a time within the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory office area. Our approach to building the robot and its controlling software differs from that used in many other projects in a number of ways. (1) We model the world as three dimensional rather than two. (2) We build no special environment for our robot and insist that it must operate in the same real world that we inhabit. (3) In order to adequatley deal with uncertainty of perception and control we build relational maps rather than maps embedded in a coordinate system, and we maintain explicit models of all uncertainties. (4) We explicitly monitor the computational performance of the components of the control system, in order to refine the design of a real time control system for mobile robots based on a special purpose distributed computation engine. (5) We use vision as our primary sense and relegate acoustic senors to local obstacle detection. (6) We use a new architecture for an intelligent system designed to provide integration of many early vision processes, and robust real-time performance even in cases of sensory overload, failure of certain early vision processes to deliver much information in particular situations, and computation module failure. ------------------------------ Date: 19 Apr 1985 15:57 EST (Fri) From: "Daniel S. Weld" Subject: Seminar - ARLO: Representing Representation Language (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] AI Revolving Seminar Ken Haase ARLO: Representing Representation Languages Tuesday, April 23; 4:00pm; 8th Floor Playroom ARLO is a language for describing the implementation and functionality of frame based representation languages. A given representation language is specified in ARLO by a collection of structures describing how its descriptions are interpreted, defaulted, and verified. This high level description is compiled into lisp code and ARLO structures whose interpretation fulfills the langauge's abstract specification. The dependencies of this compilation process (from description to implementation) are recorded by ARLO, so that changes in the high-level description will propogate to the generated implementation. In addition, ARLO itself --- as a representation language for expressing and compiling partial and complete language specifications --- is described and interpreted in the same manner as the languages it describes and implements. This talk will address general issues in the definition and implementation of representation language languages, as well as the technical problems in implementing self-descriptive systems. Finally, I will discuss the use of ARLO-like languages as a basis for learning and concept formation programs like Lenat's Eurisko. ------------------------------ Date: 11 Apr 1985 13:18 EST (Thu) From: Mike Gennert@MIT-OZ Subject: Representation Lunches [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] COMPUTER AIDED CONCEPTUAL ART (CACA) REVOLTING SEMINAR SERIES presents TACO: REPRESENTING REPRESENTATION LUNCHES Mike Gennert Mike Gerstenberger TACO is a lunch for describing the implementation and functionality of frame based representation lunches. A given representation lunch is specified in TACO by a collection of fillings describing how its descriptions are interpreted, defaulted, verified, and eaten. This high level description is compiled into TACO shell code and TACO fillings whose interpretation fulfills the langauge's nutritional specification. The dependencies of this compilation process (from description to implementation) are recorded by TACO, so that changes in the high-level description will propogate to the generated implementation. In addition, TACO itself --- as a representation lunch for expressing and compiling partial and complete lunch specifications --- is devoured and interpreted in the same manner as the lunches it devoured and implements, i.e., with one's fingers. This talk will address general issues in the definition and implementation of representation lunch lunches, as well as the technical problems in implementing self-devouring systems. Finally, We will discuss the use of TACO-like lunches as a basis for learning and concept formation programs like Automatic Hairstyle Generation: The Further Adventures of Eurisko. Friday, April 12, 12:00, 3rd Floor Lounge ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 18 Apr 85 17:26:10 est From: Walter Hamscher Subject: The Traveling President Problem [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] COMPUTER AIDED CONCEPTUAL ART (CACA) REVOLTING SEMINAR SERIES :-) (-: THE TRAVELING PRESIDENT PROBLEM Tod Malmedy We present a new variation of the traveling salesman problem. There are two differences. First, the links are free but the nodes, representing memorials, have either small positive or large negative weights, and the goal is to maximize this weight. Second, unlike most problems, in which a solver is allowed to exaustively search the space of combinations for an optimal solution, in this variation the value of the final solution is penalized by the number of combinations tested before finding it. Under these conditions the L/D (Leave it to Deaver) strategy can be proven to be the worst possible. TIME: 12 Noon Friday PLACE: 3rd Floor Theory Playroom HOSTS: Bhaskar Ghudaroy and Mike Beckerle ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Tue Apr 23 22:32:58 1985 Date: Tue, 23 Apr 85 22:32:52 est From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a008971; 23 Apr 85 13:06 EST Date: Mon 22 Apr 1985 22:36-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 #51 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 23 Apr 85 22:24 EST AIList Digest Tuesday, 23 Apr 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 51 Today's Topics: Conferences - Theoretical Approaches to Natural Language Understanding & Expert Systems In Engineering Applications & Toronto Day at Wesleyan & SCCGL Linguistics & Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge & Animal Cognition & Approximate Reasoning & Joint AI Conference at GWU ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 9 Apr 85 15:30 EST From: Dave.Touretzky@CMU-CS-A.ARPA Subject: Workshop - Theoretical Approaches to Natural Language Understanding Theoretical Approaches to Natural Language Understanding A workshop sponsored by the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence (CSCSI) / Societe canadienne pour l'etude de l'intelligence par ordinateur (SCEIO), in conjunction with Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia. To be held: 28-30 May, 1985, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Abstract: Theoretical Approaches to Natural Language Understanding is intended to bring together active researchers in Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science to dsicuss/hear invited talks, papers, and positions relating to some of the ``hot'' issues regarding the current state of natural language understanding. Three topics will form the focus for discussion; the topics include aspects of GRAMMARS, aspects of SEMANTICS/PRAGMATICS, and KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION. Each of these topics will consider current methodologies: for grammars - theoretical devlopments, especially generalized phrase structure grammars and logic-based meta-grammars; for semantics - situation semantics and Montague semantics; for knowledge representation - logical systems (temporal logics, etc.) and special purpose inference systems. Invited speakers: Harvey Abrahamson (UBC), Robin Cooper (U.Wisc), Dan Flickinger (HP), Pat Hayes (U.Rochester), Don Hindle (Bell Labs), Lynette Hirshman (SDC), Ron Kaplan (Xerox PARC), Mitch Marcus (Bell Labs), Bill Mark (Savoir), Eric Mays (IBM), Fernando Pereira (SRI), Stan Peters (CSLI), Stan Rosenschein (SRI), Paul Sabatier (Rue des Mariniers, Paris), Patrick Saint Dizier (IRISA), Candy Sidner (BBN), Norm Sondheimer (UCS-ISI), David Scott Warren (SUNY Stony Brook), Dave Touretzky (CMU), and William Woods (Applied Expert Systems). General Chairperson: Richard Rosenberg, Dalhousie University Program Chairperson: Nick Cercone, Simon Fraser University Local Arrangements: Jan Mulder, Dalhousie University Schedule: Grammar Day: Tuesday, 28 May; organized by Len Schubert and Veronica Dahl Semantics Day: Wednesday, 29 May; organized by Graeme Hirst and David Israel Knowledge Representation Day: Thursday, 30 May; organized by Ralph Weischedel and James Allen ------------------------------ Date: 10 Apr 85 15:30:09 EST From: Mary.Lou.Maher@CMU-RI-CIVE Subject: Conference - Expert Systems In Engineering Applications We are actively seeking quality papers for the Expert Systems in Government Conference in Washington DC this fall. I am head of the session on engineering applications and having a difficult time finding many applications. If you are doing work in this area and would like to meet others doing similar work, submit a paper to: Dr. Kamal Karna, Mitre Corporation 1820 Dolley Madison Boulevard McLean VA 22102 The deadline is May 1 - if you need any further information you can contact me at maher@cmu-ri-cive ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 5 Apr 85 16:38:23 EST From: Neil Immerman Subject: Conference - Toronto Day at Wesleyan announcing . . . . . TORONTO DAY AT WESLEYAN Saturday May 4 Talks and discussions led by a contingent of computer scientists from the University of Toronto. 9:30 am Steve Cook A Taxonomy of Problems with Fast Parallel Algorihms 11:00am Mike Luby A Simple Parallel Algorithm for the Maximal Independent Set Problem 2:00 pm Allan Borodin Parallel Algebraic Complexity 3:30 pm Charles Rackoff Some Definitions and Issues in the Theory of Cryptography On Friday, May 3, Steve Cook will give a talk at 4 P.M. in 150 Science Center intended for a general audience: Can Computers Routinely Discover Mathematical Proofs? [...] Toronto Day is hosted by Alan Cobham, Dan Dougherty, Sorin Istrail, Susan Landau, and Carol Wood, and is funded in part by The Sloan Foundation, Proctor and Gamble Co., and the Wesleyan University Department of Mathematics. For further information contact the Wesleyan Mathematics Department at (203)347-9411 Ext.2398 or Carol Wood at Ext.2648 (Bitnet address WOODatWESLYN). ------------------------------ Date: 13 April 1985 1527-PST (Saturday) From: li51x%sdcc3@SDCSVAX.ARPA Subject: Conference - SCCGL Linguistics SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CONFERENCE ON GENERAL LINGUISTICS (SCCGL) University of California, San Diego SCHEDULE We have scheduled all papers to be presented in the Third College Lecture Halls, Room 104 (TLH 104). Saturday, 20 April, morning: 9:30 Nora Gonzalez, UCSD, "Starter 2s and Object to Subject Raising in Spanish" 10:00 Ik-Hwan Lee, Yonsei U/Harvard U, "Multiple WH questions in GPSG" 10:30 Geraldine Legendre, UCSD, "Multiattachment Constraints on OSR in French" 11:00 Robert Chametzky and John Richardson, UChicago, "Taking Strings Seriously: Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Lasnik & Kupin (1977)" 11:30 Yoshihisa Kitagawa, UMass, "Small But Clausal" Saturday, 20 April, afternoon: 1:30 J. Albert Bickford, UCSD and SIL, "Another Look at Tone in Pen~oles Mixtec" 2:00 Monica Macaulay, UCBerkeley, "Cliticization and the Morphosyntax of Mixtec" 2:30 Robert Vago, Queens College & the Graduate Center, CUNY, "Finnish Word Games: Implications for the Autosegmental Treatment of Vowel Harmony." 3:00 William Davies, Cornell, "Nominative Nonsubjects in Choctaw" 4:00 Gerald P. Delahunty, SDSU, "On an Apparent Violation of the Discourse Conditions for Using English It-Clefts" 4:30 Gary Gilligan and Chris Hall, USC, "Processing Constraints on Morphological Structure" 5:00 David Corina, Salk Institute, "Linguistic Mapping Strategies of Deaf Signers" 5:30 German Westphal, UMaryland, Baltimore County, "On Some Consequences of the Verb-Initial Hypothesis in Spanish" Saturday evening-BUFFET SUPPER AND PARTY! Fifth floor patio in the Psychology and Linguistics Building (P&L). Sunday, 21 April, morning: 9:30 Robert Chametzky, UChicago, "Anaphoric Dependencies and Coordinate Structures" 10:00 Sungshim Hong, UConn, "A Constraint on Pronominal Binding in Null-Subject Languages" 10:30 Donna Gerdts, SUNY-Buffalo, "Korean Passive Causatives and Their Implications" 11:00 Peter Sells, CSLI, Stanford, "The Interpretation of Non Restrictive Relative Clauses" 11:30 David Dowty, CASBS, Stanford, and William Ladusaw, UCSC, "Toward a Formal Semantic Account of Thematic Roles" ============================================================== Further information: (619) 452-2523 or SCCGL UCSD Linguistics or sdcsvax!sdcc6!ix212 C-008 La Jolla, CA 92093 Registration is $5 for students and $7 for non-students. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Apr 85 19:24:07 PST From: Joe Halpern Subject: Conference - Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge CONFERENCE ON THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF REASONING ABOUT KNOWLEDGE: FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS A conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge will be held Mar. 19-22, 1986, at the Asilomar Conference Center in Monterey. While traditionally research in this area was mainly done by philosophers, recently it has been shown to be of great relevance to computer science, especially in such areas as artificial intelligence, distributed systems, database systems, and cryptography. There has also been interest in the area among linguists and economists. The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers from these various disciplines with the intent of furthering our theoretical understanding of reasoning about knowledge. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Semantic models for knowledge and belief * Resource-bounded knowledge (appropriate for modelling reasoners with limited reasoning power and reasoning about cryptographic protocols) * Using knowledge to specify and reason about distributed systems * Semantic models of knowledge acquisition and learning * Nonmonotonic reasoning Please send 8 copies of a detailed abstract not exceeding 10 double-spaced typewritten pages in length (not a full paper), by September 15, 1985, to the program chair: Dr. J. Halpern IBM Research, K51/281 5600 Cottle Rd. San Jose, CA 95193 The abstract should include a clear description of the problem being addressed, comparisons with extant work, and a section on major original contributions of this work. The abstract must provide sufficient detail for the program committee to make a decision. Papers will be chosen on the basis of scientific merit, originality, and appropriateness for this conference. Authors will be notified of acceptance by Nov. 1, 1985. Accepted papers typed on special pages will be due at the above address by Dec. 15, 1985. The program committee members are: M. Fischer, Yale J. Halpern, IBM San Jose H. Levesque, University of Toronto R. Moore, SRI R. Parikh, CUNY/Brooklyn College R. Stalnaker, Cornell R. Thomason, Pittsburg M. Vardi, Stanford/CSLI We hope to allow enough time between the talks during the conference for private discussions and small group meetings. In order to ensure that the conference remains relatively small, attendance will be limited to invited participants and authors of accepted papers. Support for the conference has been received from IBM and AAAI; an application for further support is pending at ONR. ------------------------------ Date: 11 Apr 85 07:32:48 EST From: Michael Sims Subject: Symposium - Animal Cognition [and AI?] Symposium The Question of Animal Cognition May 1-2, 1985 Wednesday, May 1: 9:00 am Dr. Donald Griffin "Animal Consciousness" Rochefeller University 10:30 am Dr. Robert Epstein "Animal Cognition as the Harvard University Praxis Views it" 1:30 pm Dr. E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh "Language Acquisition and Emory University Cognition in the Chimpanzee" 3:30 pm Dr. Louis Herman "Episodic Memory for Semantic University of Hawaii Information by Dolphins" Thursday, May 2: 9:00 am Dr. Gordon Gallup "Do Minds Exists in Species SUNY at Albany Other Than our Own?" 10:30 am Dr. Herbert Terrace "Towards an Evolutionary Columbia University Perspective on Thinking" 1:30 pm Round Table Discussion Chaired by Dr. Michael D'Amato For further information and registration contact Ms. Mary Wilk, Dept. of Psychology, Psychology Building, Busch Campus, Rutgers Univ. New Brunswick, NJ 08903 (201) 932-2553. [The three speakers that I'm familiar with, Griffin, Savage-Rumbaugh, and Terrace, are outstanding researchers in their field and represent a diversity of opinions on animal cognition. Let me briefly say why I think this work is important for AI. In AI we are trying to model the processes of 'thinking', and it seems foolish to ignore the examples of thinking which are available to us. Although AI has gotten a good bit of feedback from investigations into human cognition (Cognitive Science), we have been little influenced by the animal cognition research of ethologists or animal behaviorist. Our Species-ism would tell us that human cognition is too complicated or mystical to be useful to AI (Dreyfus et al), and that animal cognition is too primitive to be useful. But is that true? -MHS] ------------------------------ Date: 12 Apr 85 14:39:05 EST From: Ruth.Davis@CMU-RI-ISL1 Subject: Conference - Approximate Reasoning 1985 North American Fuzzy Information processing Society WORKSHOP ON APPROXIMATE REASONING THEORY & APPLICATIONS Atlanta, Georgia October 24 - 25 Workshop Coordinators: THOMAS WHALEN & BRIAN SCHOTT Papers are invited in all areas of fuzzy expert systems & decision support including but not limited to: - Fuzzy knowledge acquisition, representation & refining - Applied fuzzy logic & Fuzzy inference processes - Approximate & common sense reasoning - Linguistic processing & the human-system interface - Management of imprecision & uncertainty - Implementation issues & case studies Send abstract or session proposal by AUGUST 1 '85 to: Thomas Whalen/Brian Schott, NAFIPS '85 Decision Sciences Department Georgia State University Atlanta, Georgia 30303 - 3083 (404) 658-4000 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Apr 85 15:37:44 EST From: Bill Dean Subject: Conference - Joint AI Conference at GWU Call for Papers MAJOR CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE An INTERSOCIETY CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELIGENCE APPLICATIONS will be held at the George Washington University on October 21-23, 1985. The conference is jointly sponsored by: * IEEE's Engineering Management Society (EMS) * IEEE's Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (SMC) * GWU's Institute for Artificial Intelligence * TIMS' College on Artificial Intelligence * ORSA's Military Applications Section (MAS) * The Washington Area Working Group on Artificial Intelligence. Sessions at the symposium will cover: AI in research and development; AI in design and development; AI in test and evaluation; AI in project management; AI in production management; AI in military systems; and AI in technology insertion. Plenary addresses will present views of the status and significance of AI research from industrial and government perspectives. Special issues of the IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management and the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics are planned as products of the symposium. To submit a paper for presentation at the symposium, send a 500 word abstract, by June 30, 1985 to: Dr. Barry G. Silverman Institute for Artificial Intelligence Gelman Library - Room 636A George Washington University Washington, D. C. 20052 phone: 202-676-6443 Complete papers will be due by September 15, 1985. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Tue Apr 23 22:28:04 1985 Date: Tue, 23 Apr 85 22:27:58 est From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a006662; 23 Apr 85 4:53 EST Date: Mon 22 Apr 1985 22:46-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 #52 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 23 Apr 85 22:18 EST AIList Digest Tuesday, 23 Apr 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 52 Today's Topics: Conferences - AI at the North Texas CS Conference & Program, Society for Philosophy and Psychology & Abstracts, Society for Philosophy and Psychology ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 22 Apr 1985 09:59-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: AI at the North Texas CS Conference The Federation of North Texas Area Universities Ninth Annual Computer Science Conference, Friday April 26 1985 North Texas State University Denton, Texas 3:25 K. N. Cooper T. M. Sparr Knowledge Base Systems Architecture Reviewed 3:50 Susan Rulon An Introduction to PROgramming LOGic ------------------------------ From: Graeme Hirst Subject: Conference - Program, Soc for Phil and Psych AI Sessions PROGRAM FOR THE MEETING OF SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY University of Toronto Wednesday May 15 - Saturday May 18, 1985 For information about the program [note that there may still be room for some discussants or speakers], the usenet address for the Program Chairman, Stevan Harnad, is: bellcore!princeton!mind!srh or write to: Stevan Harnad, Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 20 Nas- sau Street, Suite 240, Princeton NJ 08540 For information about local arrangements, write to: David Olson, McLuhan Center, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, CANADA, M5S 1A1 For information about the Society and attendance, write to: Owen Flanagan, Secretary/Treasurer, Society for Philosophy & Psycholo- gy, Philosophy Department, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02181 Program follows [participant lists are in several cases only par- tial; other contributors will also be on the program]: Workshop (2 full sessions): Ia & Ib. Artificial Intelligence Versus Neural Modeling in Psychological Theory: D. Ballard, P. Churchland, P.C. Dodwell, J. Feldman, A. Goldman, S. Grossberg, S.J. Hanson, A. Newell, R. Schank. Symposia (11): II. Category Formation: S. Harnad, M. Lipton, R. Jackendoff, N. Macmillan, R. Millikan, R. Schank. III. Unconscious Processing: T. Carr, P. Kolers, A. Marcel, P. Merikle, W. Savage, A. Treisman. IV. Memory and Consciousness: K. Bowers, M. Moscovitch, D. Schacter, A. Marcel, R. Lockhart, E. Tulving. V. New Directions in Evolutionary Theory: E. Balon, O. Flanagan, A. Rosenberg, M. Ruse, E. Sober, W. Shields. VI. Paradoxical Neurological Syndromes: M. Gazzaniga, A. Kertesz, A. Marcel, O.Sacks. VII. The Empirical Status of Psychoanalytic Theory: M. Eagle, E. Erwin, A. Grunbaum, J. Masling, B. von Eckardt, R. Woolfolk. VIII. The Scientific Status of Parapsychological Research: J. Alcock, K. Emmett, R. Hyman, C. Honorton, R.L. Morris, M. Truzzi. IX. The Reality of the "G" (General) Factor in the Measurement and Modeling of Intelligence: D. Detterman, P. Hertzberg, A. Jensen, W. Rozeboom. X. The Ascription of Knowledge States to Children: Seeing, Believing and Knowing: D. Olson & J. Astington, J. Perner & H. Wimmer, M. Taylor & J. Flavell, F. Dretske, S. Kuczaj. XI. Psychology, Pictures and Drawing: J. Caron-Prague, S. Dennis, J. Kennedy, D. Pariser, S. Wilcox, J. Willats, S. Brison XII. Interpretation Versus Explanation in Cognitive and Social Theory: R. DeSousa, A. Grunbaum, S. Harnad, R. Nicholoson, A. Rosenberg, E. Sullivan, R. Woolfolk. Contributed Paper Sessions (4): XIII. Perception and Cognition To What Extent Do Beliefs Affect Apparent Motion (M. Dawson, R. Wright) (discussant: P. Kolers) Images, Pictures and Percepts (D. Reisberg, D. Chambers) (discus- sant: W. Savage) What the First Words Tell Us About Meaning and Cognition (A. Gop- nik) XIV. Induction and Information Beyond Holism: Induction in the Context of Problem-Solving (P. Thagard, K. Holyoak) (discussant: C.F. Schmidt) The Semantic of Pragmatics (M.A. Gluck, J.E. Corter) (discussant: D. H. Helman) About Promises (J. Astington) XV. Evolution of Cognitive and Social Structures Is Decision Theory Reducible to Evolutionary Biology? (W.E. Coop- er) Human Nature, Love and Morality: The Possibility of Altruism (L. Thomas) On How to Get Rid of the Craftsman (B. Dahlbom) XVI. Inferences About the Mind (chairman: J. Poland) The Puzzle of Split-Brain Phenomena (S.C. Bringsjord) (discus- sant: R. Puccetti) The Mark of the Mental (R. Puccetti) discussant: L. Alanen Natural Teleology (S. Silvers) PROVISIONAL TIMETABLE Wed am: VII vs. XIII (parallel sessions) Wed pm: III vs. XIV Wed eve: VI Thurs am: II Thurs pm: Ia Thurs eve: Ib Fri am: IV vs. XVI Fri pm: II vs XV Fri eve: (presidential address and business meeting) Sat am: V vs. XI Sat pm: VIII vs X Sat eve: XII ------------------------------ From: Graeme Hirst Subject: Conference - Abstracts, Soc for Phil and Psych AI Sessions SYMPOSIUM ABSTRACTS FOR THE MEETING OF SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY University of Toronto Wednesday May 15 - Saturday May 18, 1985 I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE VERSUS NEURAL MODELING IN PSYCHOLOGI- CAL THEORY The issues will be discussed at two levels, a practical one (P) and a foundational one (F). At the practical level the following two questions will be considered: (P1) Is psychological theory- building more successful with or without constraints from neuros- cientific evidence and neuroscientific considerations? (P2) Are the current differences between models that are neurally motivat- ed (which tend to be statistical, connectionistic, and lately, parallel) and models that are not neurally motivated (which tend to be symbol/sentence manipulative) fundamental differences, and is one approach more promising than the other? At the foundational level the questions will be: (F1) What are the data that psychological theory should account for (behavioral performance? cognitive competence? real-time topography and exe- cution? neural activity?)? (F2) Is a successful functional theory of higher cognitive performance and competence necessarily "implementation-independent" (i.e., independent of the architec- ture of the mechanism that embodies it)? The issues will be dis- cussed in the context of actual current work in modeling. II. CATEGORY FORMATION Categorization is a fundamental human activity. It is involved in everything from operant discrimination to perceptual recognition to naming to describing. Five different approaches to categori- zation now exist more or less in parallel: (1) The nativist ap- proach, which holds that there are few, if any, nontrivial induc- tive categories, and hence that most categories are preformed [see Symposium V]; (2) the statistical pattern recognition and multidimensional scaling approach, which computer-models category formation probabilistically; (3) the artificial intelligence ap- proach, which models categorization with symbol-manipulation rules; (4) the natural category approach, which investigates categorization through reaction time studies and typicality judg- ments and developmentally; (5) the categorical perception ap- proach, which investigates categorization through discrimination and identification studies. These approaches will be presented and the interaction will aim at a synthesis. III. UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSING It is undeniable that most cerebral information processing is un- conscious. Not only are vegetative functions such as posture and respiration (as well as automatized, overlearned skills) uncons- ciously controlled by the brain, but even the basic processes underlying higher cognitive activity are unavailable to conscious introspection: No one knows "how" he actually adds two and two, retrieves a name, recognizes a face. This is what makes cognitive modeling a nontrivial enterprise. But apart from these basic cog- nitive processes (about which our ignorance is sufficient to demonstrate that that they are not conscious), there are some kinds of processes that are at least normally accompanied by some awareness of their occurrence. These include the detection, discrimination and identification of verbal and perceptual in- puts. New data indicate that even these activities may sometimes occur without introspective awareness of their occurrence. This new look at "subliminal perception" and related phenomena in a contemporary psychophysical, information processing framework will examine the evidence, methodological criteria and theoreti- cal interpretations of the newer findings. [See also Symposium VI.) IV. MEMORY AND CONSCIOUSNESS The symposium will examine the distinction between memory (the consequence of some experience) and remembering (the awareness of past events), which involves consciousness of a past experience. The distinction involves the relation between mental processes that reasonably decribe the performance of intelligent systems (whether animals, people or machines), that is, "subpersonal" cognitive psychology, and the intentional mental activities and states of conscious human adults: "intentional psychology." V. NEW DIRECTIONS IN EVOLUTIONARY THEORY Among the current developments in evolutionary theory and their implications for psychology that will be discussed are: (1) The "new preformationism," arising chiefly from develomental biology, according to which there are substantial structural constraints on the variation on which selection can operate; this implies that there are structures and functions that cannot be regarded as having been shaped by random variation and selection by conse- quences but rather as having arisen from boundary conditions on biological structures. The issue is particularlly relevant to questions about the origins of cognitive and linguistic struc- tures [Symposium II]. (2) Current sociobiological theory has be- come concerned with cognitive questions, in particular, the ex- istence of "cognitive primitives" on which selection would operate in a way that is analogous to its effects on traits coded by genes: Is this "gene-culture co-evolution" and its new unit, the "culturgen" just overinclusive curve-fitting or is there a real empirical phenomenon here? (3) In general, are the kinds of assumptions and inclusive-fitness calculations that characterize sociobiological theorizing (and that have been critically re- ferred to as "just-so stories") a reasonable explanatory handicap or signs of taking the wrong theoretical direction? In particu- lar, when is a conscious, cognitive explanation of a behavior [Symposium III] preferable to an unconscious, fitness-related one? VI. PARADOXICAL NEUROLOLOGICAL STATES This symposium will consider neurological states that (based on their symptoms and inferences from their symptoms) are very hard to imagine "being in." These include: (1) "blindsight," i.e., the loss of all conscious visual experience, but with the retention of "visual" information (e.g., object location); (2) the anosag- nosias and attentional disorders, i.e., the apparent unawareness and denial of dramatic neurological deficits such as loss of large portions of the visual field or of body sensation; (3) deconnection phenomena such as alexia without agraphia (intact vision with the loss of all ability to read but the retention of the ability to write) or the split-brain patient's ability to match but inability to name out-of-sight objects grasped with the left hand; (4) various memory disorders such as the ability to acquire cognitive information and skills with complete inability to remember the episodes in which they were acquired [cf. Sympo- sium IV]; (5) confabulations arising from these paradoxical states (i.e., the unusual way patients rationalize having these deficits). The clinical phenomenology of these paradoxical states will be decsribed and then they will be discussed in terms of current philosophical, psychological and neurological theories of cognition and consciousness. VII. THE EMPIRICAL STATUS OF PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY The empirical status of psychoanalytic theory will be considered in terms of the following questions: (1) Is psychoanalytic theory testable? (2) If so, how much of it is testable, and, in particu- lar, what parts? (3) How is it testable (clinically? experimen- tally? epidemiologically?)? (4) How much of psychoanalytic theory has actually been tested in these ways, and was the theory sup- ported by the evidence? (5) Are future tests of psychoanalytic theory likely to yield outcomes that support the theory, and is this theory the best one to use to guide future research? (6) Is the proportion of psychoanalytic theory that is testable compar- able to the proportions of other scientific theories that are te- stable, or is evidence disproportionately remote from or ir- relevant to psychoanalytic theory? (7) Is testability irrelevant to some kinds of theoretical understanding? (8) Is psychoanalytic theory based on adequate views of conscious and unconscious processes and explanation? These questions will be discussed by clinicians, experimentalists and methodologists of science. VIII. THE SCIENTIFIC STATUS OF PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH In parapsychology there appears to be a chronic polarization of rival views in a way that only occurs occasionally and briefly at the frontiers of other kinds of scientific research. The polari- zation consists of those who accept the validity of the reported phenomena and of the theoretical framework accounting for them and those who do not. The following questions will be considered: (1) Is the polarization merely a prejudice, or are there objec- tive characteristics that set this field of research apart? (2) Are there special problems with furnishing replicable positive evidence in this area? (3) Are there logical problems with the theoretical framework in which the research is undertaken? (4) Are there statistical problems with the data-analysis and the underlying assumptions? (5) Is there any possibility of resolu- tion, or will the field always continue to split among believers and nonbelievers, and if the latter, (6) what does that imply about the scientific validity of this domain of inquiry? These questions will be discussed, in the context of representative current experimental work in parapsychological research, by parapsychologists, skeptics and (as yet) uncommitted methodolo- gists. IX. THE REALITY OF THE "G" (GENERAL) FACTOR IN THE MEASUREMENT AND MODELING OF INTELLIGENCE When intelligence tests are factor-analyzed (i.e., the structure of their correlations with one another is reduced to a small number of underlying variables), one general, overall factor al- ways emerges, along with a number of special factors peculiar to some groups of tests and not others. The general ("g") factor has been interpreted as a unitary measure of general intelligence. Some have challenged the reality of "g" on the grounds that indi- vidual test items (and indeed entire tests) are so constructed as to correlate with one another, and hence the overall positive correlation factor is built in; moreover, it is argued that it is fallacious to think in terms of an underlying, one-dimensional unitary intelligence. Others have argued that "g" is an empirical finding after all, because even tests constructed and validated to measure the special abilities (e.g., verbal versus spatial skills) have high "g" loadings, and indeed the more discriminat- ing tests (the ones that are more sensitive to and predictive of individual differences) tend to have the higher "g" loadings. The technical and conceptual problems of measuring, validating and modeling human cognitive capacities will be discussed in the con- text of the interpretation of "g." X. THE ASCRIPTION OF KNOWLEDGE STATES TO CHILDREN: SEEING, BELIEVING AND KNOWING Considerable discussion in cognitive science surrounds the issue of the ascription of beliefs to animals, machines and young chil- dren. Opinions range from that of Davidson, who argues that one cannot have beliefs unless one has a concept of belief, to that of Searle, who argues that "only someone in the grip of a philo- sophical theory would deny that dogs and children have beliefs." Recent research on children's ascription of beliefs to others and to themselves in the interpretation of visual events may cast some light on this question. XI. PSYCHOLOGY, PICTURES AND DRAWING The past decade has seen considerable interest in theory of dep- iction and allied theories of drawing. Current theories are technically well constructed, significant in themselves and, in addition, have important implications for neighboring areas of psychology. Yet they are often distinct in the assumptions they make about perception, communication and the environment. The present symposium draws together philosophers, educators and psychologists who have developed theories about pictures, percep- tion and drawing. Assumptions will be reviewed and implications will be discussed. XII. INTERPRETATION VERSUS EXPLANATION IN COGNITIVE AND SOCIAL THEORY The following questions will be considered: (1) What is an expla- nation, and is "scientific" explanation an atypical case or a paradigmatic one? (2) What is the role of testability and falsi- fiability in explanation? (3) What is the role of considerations of satisfyingness, coherence, elegance and other subjective cri- teria in explanation? (4) Are there different explanatory metho- dologies in the natural sciences and ther "human" sciences? (5) Is there an objective way to choose among rival interpretations? (Should there be? Is there one in the case of rival scientific theories?) (6) Is there anything objective to replace the outmod- ed "positivistic" stereotype? Pro and antihermeneuticists will participate and the discussion will focus on the role of in- terpretation in psychological and social scientific theory. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Thu Apr 25 22:12:37 1985 Date: Thu, 25 Apr 85 22:12:30 est From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a020889; 25 Apr 85 4:49 EST Date: Thu 25 Apr 1985 00:33-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 #53 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Thu, 25 Apr 85 22:05 EST AIList Digest Thursday, 25 Apr 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 53 Today's Topics: Request - MRS Information, Applications - Architecture & Agricultural AI, Psychology - Emotional Attachment & Semantics of Humor, Philosophy - Knowledge, Information, and Belief & Knowledge as an Obstacle to Learning, Application & Humor - BBoard Contest, Seminars - Bertrand Constraint Language (SRI) & Assumption-Based Truth Maintenance (SU) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 23 Apr 85 15:52:40 PST (Tue) From: whiting@sri-spam Subject: Request for additional information on MRS I am looking at making some extensions/improvements to MRS. The following are being investigated: - Adding a better user-interface - Improving efficiency - Adding debugging aids - Extending the system to deal with uncertainty elegantly I have all the HPP reports on MRS, I am looking for additional information. If you have worked with the system or know of articles which might be useful to me, I would very much appreciate hearing from you. Thanx in Advance, Kevin Whiting (415) 859-4099 ------------------------------ Date: 24 Apr 1985 1119-EST From: Benoit Flamant Reply-to: FLAMANT@CMU-CS-PS2.ARPA Subject: Expert Systems in Architecture I am looking for information about experts systems in the domain of architecture. Does anyone know of good articles or books published recently, understandable by people without deep knowledge in AI ? Please reply to flamant@cmu-cs-ps2. Thanks. ------------------------------ Date: Sat 20 Apr 85 17:42:22-PST From: LOUROBINSON@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Agricultural AI In response to Peter Friedland's inquiry regarding agricultural AI systems: The Imperial Chemical Industries of Great Britain recently entered into an agreement with a British expert systems company, ISIS Systems, to develop tools that will assist farmers. One of these tools is a system called Counselor intended to help farmers analyze crop diseases. The advisory service calculates the probable incidence of disease based on data provided by the user. "Wheat Counselor" can be used to determine probable wheat infestations and appropriate (chemical) treatment. Lou Robinson The AI Report ------------------------------ Date: 20 Apr 85 17:16 EST (Sat) From: _Bob Subject: Midnight Theorizer From: BATALI%MIT-OZ at MIT-MC.ARPA From: MINSKY Perhaps this, too, explains the prolonged, mourning-like depression that follows sexual or other forms of personal assault. No matter that the unwelcome intimacy of violence may be brief; it nonetheless affects one's attachment machinery, however much against one's wish. So the suggestion is that the rape-victim feels bad because she has formed an attachment-bond to her attacker? The same "mechanism" is involved as in the formation of her attachment-bonds to other people? That is precisely the suggestion. So she feels bad not because she has been raped, but because her rapist has then left her? Is there a shred of evidence that any rape victim has ever felt this way? No, perhaps the victim feels bad because of a. The terrible invasion of the sexual assault itself, b. The cognitive dissonance when the attachment machinery begins to operate in these terribly inappropriate circumstances. I suspect that many people would agree there is more than a shred of evidence for similar emotive patterns. The syndrome in which hostages identify with their captors, despite violence (and in the case of Patty Hearst, rape) comes to mind. Is this theory somehow suggesting that there really isn't much of a difference between rape and seduction and falling in love? Perhaps not, in some ways. Is it being assumed that fear, pain and loss of self-esteem is not enough to "explain the prolonged depression" that follows sexual assault? No, rather it seems to be examining the internal dynamics of "loss of self-esteem." I have some doubts about that part of AI which asserts the validity of scientific inquiry that gathers "data" by introspection. But I have even greater doubts about moral indignation as a criterion for rejection of hypotheses (or of humor, for that matter). _B ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 21 Apr 85 11:51 EST From: Brant Cheikes Subject: Book on semantics of humor Since there was some recent mention on studies of humor, I thought I'd mention a book I just started reading on that very topic: "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor" Raskin, Victor D. Reidel Publishing Company Dordrecht, Holland, 1985. Raskin attempts to develop a semantic theory that captures the necessary and sufficient conditions for a text to be considered funny by the "native speaker." The book is full of examples, however, in the preface, Raskin insists that the book is not a joke book, rather, that all joke examples were chosen purely for their illustrative value. So if you want to know what's funny and what's not and why, then read this book. Brant ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Apr 85 11:04:49 EST From: Morton A Hirschberg Subject: Re: Jeff Peck Jeff's got a good start on the data, information, knowledge hierarchy (you see it here as you read from left to right, think from bottom to top). Data is all around us and can exist without context. Information is derived from data in a particular context with or without the aid of data, information, and knowledge from other contexts. From information we can derive secondary data. Think of the two triplets of numbers representing the coordinates of two points in three space. Each by itself is meaningless however, assuming that the triplets are not identical, one can derive the equation of a line in space. From that equation, one can then derive as many new triplets as one desires (some may actually be useful). Knowledge can be derived from information, that is it is the synthesis of information (usually thought of in particular contexts). Thinking about the hierarchy in this way has been quite useful in dealing with and teaching data basing. We also see that data which can not be manipulated to form information remains data. The listing of names, street numbers and telephone numbers in a telephone book is really data and those books should be called data books and not information books. There are ways of manipulating those data (I don't work for Ma Bell) to derive information (Ma Bell sells those books to businesses) but that is another story. Mort ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Apr 85 10:36:39 EST From: cugini@NBS-VMS Subject: definition of knowledge/information/data Alright, my philosophical feathers have been ruffled... "True justified belief" is *not* a special case of "things that are useful in making good decisions". 1. While it probably is true as a matter of empirical fact that true beliefs are likely to be more useful for making decisions than are false ones (in most cases), this is certainly not true by definition. 2. One quick counter-example: Suppose you were in a prisoner-of-war camp. You might have a false, unjustified belief that you would soon be rescued. This irrational hope might in fact have greater survival value (= lead to better decisions on how to act) than a more realistic outlook - but the utility of the belief hardly makes it true, in the any normal English sense of the word. 3. Anyway, the emphasis of the "true justified belief" concept is on "justified" - ie defining knowledge as a true belief rationally arrived at, rather than as a lucky guess. There are problems with this defintion, to be sure, in particular, distinguishing between subjective justification (I believe X, based on the evidence given to me so far), vs objective (but in fact part of that evidence consists of lies, undetected by you). A typical case discussed is: suppose Mr. X wrongly believes that P, and, wanting to deceive you, tells you that not-P is the case (which in fact it is). You then, believing him, have a true belief that not-P is so. But is it justified? Subjectively, yes, because you are acting rationally - but in fact you're relying on a method (Mr. X) which is unreliable - if P really were the case, this method would not lead you to believe P - so your source of belief is not related to its object in such a way that it would reliably track that object in other "nearby" possible worlds. Robert Nozick in "Philosophical Questions" has a very well-written insightful discussion on all this. John Cugini National Bureau of Standards Bldg 225 Room A-265 Gaithersburg, MD 20899 phone: (301) 921-2431 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 17 Apr 85 11:24:58 pst From: Vaughan Pratt Subject: Knowledge as an obstacle [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] This morning I overhead "I just don't understand Karl Marx" as I biked past two students. My first reaction was "Gee, if they think Marx is tough they must go bananas with Kant." Then on further reflection I thought "Now if Marx is really that inaccessible, where did he get such a large following?" Which train of thought led me to: There are two very different reasons for being unable to grasp an idea. The "obvious" one is that it takes time to assimilate new ideas. The less obvious one is that you may already know too much! If the new idea is inconsistent with what you know, something has to give. Now consider the following scenario. A teacher of Marx spends say forty years expounding Marx's ideas. In his youth he has no trouble getting the message across. Later he finds it much harder. He agonizes: "Are students really getting dumber, or am I just losing my touch?" The truth of the matter may be neither. He and his students may simply have diverging theories of the world. His stays put while theirs (collectively!) continue to accumulate the latest ideas. The more divergent those theories become, the harder he finds it to get his ideas across. What really ices all this is that neither he nor his students diagnose the problem. They all think that there is an idea here which the students are just having trouble absorbing. If the teacher were to say "Marx's ideas are contradicted by X,Y,Z that you take as economic gospel" then the students would know what knowledge had to be laid aside to appreciate Marx. This is surely better than laying aside either nothing, everything, or a guessed-at selection. Whether teaching Marx, or any other subject, actually works this way I haven't a clue. Educational theorists have a batting average about that of economic theorists, whether you look at the professional leagues or the amateur. -v ------------------------------ Date: 21 Apr 85 08:32:45 EST From: Robert.Thibadeau@CMU-RI-VI Subject: BB Contest [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Bulletin boards certainly have had their ups and downs. I have always objected to a plethora of boards and to a plethora of posts, a quandary perhaps. But let us invite an "expert system" contest in the world community (for heavens sake!) which provides us with "the intelligent bulletin board". I can indicate my own predilections, and, when I write a message, the system will interpret it with respect to the world of everybody's predilections. Anyone can enter: protocols are at your finger tips. Imagine a system which, after you post your message says, "System won't bother on that post, no one wants to read it." You might even ask why, and find out. Then imagine the thrill, one day, of seeing "System has decided everybody in the world wants that message today -- automatic phoning system engaged." Frabjous joy. This contest is serious: when you have a system design, describe it: consider performance, compatibility, and extensibility along with representational and procedural intelligence. Deadline is December 1, 1985 (mid-term assignments anyone?). Mail description only to prism@cmu-ri-vi. I will put my IRS gift of $100 into a winner and invite other sufferers longing for the good old days to do the same (send commitments not cash). All suggestions will be publicly available, the results published (SIGART Newsletter). ------------------------------ Date: 24 Apr 1985 0959-PST From: GOGUEN@SRI-CSL.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Bertrand Constraint Language (SRI) CSL SEMINAR, 10:30am THURSDAY, 25 APRIL 1985, ROOM EL381 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- 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: Tue 23 Apr 85 13:19:28-PST From: Carol Wright/Susie Barnes Subject: Seminar - Assumption-Based Truth Maintenance (SU) SIGLUNCH DATE: Friday, April 26, 1985 LOCATION: Chemistry Gazebo, between Physical & Organic Chemistry TIME: 12:05 SPEAKER: Johan Dekleer Member of Research Staff in Qualitative Physics at Xerox Park TITLE: An Assumption-Based Truth Maintenance System This talk presents a new view of problem solving motivated by a new kind of truth maintenance system. Unlike previous truth maintenance systems which were based on manipulating justifications, this truth maintenance system is, in addition, based on manipulating assumption sets. As a consequence it is possible to work effectively and efficiently with inconsistent information, context switching is free, and most backtracking (and all retraction) is avoided. These capabilities motivate a different kind of problem-solving architecture in which multiple potential solutions are explored simultaneously. This architecture is particularly well-suited for tasks where a reasonable fraction of the potential solutions must be explored. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Fri May 3 05:02:07 1985 Date: Fri, 3 May 85 05:02:02 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a008602; 3 May 85 3:11 EDT Date: Thu 2 May 1985 23:28-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #54 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 3 May 85 04:50 EST AIList Digest Friday, 3 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 54 Today's Topics: Queries - Nim & Archeology & AI Curriculum & Pearl & Bindings & SIGART Speakers & ES on Multiprocessors & Unification Hardware & Simulation of Human Understanding & Machine Translation & Vision On Apollo Or Sun & Image Processing in LISP Seminar - BB1: A Blackboard Architecture (SU) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 22 April 1985 1003-EST From: Peter Pirolli@CMU-CS-A Subject: Nim refs sought I'm posting this for Malcom Cook (mcook@cmu-psy-a): For an exercise in human problem solving and learning to solve problems, I'm looking for references to nim (a.k.a. the Marienbad game) as an example. I would like to know of analysis of best or winning play in this game, and also of computer programs that play the game. Any data much appreciated. Please direct replies to Cook@ari-hq1 (that is my father Donald A. Cook, not me). thanks ------------------------------ Date: 25 Apr 1985 0906-EST From: Benoit Flamant Reply-to: FLAMANT@CMU-CS-PS2.ARPA Subject: AI list post correction My apologies for my last message, I meant archeology instead of architecture, so the right message is: I am looking for information about expert systems in the domain of archeology. Does anyone know of good articles or books published recently, understandable by people without deep backkgrond in AI ? Please reply to flamant@cmu-cs-ps2.arpa. Thanks. Maybe Freud would certainly have found an appropriate explanation for my making this slip. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Apr 85 04:21:09 est From: kevin%gvax@Cornell.ARPA (Kevin Karplus) Subject: what's the best preparation for AI study? One of my CS advisees has expressed a serious interest in AI, but Cornell has no AI courses or researchers. He is now a second semester sophmore, and plans to go to graduate school to do AI work. What courses should I recommend for him? I recommended the following electives: Intro to Cognitive Psychology (1 semester) Introductory Linguistics (2 semesters) Mathematical Logic (1 semester) as taught by Math, not Philosophy Programming Languages (1 semester) (our only course that does anything with Lisp) He could take other courses (instead of the computer architecture sequence) in his current schedule. What do the AI researchers and students recommend as the "best" background for an undergrad? Thanks for the help, Kevin Karplus ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 30 Apr 85 08:48 CDT From: Warren_Moseley Subject: Request for Help in Tools for AI course Can any one out there tell me where I can get a copy of Pearl? I have seen a write up of the capabilities and I interested in the possibility of using it in a graduate course in Software Engineering in which I want to try some Ai techniques. I teach at North Texas State University. We run VMS and Franz Lisp, and have IBM and TI PC'S. If anyone can help I would appreciate a reply. I would also be open to any other suggestions for tools to support instruction in AI. I also need an implementation of a relation data base simulator written Franz Lisp. Any suggestions for tools, techniques, text books and ideas would be appreciated. I can be reached at MOSELEY@TI-EG. 214-952-2157 Warren Moseley ------------------------------ Date: Friday, 26-Apr-85 18:11:00-GMT From: STEVE HPS (on ERCC DEC-10) Subject: Bindings Can anyone give the current bindings for either or both of Sharon Sickel James Munyer ? Thanks, Steve Owen Edinburgh University ------------------------------ Date: 29 Apr 85 09:07 PDT From: Bill D'Camp Subject: Speakers wanted The newly formed San Diego SIGART group is interested in contacting potential speakers. If you are planning to be in Southern California for IJCAI and would like to give a presentation on any topic related to artificial intelligence, please contact me. We are also interested in contacting potential speakers for presentations at other times. Thank You, Bill D'Camp arpa address: bill@logicon.arpa USnail : Bill D'Camp Logicon Inc. P.O. Box 5158 San Diego, Ca. 92138 phone : (619)455-1330 ------------------------------ Date: Fri 26 Apr 85 12:19:27-MST From: Pete Tinker Subject: Rule-Based Systems on Multiprocessors I'd like to hear of any attempts to put either new or existing rule-based systems on multiprocessors. I'm already aware of the DADO project, and should appreciate hearing of other efforts. - Pete Tinker ------------------------------ Date: 27 Apr 1985 11:26-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Hardware for Unification We need information on VLSI/hardware processors for unification and transitive closures. References, contacts, etc. would be greatly appreciated: We have heard about a transitive closure chip at XEROX, a unification processor built at AT&T and work in this area at Stanford. However, right now we do not have specific references. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 85 10:49:56 pdt From: Cindy Mason Subject: Simulation of Human Understanding I came across this question on a take-home final exam I had in my cognitive psychology class, and I would be interested to see what some of you have to say on the matter, especially some of the readers who have been studying AI for a while. "Which of the following topics covered in the course do you feel must be built into an adequate computer simulation of human understanding? Why? Attention Memory Categorization Language Judgement Heuristics Decision Framing Causal Perceptions Emotion (in light of causation) Event Structure Problem Solving Scripts, Plans and Goals Please send responses to the AILIST rather than to me personally since I believe many people will be interested in this question. Cindy Mason ------------------------------ Date: Wednesday, 1 May 1985 16:17:48-PDT From: bstafford%nermal.DEC@decwrl.ARPA Subject: Query to Dominique Petitpierre on Machine Translation From: NERMAL::SCLARK 1-MAY-1985 07:52 To: BSTAFFORD Subj: DOMINIQUE Dominique, In response to your notice in the AIList Digest (V3 #50) my colleague, Sharon Clark, and I are very interested in obtaining additional information on the machine translation systems, ALPS and Weidner. We are preparing a workshop to help writers eliminate ambiguity from their work in anticipation of having their work translated by machine. The topics we intend to cover are words with multiple meanings, conversions, simplifying syntax, eliminating idioms, eliminating logical ambiguities, and dealing with cultural issues. The workshop's objective is to teach writers to prepare documentation that can go straight into being translated by a computer without the benefit of a pre-editor. We are also interested in obtaining a copy of the tutorial organised by ISSCO which you also mentioned in the AIdigest Entry. In addition, can you tell us the best way to get a hold of Rebecca Root? Do you have a phone number for the LRC? Any additional information you can provide us will be greatly appreciated. We are working on a tight deadline as we will be presenting the workshop at a Conference which begins May 19. Regards, Barbara Stafford ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 Apr 85 00:08 EST From: Josef Skrzypek Subject: VISION ON APOLLO OR SUN ? I am looking for information about Vision (imaging) systems based on Apollo or SUN workstations. Please reply directly to: SKRZYPEK.NORTHEASTERN@CSNET-RELAY thank you -- josef ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 85 13:55:25 -0200 From: prlb2!ronse@seismo.ARPA (Ronse) Subject: Image Processing in LISP? Some time ago I posted to net.ai a request for information on image processing in LISP (including binary or grey level images, quadtrees, efficiency, etc.). I have so far received only one answer (from msp@ukc.UUCP). Has really noone used LISP for image processing? I repeat thus my request: can anyone give me pointers to any work done in this subject? Christian RONSE maldoror@prlb2.UUCP {philabs|mcvax}!maldoror Philips Research Laboratory Brussels Av. E. Van Becelaere 2, box 8 B-1170 Brussels, Belgium [SRI has been doing considerable image processing on Symbolics lisp machines, and is offering an image manipulation and processing package called ImageCalc; contact Quam@SRI-AI for details. John Gilmore of Georgia Tech is associated with a somewhat similar image windowing system called Dalek. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Tue 30 Apr 85 14:07:24-PDT From: Carol Wright/Susie Barnes Subject: Seminar - BB1: A Blackboard Architecture (SU) SIGLUNCH DATE: Friday, May 3, 1985 LOCATION: Braun Auditorium in Mudd/Chemistry Building TIME: 12:05-1:05 SPEAKER: Barbara Hayes-Roth Helix Group, Knowledge Systems Laboratory TITLE: BB1: An Architecture for Blackboard Systems BB1 is a domain-independent blackboard architecture. The prototypical blackboard system includes: functionally independent knowledge sources to generate solution elements; a structured blackboard to record solution elements and mediate knowledge source interactions; and a control mechanism to trigger, schedule, and execute knowledge sources. Building upon this basic functionality, BB1 also provides capabilities for dynamic control planning, strategic explanation, and automatic learning of control heuristics. BB1 will be illustrated with examples from PROTEAN, a system that integrates multiple constraints to determine the 3-D structures of proteins in solution. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Sun May 5 04:33:15 1985 Date: Sun, 5 May 85 04:33:06 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a019965; 5 May 85 2:43 EDT Date: Sat 4 May 1985 22:43-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #55 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sun, 5 May 85 04:24 EST AIList Digest Sunday, 5 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 55 Today's Topics: Query - Expert Systems Tools for IBMPC, Report - ES Tools Paper, Interest Group - Evolution, Games - Nim, Image Processing - ImageCalc, Recent Articles - Survey Linguistics - Notes from La Jolla, Review - The Logical Basis for Computer Programming, Call for Papers - Knowledge-Based Systems for Engineering, Course - ARO-Sponsored Summer Courses for Army ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 3 May 85 11:12:12 pdt From: (Marvin Erickson [pnl]) erickson@lbl-csam Subject: Info request: IBMPC & Expert Systems I am gathering information on IBM PC-compatible expert system development packages. I am also reviewing packages that require/allow development on a different machine for e.s. application delivery on IBM PCs. So far, I have information on the T.I. Personal Consultant, ExpertEase, TIMM, INSIGHT, M.1, and K-Base. I would be very interested in hearing about packages I have missed (or getting appropriate pointers). Thanks in advance and please send responses to erickson@lbl-csam. Mark A. Whiting Battelle Northwest Laboratories [SRI has a SeRIes-PC expert-system shell. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Wed 1 May 85 19:17:09-PDT From: Mark Richer Subject: ES Tools Paper The paper I offered to readers about 5 tools for building KB systems is ready to go. I am mailing out copies tomorrow to those people who needed a copy right away. After we get more copies back from the photocopy center the other copies will be sent out (probably next week). A few people insisted on electronic copies ... I will try to accomodate you tomorrow. You are also welcome to ftp it from {sumex}es.mss if you wish. This is a scribe file. Don't ask me about ftping however .. if someone succeeds perhaps they can explain how they did it. In fact, I will be gone from Fri. 5/2 through 5/20. (what is a scribe file ... SCRIBE is a text formatting program. My file is a normal ascii text file, but it has scribe commands in it like @b[this prints in bold when scribed] There is a chance I may be able to produce a text file ... check for es.txt or es.tty if you don't have access to scribe. As I said in my original note, this paper is a modest review of the 5 systems. Without hands-on testing I was unable to make the kind of evaluations I wanted to make. For many people, my paper will be a valuable introduction and overview to this market of products. More experienced readers may or may not be disappointed. However, from some of the msgs. that I received it seems likely I will get responses back from people who have had experience with one or more of the programs I describe. I don't know which idea is better (and perhaps Ken Laws can decide): I get all the responses and then post a summary on the net at some point (when I get time, which is uncertain) or A dialogue about the products and comments I have made can start on the AILIST bboard? I myself would like to learn more about these products as well as the broader issues I have raised in the paper; perhaps, some of you can contribute. mark [A dialog in AIList is fine, but try to keep messages self-contained for the benefit of those who haven't read the paper. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 30 Apr 1985 09:32-PDT From: king@Kestrel.ARPA Subject: New interest group -- evolution There has been a lot of interest in what I will call mathematical evolution theory. This includes some game theory (for example the result that equal numbers of males and females should exist in any species in which each birth is the result of a mating) and some computer simulation work (for example the result that cooperation can evolve if and only if members of the species can recognize each other as individuals). I am sending this message to guage interest in the establishment of an interest group in this area. If anyone has an address that accesses a large number of csnet bboards, please tell me. Dick ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 1985 06:20:21 EDT (Fri) From: Dan Hoey Subject: Re: Nim refs sought I told Cook@ARI-HQ1, but I guess I'd better let you folks know, or I'll be reading this query on ARPANET-BBoards next. Perfect strategy for Nim is known. For an analysis of Nim, and open questions associated with many related games, see *On Numbers and Games* by J. H. Conway (Academic Press, 1976). Dan Hoey [Another good source is Mathematical Recreations by Bell. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 03 May 85 09:25:32 EDT From: connolly@GE-CRD Subject: Image Processing in Lisp In praise of Image-Calc: In response to the query about Image Processing in Lisp - We at GE CRD have been using Image-Calc for about a year now, and are pleased as punch with the environment it provides. Image-Calc runs on a Symbolics 3600, and for a really comfortable environment, you should have a frame buffer & color monitor. We've mainly been working on implementing promising image-processing algorithms (e.g., the Canny edge detector) and model-matching in images (akin to Faugeras' work) and have found that the Image-Calc environment takes a lot of the drudgery, boredom, and slowness out of constructing these algorithms. ------------------------------ Date: 23 Apr 1985 19:21-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Recent Articles - Survey Journal of Logic Programming 11(1984) no 3 William F. Dowling J. H. Gallier 267-284 Linear time algorithms for testing satisfiability of Horn Formulae 225-240 J. W. Lloyd R. W. Topez Making Prolog more expressive ____________________________________________________________________________ J. Info Science 34(1984) no 1 1-24: Weichung Lun King Sun Fu 3D-Plex Grammars 47-59: Marco Valtorta "A result on the computation complexity of heuristic estimates for the A* algorithms" ____________________________________________________________________________ Vestnik Lening Unive. Mat. Mekh. Astron 1984 111-113 S. P. Lukin V. N. Fomm An optimal stopping rule for training algorithms with reward In Russian with English Summary ____________________________________________________________________________ Publ. Inst. Math (Beograd( 1983 34(48) 37-47: Dragos Cvetkovik, Irena Pevac Discussing graph theory with a computer III Man Machine Theorem Proving ____________________________________________________________________________ Comm. Cognition 17 (1984) no 1 3-42 Isles, David "Artificial Intelligence as a possible tool for discovering the laws of logic ____________________________________________________________________________ J. Math. Psych. 24(1984) no 3 231-281 Richard Schweickert, George J. Boggs Models of central capacity and concurrency ____________________________________________________________________________ STACS 84 2nd Annual Symposium on Theorietical Aspects of Computer Science Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in CS 182 $16.00 Tree Automata and Logic Programs G. File page 119 ____________________________________________________________________________ International Journal of Bio-Medical Computing Volume 16 no 1 Jan 84 Computer Vision J. G. Llaurado Page 4 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 85 11:35:39 pdt From: li51x%sdcc3@SDCSVAX.ARPA Subject: Linguistic Notes from La Jolla Working papers in linguistics from the faculty and students of the Department of Linguistics, University of California at San Diego, are available from "Linguistics Notes from La Jolla" Department of Linguistics, C-008 University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California 92093 For a list of contents of issue 13 and of back issues send a self-addressed stamped envelope to LNLJ. I am posting this for Michael Smith, who is handling orders this year. He asks that orders (and payment) be received by May 15, 1985. --Michelle Gross [I've edited this down; the author can supply more info. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 04 May 85 0038 PDT From: Yoni Malachi Subject: Review - The Logical Basis for Computer Programming THE LOGICAL BASIS FOR COMPUTER PROGRAMMING Volume 1: Deductive Reasoning ZOHAR MANNA and RICHARD WALDINGER Addison-Wesley, ISBN: 0-201-18620-2 This exceptionally clear text, laced with many examples, provides a most readable introduction to the logical concepts and techniques underlying computer programming. Computational notions are explored in a logical realm independent of any programming language or any machine. The text is accessible to readers with no background in mathematics or computer programming, yet it supplies axiomatization for a rich collection of abstract data types. This book provides the intellectual tools for studying artificial intelligence, software engineering, automatic programming, database theory, logic programming, and the theory of computation. A forthcoming second volume, DEDUCTIVE SYSTEMS, describes logical techniques for automated theorem proving and its applications. Zohar Manna is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University; he is the author of the textbook "Mathematical Theory of Computation." Richard Waldinger is Staff Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Part I. Mathematical Logic Chapter 1: Propositional Logic Introduction. The Language. The Meaning of a Sentence. Properties of Sentences. Truth Tables. Semantic Trees. Proof by Falsification. Valid Sentence Schemata. Substitution. Extended Interpretation. Equivalence. Problems. Chapter 2: Predicate Logic: Basic Introduction. The Language. The Meaning of a Sentence. Semantic Rules. Validity. Universal and Existential Closure. Problems. Chapter 3: Predicate Logic: Advanced Valid Sentence Schemata. Equivalence. Safe Substitution. The Value Property. Valid Schemata with Substitution. Function Introduction and Elimination. Problems. Chapter 4: Special Theories Definition of a Theory. Augmenting Theories. Relationship between Theories. Theory of Strict Partial Orderings. Theory of Equivalence Relations. Problems. Chapter 5: Theories with Equality Theory of Equality. Theory of Weak Partial Orderings. Theory of Associated Relations. Theory of Groups. Theory of Pairs. Relativized Quantifiers. The Lexicographic Relation. Problems. Part II. Theories with Induction Chapter 6: Nonnegative Integers Basic Properties. The Addition Function. Multiplication and Exponentiation. Predecessor and Subtraction. Decomposition Induction. The Weak Less-than Relation. The Strict Less-than Relation. Complete Induction. Quotient and Remainder. Proof of Complete Induction. The Divides Relation. The Least-Number Principle. Problems. Chapter 7: Strings Basic Properties. The Head and Tail Functions. The Concatenation Function. The Reverse Function. The Decomposition Induction Principle. The Substring Relation. The Complete Induction Principle. Nonnegative Integers and Strings. String Representation of Integers. Problems. Chapter 8: Trees Basic Properties. The Left and Right Functions. The Subtree Relation. Strings and Trees. Problems. Chapter 9: Lists Basic Properties. The Head and Tail Functions. Append and Member. Example: Flatlist. Tree Representation of Lists. Example: Parsing. Problems. Chapter 10: Sets Basic Properties. The Equality Proposition. The Choice and Rest Functions. The Union and Intersection Functions. The Deletion and Difference Functions. The Subset Relation. The Set Constructor. Cardinality. Singleton Sets. Problems. Chapter 11: Bags Basic Properties. The Equal-Multiplicity Relation. Multiplicity and Equality. The Count Function. Additional Functions and Relations. Sum, Union, and Intersection. Problems. Chapter 12: Tuples Basic Properties. Nonnegative Integers and Tuples. Mapping Tuples into Sets and Bags. The Permutation Relation. The Ordered Relation. The Sort Function. Recursive Definition of Functions. Problems. Related Textbooks Index of Symbols General Index ------------------------------ Date: Sunday, 21 April 1985 20:35:49 EST From: Duvvuru.Sriram@cmu-ri-cive.arpa Subject: IEEE Software - Knowledge-Based Systems for Engineering CALL FOR PAPERS The March 1986 issue of IEEE Software will address software aspects of knowledge-based systems developed for engineering applications, focusing on the following issues: (IEEE Software is one of the prestigious magazines devoted to problems in Software engineering). - need for building the KBES; - why a particular representation was chosen; - why a particular expert-system-building tool or language was used; - what advantages and limitations were revealed through the attempt; - what kind of software tool would be ideal for doing similar tasks; - how knowledge was acquired from experts; - the software cycle; - user interfaces; and - current status. The deadline for receiving the manuscript, not more than 30 double-spaced typewritten pages, is July 1st and it will be reviewed as per the IEEE standard review process. For more information (or a copy of author's guidelines) write to: D. Sriram/M. Rychener (Guest Editors) Civil Engg. and Construction Labs. Department of Civil Engineering Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 ARPAnet address: sriram@cmu-ri-cive.arpa ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 85 15:51:21 EDT From: "Dr. Ron Green" (ARO) Subject: ARO sponsored summer courses for Army Two courses will be taught this summer as part of ARO AI education program for Army. The courses will have limited enrollment because of hands-on content of course. Logic Programming This course will be given at University of Pennsylvania from June 17 till noon June 21. A familiarity with basic issues and techniques of AI and the ability to program in higher-level languages is assumed. Familiarity with logic and LISP is very desirable. The course will cover the use of logic-based systems as arepresentation language and programming language for AI systems}i. The course will be approximately one-half lecture and one- half laboratory work. The hardware will be VAXes and LISP machines. Various PROLOG implementations and logic programming systems will be available. MAIN TOPIC AREAS 1. Theoretical foundations 2. Logic as a programming language 3. PROLOG as a programming language 4. Pratical PROLOG 5. Knowledge representation 6. Reasoning 7. Expert systems 8. Natural language processing 9. Evaluating logic programming LISP Programming This course will be taught at the University of Texas at Austin from July 8 to noon on July 12. Lectures will be presented during the mornings of Monday through Thursday, and the rest of the time will be devoted to hands-on LISP programming on LISP machines. No knowledge of LISP is required. Applicants must have general familiarity with AI problems and techniques, and must have significant programming experience in standard high-level programming languages. Persons with moderate LISP experience are welcome, but it is expected that they will work more independently on advanced problems. MAIN TOPIC AREAS 1. Basic data structures and functions 2. User-defined functions and recursion 3. Explicit flow of control and iteration 4. More advanc{_ed topics -- LAMBDA expressions, destructive alteration, arrays 5. AI methods -- state-space methods, simple rule-based systems, frames To enroll or at least apply for enrollment send a letter with the course desired, brief reason for taking the course, and status of experience with AI. Deadline for application is June 5. ARO will select the ones to attend. Send letter to US Army Research Office Electronics Division Attn: Dr. C. Ronald Green P.O. Box 12211 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2211 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Sun May 5 11:42:16 1985 Date: Sun, 5 May 85 11:42:11 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a020487; 5 May 85 4:21 EDT Date: Sat 4 May 1985 22:52-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #56 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sun, 5 May 85 11:34 EST AIList Digest Sunday, 5 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 56 Today's Topics: Emotions and Memory Emotional Attachment Emotional Attachment Cognitive dissonance ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 2-May-85 From: l12%dhdurz2.bitnet@WISCVM.ARPA Subject: Emotions and Memory Hello, My name is Wolf-Dieter Batz. I'm a Psychologist working at a software advisory board at the University of Heidelberg. This is my request to be put on the AIList. My special interest, which is also the basis for this request, lies in the metatheoretical aspects of memory research. In my thesis "About Model Construction in Memory Research", I investigated several theories about memory for their essential characteristics; theories were selected from Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience. Results indicated a number of questionable fundamentals in memory research. If anybody is interested in them I would like to get feedback. A very newborn idea in this context is to establish a new theory of emotions that is structurally related to a still-to-formulate theory of memory. I would be very glad for responses to this idea. - Everybody's invited! Kind regards - mit freundlichen Gruessen *** Wolf-Dieter Batz ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Apr 85 09:28:33 pst From: ed298-aa%ucbjade.CC@Berkeley Subject: Emotional Attachment [I'll permit this message, not as another "rape" piece, but as it relates to the Minsky/Batali/Carter discussion of human emotional mechanisms. -- KIL] Having finally become quite weary reading abstract theorizing about rape (b (brought on by the posting of a dumb story I remember first hearing in high school), I'll add some down-to-earth comments. I won't try to link this to AI issues; I don't think it works that way, and I feel somewhat strange addressing this on this bb, but it seems appropriate to offer some first-hand information and "introspection.' I've been raped, and I've worked on a rape crisis line, counseling rape survivors. I've never run across anyone agonizing because of an instant "attachment" of some kind to the rapist. Many women are raped by men they know; in this situation indeed there can be very complicated feelings. But the strongest feeling I remember, and one which I've heard expressed by other women, is the world-altering loss of trust and security after any kind of rape. Rape is a act of violence and a robber of power; one who previously feels ok about something as mundane as walking down the street may no longer be able to leave the house, or only with the greatest fear and mistrust. The attitude, which is changing but still strong, that a woman who is raped has somehow brought it on herself is enough to add feelings of shame and self-hate to the complex of fear. I don't find anything funny about jokes on rape, or any other form of humiliation or violence. There is a great deal of work to be done to transform our communities, and society, into a place where rape is not tolerated, indeed, is viewed as something as incredible as cannibalism or any other barbarism of the past. Calling people on rape "jokes" is one thing which can be done, perhaps you all can think of other more stronger steps to take. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1985 16:22 EST From: MINSKY%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Emotional Attachment Bob Carter has answered Batali's objections to my "assault" theory better than I would have. Thanks. -- minsky ------------------------------ Date: Thu 2 May 85 17:58:22-PDT From: JMYERS@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Cognitive dissonance I am offended by Mr. Carter's views on the subject of rape, that the anxiety of the victim is caused by her "cognitive dissonance when the attachment machinery begins to operate...". Although this might in some sense be true, it is not the whole truth, and I cannot remain indifferent to what is to me such a dangerous statement. Anxiety is indeed caused by cognitive dissonance, but the conflict is between our opinion of the world, and our perception of reality. We must have a valid model of our world in order to survive--there is an incredibly basic drive in human nature to make sense of it all. And, given a conflict between our concepts and our perceptions, it is usually the concepts that win out. our perceptions, our evaluations of what is occurring, are twisted to align with our model of the world, so that we do not have to bear fully the psychic shock of having our basic assumptions undermined. This accounts for the human reactions of denial, repression, regression, rationalization, and other defense mechanisms, when confronted with the occurrence of a crisis. The most basic assumptions have to do with the meaning of life, the question of evil, the assumption of causality, and the myth of invulnerability. These are the foundations on which general behavior is based. After defining and discussing these concepts, I will come back to how they apply in the case of a rape. Each person has his own meaning of life. A great many people have not formulated it explicitly, but everyone has a vague sense of purpose, a reason for living; everyone has a sense that it means something to be alive, and that it does all make sense somehow, even if we don't understand it. (Note that knowledge of the existence of purpose does not require knowledge of the purpose.) This is one of the great things theology gives us, that we do have a reason for being here. If there were no reason, if there were no sense of, "I should stay alive because someday something might happen", then there would be no reason to get out of bed in the morning, to eat, to love. Starving to death takes too long; aspirin is relatively quick and soft, although some people prefer more violent ways of ending their existence. The fact that we are saddened and outraged when a person commits suicide indicates that we believe that he had a purpose. The reality of evil is a problem that most people cope with by ignoring it or denying that it exists. We like to think that the world is basically a nice place, that people are generally decent and reasonable, and that you can generally count on them not to do evil acts. Although this must be the basis for social interaction and trust, we get into the habit of believing, because we are fortunate enough no to encounter evil in the world, that there is no evil in the world(1). People in general, and especially computer scientists, like to believe in causality. Things happen for reasons. If you can know the reasons, then you can understand the event, and predict it or modify it. This implies that you have the power to determine your own life, and that you are therefore responsible for what happens, which is a pernicious lie(2). Remorseful people feel, "If only I'd have done things differently, this wouldn't have happened...". The fact is that they acted in the best way they knew how at the time, and they cannot be held responsible for something they didn't know how to do; furthermore, things may *not* have happened differently if their actions had changed. Finally, there might not BE a reason for an occurrence, in a fundamental sense it "just happened". The myth of invulnerability says that I have always been alive as long as I can remember, and therefore, at a very deep level, I always will be alive. Bruce Lee never dies in the movies. Sure, other people die of cancer, other people get divorced, other people go through the windshield when they drive after drinking or don't fasten their seatbelts, other people get raped, but it's not REALLY going to happen to ME. The myth of invulnerability allows us to continue to live and function in a modern world while threatened with everything from nuclear annihilation down to robberies next door, without becoming completely paranoid and dysfunctional. Given this framework of beliefs held by people in general, let us now examine the rape victim. She is directly and violently confronted with a reality that goes against her deepest assumptions; there is no place to hide (successfully) from her perceptions by repression or denial. A rape is a violent act of violation that has no inherent meaning; if such senseless things occur as *reality*, then maybe life has no meaning after all. Rape is one of the ultimate evils. The rape victim is directly confronted with an experience of undeniable evil; she must completely revise her opinions of the basic nature of mankind and men, what she now believes will happen in the future from a given situation, and how far she can trust people. The rape victim is confronted with a random act that does not make sense, that she realistically could not change or stop from happening. Yet, she still feels that maybe it happened because of something she did, maybe if she somehow had done something different that it wouldn't have happened. Not only must she deal with these feelings, but she must accept the horrifying concept that causality does not apply at some times. Finally, the rape victim has something terrible happen directly to her, something that she cannot ignore, that shatters her illusion of invulnerability. She must directly confront the fact of her own mortality at a gut level, something that most of us are unable to do completely. Again, it is not these emotions or concepts per se that are so difficult to deal with; it is the fact that they are completely opposed to the current belief structure of the victim, which is the basis for survivability. She is forced to somehow integrate these new values into her beliefs. She cannot survive with her old beliefs; she has no way of knowing whether she will survive with her new beliefs, and so her survivability is seriously within question. I argue that the cognitive dissonance created in the victim by attempting to integrate any one of these four areas into her belief structure is a stronger and more probable explanation for anxiety than a theoretical "attachment bond" to the attacker. I also feel that the "attachment bond" theory is open to distortion, and could promote significantly unhealthy attitudes in the population at large (e.g., "she really loves it", "it's not the rapist's fault", etc.) Finally, I would like to again call attention to the concept of homosexual rape. This is a reality that people do not like to think or talk about. Male computer scientists are not immune to being raped, and I strongly believe that considering the concept of it happening to YOU puts things in a much different perspective than the abstract idea of it happening to some woman. In such a situation, you would be given the same choice: submit or die. I hope you find such an idea extremely offensive and revolting. RAPE, IN GENERAL, IS. Notes: (1) Proving the existence of evil raises disturbing fundamental questions about the existence or direction of purpose in life. (2) Paradoxically, the concept that you do not have the power to determine your own life, and that you are not responsible for what happens to you, is also a pernicious lie. The Theater of the Absurd is based on this concept. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Sun May 5 20:54:45 1985 Date: Sun, 5 May 85 20:54:40 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a022791; 5 May 85 17:48 EDT Date: Sat 4 May 1985 23:08-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #57 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sun, 5 May 85 20:44 EST AIList Digest Sunday, 5 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 57 Today's Topics: Seminars - What is Information? (CMU) & Theorem Proving, Connection Machine (BBN) & Hypotheticals and Legal Reasoning (LSU) & Domain-Independent Planning (MIT), Conference - AI Applications & Carnegie Symposium, Language Acquisition & Expert Database Systems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 30 Apr 1985 0749-EDT From: Lydia Defilippo Subject: Seminar - What is Information? (CMU) Speaker: Heinz Zemanek (Vienna) Date: Wednesday, May 8 Time: 11:00 am Place: 5409 Title: What is Information? Our century has its information technology and its information industry, but does it know what entity it is dealing with? There is no standard definition of information, and there is no way to measure it. The Bit, for example, merely measures the statistical density of symbols, and it does not measure the flow through a logical network. Perhaps if computer scientists cannot measure their primary entity, they do not belong to the natural sciences but at least partially belong to the humanities! The author will argue that information can be understood from the context in which it appears: in the naive context (what was information before the computer appeared?), in the sensory organs, in language, in the transmission media (that is, in the channel, where information theory began), in protocols, as merchandise, as "intelligence," as knowledge, and as an entity controlling real-world processes (of which the computation processes are a harmless subclass). The conclusion is that the computer may turn science and technology much more towards the humanities than scientists and engineers might expect. ------------------------------ Date: 29 Apr 1985 13:49-EDT From: AHAAS at BBNG.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Theorem Proving, Connection Machine (BBN) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Something new in ther BBN AI seminar series: a talk on theorem proving. This area is enjoying a revival - they've even written some programs that real mathematicians consider useful. Wolfgang Bibel of Duke University and Technische Universitat, Munich will speak at 10 AM on Monday May 6 in the 3rd floor conference room. The connection method and plan generation W. Bibel In this talk we give a brief overview of the AI projects at the TUM. These include the development of a logical connection machine, ie a multi-processor machine for deduction based on the connection method in ATP. This method is outlined in some detail. As an example among the various applications of deductive reasoning plan generation is considered, and a new purely deductive solution for this well-known problem in AI is presented. ------------------------------ Date: 1 May 1985 11:45-EST From: "George R. Cross" Subject: Seminar - Hypotheticals and Legal Reasoning (LSU) Hypotheticals and Legal Reasoning Edwina Rissland Department of Computer Science University of Massachusetts Sponsored by: Louisiana State Law Institute, Center for Civil Law Studies, and Department of Computer Science, Louisiana State University Place: Coates 155, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA Time: Tuesday, May 7, 1:30 P.M. Abstract: In this talk, I shall discuss the use of hypotheticals in legal reasoning, in particular, how hypos serve a central role in analyzing issues and preparing arguments. I'll describe a program, called HYPO, which generates legal hypotheticals, and an environment, called COUNSELOR, which provides support for legal reasoning and other strategic tasks, like resource management. I'll discuss the kinds of modifications one makes to hypos in the course of argument, offer a preliminary taxonomy of such "argument moves", and discuss some higher level structures in legal argument. As background, I'll also present some general issues about examples such as their generation, structure and importance in reasoning, especially in the domains of mathematics and the law. For More Info: George R. Cross Computer Science Department Louisiana State University Phone: 504-388-1495 cross@lsu.CSNET ------------------------------ Date: 4 May 1985 14:20 EDT (Sat) From: "Daniel S. Weld" Subject: Seminar - Domain-Independent Planning (MIT) AI Revolving Seminar Tuesday, May 7 4:00pm 8AI Playroom Reid G. Simmons Domain Independent Planning: Putting "Shakey" on Firmer Ground Current domain independent planners are limited in the range of real-world problems that they can handle. This limitation is due largely to the lack of explicit temporal representations and to the relative inexpressiveness of the STRIPS-like operator representations. We present a domain independent planner which overcomes some of these limitations. First, time is explicitly represented and reasoned about. Second, the operator representation is extended in two important ways -- an "effect" may consist of a quantified formula and the "output" value of an effect may depend on its "input" value. We demonstrate how these changes significantly extend the range of operator representation without rendering the planning problem intractable. We also present a technique which can be used to control the potentially exponential search for a correct plan, so that planning is manageable even using these extended operator representations. This technique combines a careful analysis of the effects of each plan step with dependency directed search. It has proven to be very effective in solving traditional blocks-world examples and is currently being applied to more demanding domains. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 4 May 85 15:50 EST From: John Roach Subject: Conference - AI Applications =============== CALL FOR PAPERS =============== IEEE Computer Society SECOND CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE APPLICATIONS The Engineering of Knowledge-Based Systems Fontainebleau Hilton Miami Beach, Florida 11-13 December 1985 Purpose: to explore the technology, implementation and impact of emerging application areas and indicate future trends in available systems and required research. Topic areas include: Knowledge Acquisition and Representation System Architecture Planning and Problem Solving Natural Language Reasoning with Uncertainty Sensor Feedback Validation Learning and Control Human-Computer Interface Explanation The program will consist of submitted and invited paprs. Invited papers will provide an overview of research in selected areas. All papers will be reviewed by two members of the program review committee. Contributed papers may be selected for presentation and publication, or for publication only. Please limit papers to five thousand words. Research proposals and minor changes to old ideas are discouraged. Fours copies of the complete paper are to be submitted to: Program Chair Artificial Intelligence Conference P. O. Box 639 Silver Spring, MD 20901 Accepted papers will be published in the proceedings of the conference and will be allocated a maximum of six pages. CONFERENCE TIMETABLE Four Copies of Manuscript 1 June 1985 Acceptance Letters 15 July 1985 Camera-Ready Papers 1 September 1985 Tutorials 9, 10 December 1985 Conference 11 - 13 December 1985 A limited amount of exhibit space is available. Please contact Director of Conferences, IEEE Computer Society, 301-589-8142. CONFERENCE COMMITTEE General Chair John Roach Department of Computer Science Virginia Polytechnic Institute Blacksburg, Virginia 24061 Program Chair Charles Weisbin Center for Engr. Systems Advanced Research Oak Ridge National Laboratories Oak Ridge, TN 37831 Local Arrangements Chair Harry Hayman Tutorials Chair Mabry Tyson SRI International Treasurer Daniel Chester University of Delaware Program Committee Charles Weisbin J. Barhen P. Cheeseman R. Duda R. Haralick E. Heer D. Hertz A. Kak H. Pople E. Rich J. Roach L. Shapiro R. Simmons ------------------------------ Date: Saturday, 04 May 85 11:32:04 EDT From: sokolov (jeff sokolov) @ cmu-psy-a Subject: Conference - Carnegie Symposium, Language Acquisition ********************************************************************** 20th Annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition Carnegie-Mellon University May 16-18 Theme: "Mechanisms of Language Acquisition" ********************************************************************** The 20th Annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition will be held on May 16, 17, and 18 in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall on the Carnegie-Mellon campus in Pittsburgh. Presentations will begin at 2:00 on the 16th. Participants include Martin Braine, Robert Berwick, Jaime Carbonell, Eve Clark, Elizabeth Bates, Brian MacWhinney, John Anderson, Melissa Bowerman, Michael Maratsos, Marlys Macken, Pat Langley, Jeff Sokolov, Steven Pinker, Kenneth Wexler, Thomas Roeper, Jay McClelland, Peter Gordon, and David Rumelhart. Focal issues will be: the role of universal constraints on the shape of grammar and the parser, ways of constraining rule overgeneralization, and competition/parallel models of learning and processing. Support is being provided by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation. For a copy of the program contact Brian MacWhinney or Kathy Marengo at (412) 578-2656. The public is invited. ------------------------------ Date: Thu 2 May 85 08:28:36-CDT From: AI.HASSAN@MCC.ARPA Subject: Conference - Expert Database Systems [long message] Call for Papers and Participation First International Conference on Expert Database Systems April 1-4, 1986, Charleston, South Carolina Sponsored by: The Institute of Information Management, Technology and Policy College of Business Administration, University of South Carolina In Cooperation With: American Association for Artificial Intelligence Association for Computing Machinery -- SIGMOD, SIGART and SIGPLAN IEEE Technical Committee on Data Base Engineering Agence de l'Informatique, France Conference Objectives The goal of this conference is to explore both the theoretical and practi- cal issues of Expert Database Systems. These systems represent the conflu- ence of R&D activities in Artificial Intelligence, Logic, and Database Management. Expert Database Systems will play an ever-increasing role in scientific, governmental and business applications by: o providing intelligent, knowledge-based access to large shared data- bases through novel user-interfaces and natural-language question- answering facilities, o endowing database systems with reasoning, planning, and justification capabilities, o creating knowledge base management tools and techniques to support the creation, manipulation, indexing, and evolution of large knowledge bases, and o integrating AI & DB functional requirements into new hardware and software environments for the specification, prototyping, testing and debugging of knowledge-based applications. In order to foster the cross-fertilization of ideas from AI, Logic, and Databases the Conference will be composed of tutorial sessions, paper ses- sions, and panel discussions. Topics of Interest The Program Committee invites original papers (of approximately 5000 words) addressing (but not limited to) the following areas: Theory of Knowledge Bases (including knowledge representation, knowledge models, recursive data models, object-oriented models, knowledge indexing and transformation), Knowledge Engineering (including acquisition, maintenance, learning, knowledge-directed database specification and design methodologies, and case studies), Knowledge Base Management (including architectures and languages, con- straint and rule management, metadata management, and extensible data dictionaries), Reasoning on Large Data/Knowledge Bases (including inexact and fuzzy rea- soning, non-monotonic reasoning, deductive databases, logic-based query languages, semantic query optimization, and constraint-directed reasoning), Natural Language Access (including question-answering, extended responses, cooperative behavior, explanation and justification), Intelligent Database Interfaces (including expert system -- database com- munication, knowledge gateways, knowledgeable user agents, browsers, and videotex), Knowledge-Based Environments (including Decision Support Systems, CAD/CAM, and VLSI Design), Organizational Issues (including technology transfer, procurement of expert database systems, and knowledge certification). Please send five (5) copies of papers by September 1, 1985 to: Larry Kerschberg, Program Chairman College of Business Administration University of South Carolina Columbia, SC, 29208 Program Committee Hideo Aiso Sham Navathe Keio University University of Florida Antonio Albano Erich Neuhold University of Pisa Technical University of Vienna Robert Balzer S. Ohsuga USC/Information Sciences Institute University of Tokyo James Bezdek Alain Pirotte University of South Carolina Philips Research Lab, Brussels Ron Brachman D. Stott Parker, Jr. Schlumberger Palo Alto Research UCLA and SILOGIC Michael Brodie Harry Pople Computer Corporation of America University of Pittsburgh Peter Buneman Erik Sandewall University of Pennsylvania Linkoping University Mark Fox Edgar H. Sibley Robotics Institute, Carnegie-Mellon Univ. George Mason University George Gardarin John Miles Smith Univ. of Paris 6 and INRIA Computer Corporation of America Herve Gallaire Reid Smith ECRC, Munich Schlumberger-Doll Research Matthias Jarke Michael Stonebraker New York University UC -- Berkeley Jonathan King Jeffrey Ullman Teknowledge Stanford University Robert Kowalski Bonnie L. Webber Imperial College University of Pennsylvania Jack Minker Andrew B. Whinston University of Maryland Purdue University Michele Missikoff Gio Wiederhold IASI-CNR, Rome Stanford University John Mylopoulos Carlo Zaniolo University of Toronto MCC Corporation Important Dates Submission Deadline: September 1, 1985 Acceptance Notification: November 7, 1985 Final Version Due: December 15, 1985 Conference: April 1-4, 1986 Conference proceedings will be available at the conference, and subse- quently will appear in book form. Conference General Chairman Conference Coordinator Donald A. Marchand Cathie L. Hughes Institute of Information Management, Technology and Policy (803) 777-5766 Panel Coordinator Conference Treasurer Arun Sen Libby Shropshier Dept. of Management Science Institute of Information Management, College of Business Administration Technology and Policy Univ. of South Carolina Univ. of South Carolina Columbia, SC 29208 Columbia, SC 29208 Publicity Chairman Tutorial Chairman John Weitzel Jonathan King Dept. of Management Science Teknowledge, Inc. College of Business Administration 525 University Avenue Univ. of South Carolina Palo Alto, CA 94301 Columbia, SC 29208 International Representatives Latin America Europe Far East Claudio M.O. Moura Jean-Claude Rault Masahiro Nakazawa Independent Consultant Agence de l'InformatiqueNihon Digital Equip. Corp. Rua R. Eduardo Guinle 60 Tour Fiat-Cedex 16 Sunlight Bldg. 5th Floor Botafogo Paris-La Defense 5-29-1, Toyotamakita, 22.260 Rio de Janeiro, RJParis Nerima-ku Tokyo, 176 Brazil France Japan ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Mon May 6 04:30:36 1985 Date: Mon, 6 May 85 04:30:19 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a023562; 5 May 85 21:25 EDT Date: Sun 5 May 1985 16:24-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #58 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Mon, 6 May 85 04:17 EST AIList Digest Monday, 6 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 58 Today's Topics: Administrivia - Request for Help, Seminars - Database Theory and Equations (MIT) & Processing Uncertain Knowledge (UToronto) & Compact LISP Machine (SU) & How Processes Learn (CMU) & Space Modeling for Robot Navigation (SU) & Pictorial Explanations (UPenn) & Distributed Knowledge-Based Learning (USCarolina) & DART: An Automated Diagnostician (SU) & Abstraction and Classification in NIKL (MIT) & Evidential Reasoning in Semantic Networks (BBN) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun 5 May 85 16:09:01-PDT From: Ken Laws Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Seminar Abstracts I fell behind on the seminar notices when I took off for DC early this month. Rather than just ignore all the talks, I've decided to "read them into the record" now. It will take three issues to hold all the post-dated notices -- just ignore them if abstracts aren't your thing. I find that I'm spending too much time gathering and editing seminar notices, so I'm going to cut back. I will continue to forward the Stanford notices, but I'd like to get some volunteers to edit and forward notices from CMU, CSLI, MIT-MC, Rutgers, and UTexas-20. Other contributors can help me by providing meaningful Subject lines for your messages. I have been cleaning up many of the subject lines as an aid to sorting the messages and to simplify construction of the Today's Topics header. It takes a fair amount of effort to find a concise summary of an author's message, and I would appreciate it if contributors would make an effort to provide the summary. If anyone would like to split off a linguistics/psychology list, I'll provide the necessary assistance. I like reading the messages, but I'm having trouble moderating such discussions and deciding which seminar notices to include. I think that a separate discussion list is the best solution, but I'm willing to consider some kind of joint moderation of the AIList message stream. AIList is a fun hobby, but I'd like to have a little more free time for other activities. Thanks to everyone for helping to make AIList such a success. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: 5 Apr 1985 1229-EST From: ALR at MIT-XX.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Database Theory and Equations (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] DATE: TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 1985 PLACE: NE43-512A Database Theory and Computing with Equations Paris C. Kanellakis MIT Databases and equational theorem proving are well developed and seemingly unrelated areas of Computer Science research. We provide two natural links between these fields and demonstrate how equational theorem proving can provide useful techniques and tools for a variety of database tasks. Our first application is a novel way of formulating database constraints (dependencies) using equations. Dependency implication, a central computational problem in database theory, is transformed into reasoning about equations. Mathematical techniques from universal algebra provide new proof procedures and better lower bounds for database dependency implication. Our second application demonstrates that the uniform word problem for lattices is equivalent to implication of dependencies expressing transitive closure together with functional dependencies, (functional dependencies were the first and most widely studied database constraints). This natural generalization of functional dependencies, which is not expressible using conventional database theory formulations, has an efficient decision procedure and a natural inference system. This is joint work with Stavros S. Cosmadakis. HOST: Prof. Guttag ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 10 Apr 85 13:04:45 est From: Voula Vanneli Subject: Seminar - Processing Uncertain Knowledge (UToronto) UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE (SF = Sandford Fleming Building, 10 King's College Rd.) ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR - Monday, April 15, 11 a.m., SF 1105 Harry Stephanou Texas Processing Uncertain Knowledge The methodology described in this talk is motivated by the need to design knowledge based systems for applications that involve: (1) subjective and/or incomplete knowledge contributed by multiple domain experts, and (ii) inaccurate and/or incomplete data collected from different measure- ments. The talk consists of two parts. In the first part, we present a quantitative criterion for measuring the effectiveness of the consensus obtained by pooling evidence from two knowledge sources. After a brief review of the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence, we intro- duce a set-theoretic generalization of entropy. We then prove that the pooling of evidence by Dempster's rule decreases the total entropy of the sources, and therefore focuses their knowledge. In the second part of the talk, we present a fuzzy classification algorithm that can utilize a limited number of unreliable training samples, or prototypes. We then pro- pose the extension of this algorithm to a reasoning by anal- ogy scheme in which decisions are based on the "similarity" of the observed evidence to prototypical situations stored in the knowledge base. The measure of similarity relies on a set-theoretic generalization of cross-entropy. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 8 Apr 85 14:21:11-PST From: Susan Gere Subject: Seminar - Compact LISP Machine (SU) EE380/CS310 Seminar on Computer Systems Title: Compact LISP Machine Speaker: Steven D. Krueger Texas Instruments, Dallas Time: Wednesday, April 10 at 4:15 p.m. Place: Terman Auditorium The Compact LISP Machine (CLM) development program is the first of several Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) programs intended to provide embedded symbolic computing capabilities for government applications. As one of many contracts funded under the Strategic Computing Program, the CLM will provide a symbolic computer capability for insertion of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics technology in a wide range of applications. The heart of the CLM system is a high speed 32-bit VLSI LISP processor chip, built using high speed CMOS technology. It is based on the architecture of the Explorer LISP machine from Texas Instruments, which is based on the CADR LISP Machine from MIT and and LISP Machines Incorporated (LMI). The CLM system consists of four types of modules: Processor, Cache/Mapper, 4MB Memory, and Bus Interface. The Processor, Memory, and Bus Interface modules communicate over a high-performance 32-bit multi-master NuBus(TM) system bus. Some motivation will be given for adopting a special architecture for symbolic processing. Then the basic architecture of the CLM processor and Explorer processor will be reviewed. The NuBus system bus will be described, and the CLM system modules will be described. ------------------------------ Date: 4 April 1985 1155-EST From: Theona Stefanis@CMU-CS-A Subject: Seminar - How Processes Learn (CMU) Name: PS Seminar - J. Misra, The University of Texas/Austin Date: 10 April (Wed.) Time: 3:00-4:30 Place: 4605 WeH Topic: How Processes Learn A key feature of distributed systems is that each component process has access to its own state but not to the states of other processes. Any nontrivial distributed algorithm requires that some processes learn about the states of others. To study such issues, we introduce the notion of isomorphism among computations: two computations are isomorphic with respect to a process if the process can't tell them apart. We show that isomorphisms can be used to define and study learning by processes. We give a precise characterization of minimum information flow for achieving certain desired goals. As an example we show that there is no algorithm to detect termination of an underlying computation using a bounded number of overhead messages. This talk assumes no previous background in distributed systems. ------------------------------ Date: 09 Apr 85 1321 PST From: Marianne Siroker Subject: Seminar - Space Modeling for Robot Navigation (SU) SPECIAL ROBOTICS SEMINAR On Wednesday, April 10, Raja Chatila from France will speak on Consistent Space Modeling for Mobile Robot Navigation Time: 4:15 PM Place: Rm 352 MJH In order to understand its environment, a mobile robot should be able to model it consistently, and to locate itself correctly. One major difficulty to be solved is the inaccuracies introduced by the sensors. The presented approach to cope with this problem relies on general principles to deal with uncertainties: the use of multisensory system, favoring of the data collected by the more accurate sensor in a given situation, averaging of different but consistent measurements of the same entity weighted with their associated uncertainties, and a methodology enabling a mobile robot to define its own reference landmarks while exploring and modeling its environment. These ideas are presented together with an example of their application on the mobile robot HILARE. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Apr 85 14:15 EST From: Tim Finin Subject: Seminar - Pictorial Explanations (UPenn) AUTOMATING THE CREATION OF PICTORIAL EXPLANATIONS Steve Feiner (Brown Univ) 3pm Monday April 15th, 337 Towne Building Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania The APEX [Automated Pictorial EXplanations] project has as its long-term goal the realtime computer generation of effective pictorial and textual explanations. Our current research has concentrated on the automated creation of pictures that depict the performance of physical actions, such as turning or pushing, on objects. We are constructing a test-bed system that generates pictures of actions performed by a problem solver. Our system supports rules for determining automatically the objects to be shown in a picture, the style and level of detail with which they should be rendered, the method by which the action itself should be indicated, and the picture's viewing specifications. A picture crystallizes about a small set of objects inferred from the nature of the action being depicted. Additional objects and detail are added when it is determined that they help disambiguate an object from others with which it may be confused. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 17 Apr 85 12:48 EST From: Huhns Subject: Seminar - Distributed Knowledge-Based Learning (USCarolina) CENTER FOR MACHINE INTELLIGENCE University of South Carolina A DISTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE-BASED LEARNING SYSTEM FOR INFORMATION RETRIEVAL Speaker: Uttam Mukhopadhyay Date: 3:00 p.m. Wednesday, April 17, 1985 Location: Room 230, Engineering Building MINDS (Multiple Intelligent Node Document Servers) is a distributed system of knowledge-based query engines for efficiently retrieving multimedia documents in an office environment of distributed workstations. By learning document distribution patterns, as well as user interests and preferences during system usage, it customizes document retrievals for each user. In this talk we discuss the implementation of a two-layer learning testbed for studying plausible heuristics. In the simulated environment, document distribution patterns (object-level concepts) used by the query engine are learned at the lower level with the help of heuristics for assigning credit and recommending adjustments; these heuristics are incrementally refined at the upper level with the help of meta-heuristics. ------------------------------ Date: Thu 25 Apr 85 16:35:45-PST From: Elliott Levinthal Subject: Seminar - DART: An Automated Diagnostician (SU) Professor Michael Genesereth will be the featured speaker at the Seminar on May 1st. Time is 2:15, in Terman Room 217. "DART: An Automated Diagnostician for Equipment Failures" Michael R. Genesereth Logic Group Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford This talk describes a device-independent diagnostic program called DART. DART differs from previous approaches to diagnosis taken in the Artificial Intelligence community in that it works directly from design descriptions rather than MYCIN-like symptom-fault rules. DART differs from previous approaches to diagnosis taken in the design-automation community in that it is more general and in many cases more efficient. DART uses a device-independent language for describing devices and a device-independent inference procedure for diagnosis. The resulting generality allows it to be applied to a wide class of devices ranging from digital logic to nuclear reactors. Although this generally engenders some computational overhead on small problems, it facilitates the use of multiple design descriptions and thereby makes possible combinatoric savings that more than offsets this overhead on problems of realistic size. ------------------------------ Date: 26 Apr 1985 16:05 EST (Fri) From: "Daniel S. Weld" Subject: Seminar - Abstraction and Classification in NIKL (MIT) ABSTRACTION AND CLASSIFICATION IN A HYBRID REPRESENTATION SYSTEM Marc Vilain BBN Laboratories Cambridge, MA Hybrid architectures have been used in several recent knowledge representation systems. In this talk, I will explore several hybrid representation architectures, focusing particularly on the architecture of the KL-TWO system. KL-TWO is built around a propositional reasoner called PENNI (a descendant of RUP) and a terminological reasoner called NIKL (a descendant of KL-ONE). I will show how NIKL can be interfaced to PENNI so as to augment PENNI's propositional language with a limited form of quantification. This interface relies crucially on two operations that follow naturally from the KL-TWO architecture: abstraction and classification. I will describe these operations, and discuss how their generality might extend beyond the scope of KL-TWO. Tuesday, April 30; 4:00pm; 8th Floor Playroom ------------------------------ Date: 24 Apr 1985 12:24-EST From: AHAAS at BBNG.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Evidential Reasoning in Semantic Networks (BBN) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Another BBN AI Seminar: Lokendra Shastri of U. of Rochester will talk on Friday April 26 in room 5/143 (near the travel office). Evidential Reasoning in Semantic Networks A Formal Theory and its Parallel Implementation The talk presents an evidential approach to knowledge representation and inference wherein the principle of maximum entropy is applied to deal with uncertainty and incompleteness. It focuses on a representation language that is an evidential extension of semantic networks, and develops a formal theory of inheritance and recognition within this language. The theory applies to a limited, but interesting, class of inheritance and recognition problems, including those that involve exceptions, multiple hierarchies, and conflicting information. The resulting theory may be implemented as an interpreter-free, massively parallel network made up of highly interconnected but extremely simple computing elements. The network can solve inheritance and recognition problems in time proportional to the depth of the conceptual hierarchy. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Mon May 6 04:29:56 1985 Date: Mon, 6 May 85 04:29:50 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a023893; 5 May 85 23:30 EDT Date: Sun 5 May 1985 16:35-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #59 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Mon, 6 May 85 04:20 EST AIList Digest Monday, 6 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 59 Today's Topics: Seminars - Artificial Language Learning (SU) & Understanding Text with Diagrams (UTexas) & Semantics and Metaphysics (CSLI) & Diagram Understanding (SRI) & Simple Description of the World (CSLI) & Illocutionary Acts (UCB) & A Computational Model of Skill Acquisition (SU) & Marker-Passing during Problem Solving (UToronto) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 9 Apr 85 18:23:01 pst From: gluck@SU-PSYCH (Mark Gluck) Subject: Seminar - Artificial Language Learning (SU) Morphological & prosodic cues in the learning of a miniature phrase-structure language RICHARD MEIER (Stanford University) I will claim that the input to language learning is a grouped and structured sequence of words and that learning operates most successfully on such structures, and not on mere word strings. After briefly reviewing evidence for such groupings in natural language, this claim will be supported by three experiements in artificial language learning. These experiments allow rigorous control of the input to the learner. Prior work had argued that, in such experiments, adult subjects can learn complex syntactic rules only with extensive semantic mediation. In the current experiments, subjects fully learned complex aspects of syntax if they viewed, or heard, sentences (paired with an uninformative semantics) containing one of three grouping cues for constituent structure: prosody, function words, or agreement suffixes on the words within a constituent. Absent such cues, subjects learned only limited aspects of syntax. These results suggest that, in natural languages, such grouping cues may subserve syntax learning. April 12th 3:15pm Jordan Hall; Rm. 100 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 10 Apr 85 13:24:21 cst From: briggs@ut-sally.ARPA (Ted Briggs) Subject: Seminar - Understanding Text with Diagrams (UTexas) Understanding Text with an Accompanying Diagram by Bill Bulko noon Friday April 12 PAI 5.60 We are investigating the mechanisms by which a physics problem specified jointly by English text and graphics images can be understood. The investigation is guided by the study of the following subproblems: (1) What kinds of rules and knowledge would it take to understand the information contained in a picture model and a block of related English text? (2) What kind of control structure is required? (3) How can information contained in the picture but not in the text, and vice versa, be recognized and understood? That is, how can coreference between text and a picture be handled? ------------------------------ Date: Wed 3 Apr 85 16:26:36-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Semantics and Metaphysics (CSLI) Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, April 11, 1985 ``Semantics for Natural Language: Metaphysics for the Simple-minded?'' Chris Menzel, CSLI What, exactly, is the connection between semantics and metaphysics? A semantical theory gives an account of the meaning of certain expressions in natural language, and, intuitively, the meaning of an expression has to do with the connection between the expression (or an utterance of it) and the world. Thus, a simple-minded view might be that (as far as it goes) a correct semantical theory ipso facto yields the sober metaphysical truth about what there is. To the contrary, implicit in much work in semantics is the idea that all we should expect of a good theory is that it be, in Keenan's terms, descriptively adequate: it should provide a theoretical structure which preserves our judgments of logical truth and entailment, never mind the question of the literal metaphysical details of the structure (e.g., that the denotations of singular terms are complex sets of sets rather than individuals). For next week's TINlunch I will provide a framework for discussion by laying out the simple-minded view and its chief rival in somewhat more detail. Being rather simple-minded myself, I'll attempt to defend a reasonable version of the former. As grist for both philosophical mills I will draw upon recent work in intensional logic, Montague grammar, generalized quantifiers, the semantics of plurals, and situation semantics. --Chris Menzel ------------------------------ Date: Mon 8 Apr 85 11:19:34-PST From: PENTLAND@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Diagram Understanding (SRI) Area P1 Talk -- WHERE: SRI Int'l Room EK242 (conference room) WHEN: Tues April 9 at 2:30 DIAGRAM UNDERSTANDING: THE INTERSECTION OF COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND COMPUTER VISION Fanya S. Montalvo MIT, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ABSTRACT A problem common to Computer Vision and Computer Graphics is identified. It deals with the representation, acquisition, and validation of symbolic descriptions for visual properties. The utility of treating this area as one is explained in terms of providing the facility for diagrammatic conversations with systems. I call this area "Diagram Understanding", which is analogous to Natural Language Understanding. The recognition and generation of visual objects are two sides of the same symbolic coin. A paradigm for the discovery of higher-level visual properties is introduced, and its application to Computer Vision and Computer Graphics described. The notion of denotation is introduced in this context. It is the map between linguistic symbols and visual properties. A method is outlined for associating symbolic descriptions with visual properties in such a way that human subjects can be brought into the loop in order to validate (or specify) the denotation map. Secondly, a way of discovering a natural set of visual primitives is introduced. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 3 Apr 85 16:26:36-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Simple Description of the World (CSLI) Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, April 11, 1985 ``What if the World Were Really Quite Simple?'' Alex Pentland, CSLI One of the major stumbling blocks for efforts in AI has been the apparent overwhelming complexity of the natural world; for instance, when an AI program tries to decide on a course of action (or the meaning of a sentence) it is often defeated by the incredible number of alternatives to consider. Results such as those of Tversky, however, argue that people are able to use characteristics of the current situation to somehow "index" directly into the two or three most likely alternatives, so that deductive reasoning per se plays a relatively minor role. How could people accomplish such indexing? One possibility is that the structure of our environment is really quite a bit simpler that it appears on the surface, and that people are able to use this structure to constrain their reasoning much more tightly than is done in current AI research. Is it possible that the world is really relatively simple? In forming a scientific theory we may trade the size and complexity of description against the amount of error. Because modern scientific endeavors have placed great emphasis on increasingly accurate description, very little effort has gone toward discovering a grain size of description at which the world may be relatively simply described while still maintaining a useful level of accuracy. I will argue that such a simple description of the world is plausible, discuss progress in discovering such a descriptive vocabulary, and comment on how knowledge of such a vocabulary might have a profound impact on AI and psychology. --Alex Pentland ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 24 Apr 85 17:34:14 pst From: chertok%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Paula Chertok) Subject: Seminar - Illocutionary Acts (UCB) BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237B TIME: Tuesday, April 30, 11 - 12:30 PLACE: 240 Bechtel Engineering Center SPEAKER: Herbert H. Clark, Department of Psychology, Stan- ford University TITLE: ``Illocutionary acts, illocutionary perfor- mances'' From John Austin on, theorists have said a good deal about what it is to be a question, assertion, promise, or other illocu- tionary act. But in their characterizations they have generally assumed a rather strong idealization about how illocutionary acts are performed. Among other things, they have taken these four points for granted: (1) An illocutionary act is a preplanned event. (2) It is performed by the speaker acting alone. (3) The speaker acts with certain definite intentions about affecting his addressee. And (4) the speaker discharges these intentions merely by issuing a sentence (or sentence surrogate) in the right circumstances. As with any idealization, these assumptions aren't quite right. Indeed, I will document that illocutionary acts in conversation are not preplanned events but processes that the participants may alter midcourse for various purposes, and that they are accomplished by the speaker and addressees acting together. Once the traditional assumptions are replaced by more realistic ones, we are led to quite a different notion of illocu- tionary act. The view I will develop is that performing illocutionary acts in conversation is a collaborative process between speaker and addressees. One of the goals of these participants is to establish the mutual belief, roughly by the beginning of each new contribution, that the addressees have understood the speaker's meaning well enough for current purposes. The speaker and addressees have systematic linguistic techniques for reaching this goal. In support of this view I will report a study by Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs and myself on how definite references get made in conversation and another study by Edward F. Schaefer and myself on what it is, more generally, to make certain contribu- tions to conversation. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Apr 85 05:01:59 pst From: gluck@SU-PSYCH (Mark Gluck) Subject: Seminar - A Computational Model of Skill Acquisition (SU) [Forwarded from the CSLI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Psych. Dept. Friday Cognitive Seminar April 26th 3:15pm Jordan Hall; Rm. 100 A Computational Model of Skill Aquisition KURT VAN LEHN (Xerox PARC) A theory will be presented that describes how people learn certain procedural skills, such as the written algorithms of arithmetic and algebra, from multi-lesson curricula. There are two main hypotheses. (1) Teachers enforce, perhaps unknowingly, certain constraints that relate the structure of the procedure to the structure of the lesson sequence, and moreover, students employ these constraints, perhaps unknowingly, as they induce a procedure from the lesson sequence. (2) As students follow the procedure they have induced, they employ a certain kind of meta-level problem solving to free themselves when their interpretation of the procedure gets stuck. The theory's predictions, which are generated by a computer model of the putative learning and problem solving processes, have been tested against error data from several thousand students. The usual irrefutability of computer simulations of complex cognition has been avoided by a linguistic style of argumentation that assigns empirical responsibility to individual hypotheses. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 10 Apr 85 13:04:45 est From: Voula Vanneli Subject: Seminar - Marker-Passing during Problem Solving (UToronto) UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE (GB = Galbraith Bldg., 35 St. George St.) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR - Wednesday, April 10, 4 pm, GB 244 Jim Hendler Dept. of Computer Science, Brown University Studies of Marker Passing in Knowledge Representation and Problem Solving Systems. A standard problem in Artificial Intelligence systems that do planning or problem solving is called the "late- information, early-decision paradox." This occurs when the planner makes a choice as to which action to consider, prior to encountering information that could either identify an optimal solution or that would present a contradiction. As the decision is made in the absence of this information it is often the wrong one, leading to much needless processing. In this talk I describe how the technique known as "marker- passing" can be used by a problem-solver. Marker-passing, which has been shown in the past to be useful for such cog- nitive tasks as story comprehension and word sense disambi- guation, is a parallel, non-deductive, "spreading activa- tion" algorithm. By combining this technique with a plan- ning system the paradox described above can often be circum- vented. The marker-passer can also be used by the problem- solver during "meta-rule" invocation and for finding certain inherent problems in plans. An implementation of such a system is discussed as are the design "desiderata" for a marker-passer. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Tue May 7 05:32:38 1985 Date: Tue, 7 May 85 05:32:32 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a024293; 6 May 85 1:15 EDT Date: Sun 5 May 1985 16:59-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #60 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 7 May 85 05:27 EST AIList Digest Monday, 6 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 60 Today's Topics: Seminars - Frame Problem (UCB) & The Sequential Nature of Unification (SU) & Late-Bound Polymorphic Languages (IBM-SJ) & Inclusive Predicate Existence (CMU) & The LCF Programmable Theorem Provers (UTexas) & Automated Programming (CMU) & Mathematical Discovery and Hindsight (RU) & Foundations of Horn Logic Programming (CMU) & Property Theory and Second-Order Logic (CSLI) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 3 Apr 85 15:29:21 pst From: chertok%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Paula Chertok) Subject: Seminar - Frame Problem (UCB) BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237B TIME: Tuesday, April 9, 11 - 12:30 PLACE: 240 Bechtel Engineering Center SPEAKER: Jerry Fodor, Philosophy Department, MIT and UC Berkeley TITLE: ``Modules, Frames, Fridgeons, Sleeping Dogs and The Music of The Spheres'' This paper continues the discussion of the frame problem from The Modularity of Mind. It's argued that outbreaks of the frame problem are characteristic of the study of unencapsulated - hence nonmodular - cognitive faculties, and that this explains why the effects of the problem are felt much more strongly when we consider cognition and problem solving than when the topic is perceptual integration. Since unencapsulation is a leading characteristic of any process of rational nondemonstrative infer- ence, it is argued that the solution of the frame problem is not dissociable from the general problem of understanding such processes. This rather gloomy assessment is then compared with views current in AI according to which resort to `sleeping dog' strategies has already made it possible to circumvent the frame problem. I argue that the proposed solution begs the problem. ------------------------------ Date: 3 Apr 85 0000 PST From: Arthur Keller Subject: Seminar - The Sequential Nature of Unification (SU) CS Colloquium, April 9, 4:15pm, Terman Auditorium ON THE SEQUENTIAL NATURE OF UNIFICATION Cynthia Dwork Massachusetts Institute of Technology Unification of terms is a crucial step in resolution theorem proving, with applications to a variety of symbolic computation problems. It will be shown that the general problem is log-space complete for P, even if inifinite substitutions are allowed. Thus a fast parallel algorithm for unification is unlikely. More positively, term matching, an important subcase of unification, will be shown to have a parallel algorithm requiring a number of processors polynomial in n, the size of the input, and running in time poly-logarithmic in n. This talk assumes no familiarity with unification or its applications. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 3 Apr 85 17:03:57 PST From: IBM San Jose Research Laboratory Calendar Reply-to: IBM-SJ Calendar Subject: Seminar - Late-Bound Polymorphic Languages (IBM-SJ) IBM San Jose Research Lab 5600 Cottle Road San Jose, CA 95193 Mon., Apr. 8 Computer Science Seminar 10:30 A.M. STATIC TYPE ANALYSIS IN LATE-BOUND POLYMORPHIC LANGUAGES Aud. A Late-bound languages are those which in some way permit the user to delay the binding of meanings to operation names until such time as the operation is actually to be invoked. SIMULA is generally considered to be the first such language and several others, most notably Smalltalk, Zetalisp, and LOOPS, have been introduced in recent years. These languages gain great flexibility from the programmer's ability to write procedures which work on a wide variety of kinds of data, each of which implements a small set of common operations in a data-specific way. This kind of polymorphism, coupled with an inheritance mechanism for sharing code, has enabled the creation of powerful software in remarkably little time and space. The price for this flexibility, however, has until now been the inability to formally reason about programs in these languages. In particular, the lack of a decidable and sound system of static typechecking has prevented the application of even the simplest kinds of compiler optimizations. In this way, late-binding has acquired a reputation for inherent slowness and impracticality. My talk will examine the issue of static typechecking for these languages in detail. The Smalltalk-80 language is studied first, leading to an explication of both the major subtleties inherent in the problem and the picayune but crippling difficulties with Smalltalk itself which render static analysis in that language ugly and, ultimately, impracticable. An approach to the problem and a new perspective on late-binding itself eventually emerge and, in the final part of the talk, these are applied to the design of a small, late-bound, polymorphic language. I have constructed formal semantics and a provably-sound system for type-inference in this language. These in turn have led to a type-assignment algorithm based on circular unification. P. Curtis, Cornell University Host: J. Williams ------------------------------ Date: 2 Apr 1985 1621-EST From: Lydia Defilippo Subject: Seminar - Inclusive Predicate Existence (CMU) APPLIED LOGIC SEMINAR Speaker: Ketan Mulmuley Date: Monday, April 8, 1985 Time: 2:00 - 3:15 pm Place: 2105 Doherty Hall Title: A Mechanizable Theory For Inclusive Predicate Existence ABSTRACT: In denotational semantics inclusive predicates play a major role in showing the equivalence of two semantics - one operational and one denotational, for example - of a given language. Proving the existence these inclusive predicates is always the hardest part of any semantic equivalence proof. Reynolds and Milne gave a general scheme for proving such existences. However, because of the difficult nature of these proofs it soon became desirable to have a mechanizable theory for such proofs so that the computer could automate a large chunk of them. We shall present one such theory and see how it was implemented on top of LCF. Moreover, we shall prove that this existence issue is indeed nontrivial through diagonalization. ------------------------------ Date: Sun 7 Apr 85 13:23:27-CST From: CL.SHANKAR@UTEXAS-20.ARPA Subject: Seminar - The LCF Programmable Theorem Provers (UTexas) Larry Paulson (Cambridge U.) on LCF, Tue April 9, 4-5pm, Pai 3.02 Abstract: The LCF project has produced a family of interactive, programmable theorem-provers, particularly intended for verifying computer hardware and software. The introduction sketches basic concepts: the metalanguage ML, the logic PPLAMBDA, backwards proof, rewriting, and theory construction. A historical section surveys some LCF proofs. Several proofs involve denotational semantics, notably for compiler correctness. Functional programs for parsing and unification have been verified. Digital circuits have been proved correct, and some subsequently fabricated. There is an extensive bibliography of work related to LCF. The most dynamic issues at present are data types, subgoal techniques, logics of computation, and the development of ML. ------------------------------ Date: 15 Apr 1985 0912-EST From: Lydia Defilippo Subject: Seminar - Automated Programming (CMU) Speakers: Kent Petersson and Jan Smith Dept. of Mathematics, Univ. of Goteborg, Sweden Date: Tuesday, April 16 Time: 3:30 - 4:30 Place: 4605 Wean Hall Topic: Program derivation in type theory In Martin-Lof's type theory, programs can be formally derived from specifications. When formulating a specification, predicate logic is available by the interpretation of propositions as types. Formulating the rules as tactics, programs are constructed "top down." These ideas will be illustrated by a derivation of a program for the partitioning problem. ------------------------------ Date: 17 Apr 85 13:28:24 EST From: John Subject: Seminar - Mathematical Discovery and Hindsight (RU) Machine Learning Colloquium MATHEMATICAL DISCOVERY AND THE HINDSIGHT CRITERION Michael Sims, Rutgers Abstract My dissertation research is an investigation into the nature of mathematical discovery, and this talk will concern the portion of that work related to the understanding of the relationship between changes in representation and a discovery systems performance. More specifically, I would like to define new concepts in such a way that the resulting representation language leads to better efficiency in future discovery tasks. I will suggest a general principle (Hindsight Criterion), which leads to greater future efficiency in concept formation problems in an interestingness driven discovery system. I will also indicate why this is expected to be true. The Hindsight Criterion says that it is useful to define a new concept when doing so will make an (already known) interesting expression simpler. Although this is a widely used criterion, my work indicates how Hindsight relates to the complexity of the search for the original expression, as well as how it can improve the complexity of future discoveries in an actual discovery system. I will also discuss how Hindsight is being used to direct concept formation in the mathematical discovery system, IL, which I am currently implementing. DATE: Friday, April 19th TIME: 11:00-12noon (talk); 12noon-12:30 (discussion) PLACE: Room 423, Hill ------------------------------ Date: 25 Apr 1985 0828-EST From: Lydia Defilippo Subject: Seminar - Foundations of Horn Logic Programming (CMU) Speaker: Vijay Saraswat Date: Monday, April 29, 1985 Time: 2:00 - 3:15 Place: Scaife Hall 324 Topic: On the foundations of (Horn) logic programming. In this talk I present the classical (van Emden, Kowalski, Apt ...) interpretation of Horn logic (without equality) as a programming language. In this view (computation as deduction), definite clauses are viewed as specifications of recursively defined procedures. The least fixed point of the functional associated with these procedures (which can be captured by a form of resolution known as SLD-resolution, i.e. non-deterministic procedure call with parameter passing by unification) is then seen as precisely the extension of the corresponding predicate in the initial model of the axioms. Various operational notions of "negation" arise in this context, which can be related to validity in certain Herbrand models, and I will discuss them briefly. I will also discuss recent work by Nait-Abdallah and van Emden on the semantics of a certain kind of infinitary computation using Horn clauses. Finally, I will touch upon some "real" "logic" programming langauges such as Prolog and Concurrent Prolog and show why the classical semantics is not adequate. For Prolog it only provides a notion of partial correctness, and for Concurrent Prolog it just bounds the space of correct answers to a query, while not telling us anything about whether the query might fail or not terminate. Answering such questions leads to the application of more conventional techniques from semantics of programming languages to (Horn) logic programming. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 24 Apr 85 17:10:00-PST From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Property Theory and Second-Order Logic (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] THURSDAY, May 2, 1985 2:15 p.m. CSLI Seminar Redwood Hall ``Property Theory and Second-Order Logic'' Room G-19 Chris Menzel, CSLI ``Property Theory and Second-Order Logic'' Much recent work in semantics (e.g., Barwise and Perry, Chierchia, Sells, Zalta) involves an extensive appeal to abstract logical objects--properties, relations, and propositions. Such objects were of course not unheard of in semantics prior to this work. What is noteworthy is the extent to which the conception of these objects differs from the prevailing conception in formal semantics, viz., Montague's. Two ways in which they differ (not necessarily common to all recent accounts) stand out: first, these abstract objects are metaphysically primitive, not set theoretic constructions out of possible worlds and individuals; second, they are untyped--properties can exemplify each other as well as themselves, relations can fall within their own field, and so on. With properties, relations, and propositions playing this more prominent role in semantics (as well as in philosophy), it is essential that there be a rigorous mathematical theory of these objects. The framework for such a theory, I think, is second-order logic; indeed, I will argue that second-order logic, rightly understood, just IS the theory of properties, relations, and propositions. To this end, building primarily on the work of Bealer, Cocchiarella, and Zalta, I will present a second-order logic that is provably consistent along with an algebraic intensional semantics which yields significant insights into the structure of the abstract ontology of logic and the paradoxes. Time permitting, I will apply the logic to two issues, one in semantics and the other in the philosophy of mathematics--specifically, to the analysis of noun phrases involving terms of order like `fourth' and `last', and the question of what the (ordinal) numbers are, to which I will give a logicist answer adumbrated by Russell. --Chris Menzel ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Thu May 9 05:02:43 1985 Date: Thu, 9 May 85 05:02:37 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,MINDELJL,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a015831; 8 May 85 13:17 EDT Date: Wed 8 May 1985 09:25-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #61 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Thu, 9 May 85 04:57 EST AIList Digest Wednesday, 8 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 61 Today's Topics: Machine Translation - Survey, Games & Learning - NIM References, Opinion - Research Literature, Seminar - Mechanized Hypothesis Formation (SMU), Description - CS at Linkopings University, Sweden ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 6 MAY 85 14:48-N From: PETITP%CGEUGE51.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA Subject: more on machine translation Here is a summary of the information I sent to Barbara Stafford concerning Machine Translation. (cf her request in AIList V3 #54 and my note in V3 # 50) To know what is beeing done on MT in Provo,Utah, contact Alan K. Melby at Brigham Young University. Mr Melby works in the field of user interface for MT and gave a paper at the ISSCO tutorial on MT: "Recipe for a translator's workstation". Here are ALPS and WEIDNER's address: Alps Systems 190 West 800 North Provo, Utah 84601 Tel: (801) 3750090 Another commercial system I didn't mentionned was developped in Germany: LOGOS (also quite primitive). Here is their address: LOGOS Computer Systems Deutschland Gmbh Lyoner Strasse 26 6000 Frankfurt am Main 71 Tel: (0611) 666 69 50 Telex 4 189808 And also in Germany, Siemens just entered the market with METAL (that I mentionned in AIList v3 #50). It was presented at the Hannover fair this april. In the ISSCO MT tutorial, the presentation by E.Ananiadou & S.Warwick ("An overview of post ALPAC developments") might interest you: In that paper there is a part on TITUS a french MT system for abstracts with a restricted syntax. This might be close to your work. Here is their address: Institut Textile de France 35 rue des Abondances F-92100 Boulogne-sur-Seine (France) Tel: 825.18.90 Telex: 250940 And some more reference to introductory readings in Machine Translation: Kilby K.J., Whitelock P.J. "Linguistic and computational techniques in Machine Translation system design. - Final report", December 83 CCL/UMIST report 84/2 with description of the systems SYSTRAN, TAUM METEO, TAUM AVIATION, GETA ARIANE-78, LRC METAL, Wilks' PS. Centre for Computational Linguistics University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology PO BOX 88 Manchester, England (Pete Whitelock's network address is pjw%minim%umpa@UCL-CS.ARPA) Veronica Lawson (Editor) Practical Experience of Machine Translation North Holland, 1982 (Papers from a conference given by the ASLIB) ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 5 May 85 13:53:17 edt From: gross@dcn9.arpa (Phill Gross) Subject: NIM references With a partner, I developed a learning Nim game as part of a project for a AI course at George Washington University. It was implemented as a Collective Learning Automaton, a concept advanced by the instructor, Peter Bock. The CLA concept is rather simple. It only works for small state-space games where the current state representation contains all information necessary to make the next move. It also works best with games like Nim that have a perfect playing strategy. The automaton knows the rules and begins by guessing moves. An independent process watches the action and rewards or punishes the automaton based on the result. In the next game, the automaton chooses moves based on what it 'learned' from its previous experiences. After a series of games, it homes in on the correct strategy. We matched our automaton against 4 levels of opponents- an expert, another learner, a dummy (made legal but totally random moves) and a 'novice' (smart enough not to make random moves but hasn't really gotten the hang of it yet). Our interest was learning speed under various reward/punishment regimes. Despite the simplicity of the CLA model, some interesting, 'intuitively obvious' anthropomorhisms were 'verified'. For example, it always learned quickly and perfectly against an expert. Against the dummy, it exhibited very confused behavior, characterized by slow, imperfect learning, since it may be alternately rewarded and punished for the same move. (The moral, I suppose, is if you want to learn a game, don't play against schlubs). It seemed that heavier punishment was more important when playing against the novice or the dummy. (ie, if a move loses against a dummy, it must really be bad), whereas light punishment/heavier reward produced better results against the expert (don't crucify the kid if he loses when he's clearly out of his league). Interestingly enough, learning was slowed against the expert without at least a small amount of punishment (constructive criticism?). AI is by no means my main interest but I feel compelled to open myself to flames by adding a couple comments. The two AI courses I took (the other at Penn State) were (charitably) the weakest courses I had in grad school. While any good curriculum should include courses on topics like compilers and operating systems, perhaps the state of AI today is such that it should not be casually included just to broaden the course offerings. It seems that the AI frontier is pushing forward on two fronts- a rather esoteric 'high end' exploring things like vision, natural language understanding and cognitive processes; and a more down-to-earth 'low end' dealing with knowledge based systems and heuristic programming. While the former mixes a number of disciplines outside computer science and is best pursued as thesis topics, I feel the latter could be taught to a bright class of sophomores or juniors. A manager of KBES projects noted to me that his experience showed that if you give some expensive tools to a smart programmer, send her to a two week course given by one of the vendors and then let'm hack for a while, you've got yourself a 'knowledge engineer'. If only results in true AI could be achieved as readily. All of this is a major digression from my original intent, which was to add a few references to the Nim list. * 'Basic Computer Games', David Ahl, Workman Publishing Co., 1978. * 'Games of the World', Frederick Gruenfeld, Ballentine Books, 1975. * 'The World Book of Math Power', (Adjunct to the good old World Book Encyclopedia), Vol 2, "NIM", pp 667-671, 1983. Anyone interested in CLA's should contact Peter Bock at GWU, since I can't recall him giving references for his articles. Regretfully (and somewhat gratefully, since I really don't feel that we did much to push forward the AI frontiers), neither the code nor our final report is available online, nor do I have the time and resources to make it available by mail. Phill Gross [Phil's approach sounds like the "learning machine" discussed in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column in March 1962. I remember inferring that something was wrong with my own NIM strategy after noticing that 1) my machine quickly learned to beat me whenever I started, and 2) it usually also beat me when it started. That column got me interested in learning algorithms and, eventually, AI. I still have the paper machine I constructed, along with the card-and-hole "logic machine" from the December 1960 column. The NIM reference I gave earlier should have been W. Rouse Ball, not Bell. I think I have his 13th edition packed away somewhere. It also has interesting discussions of mathematical card tricks, string figures, and the Cambridge educational system -- much of which was omitted from later editions. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Tue 7 May 85 18:25:31-EDT From: SRIDHARAN@BBNG.ARPA Subject: Research Literature I read an article in New Scientist (18 April 85) that ... ".. there are 2750 different mathematics research journals. If you conservatively estimate the annual contents of each to be, on average, 700 pages, this means that each year some 1 650 000 pages of mathematical research are published. One estimate puts the number of profesional mathematicians in the world at 100 000." Compared to this AI has I would guess has less than 2 dozen journals now and about 1000 researchers (over-estimate). In my mind, this discipline, concerned with knowledge and reasoning, is just as fundamental as mathematics - and I should like AI to be eventually (in the next century) to be just as large. One consequence of growth should be understood. When someone writes a paper, others may not actually read it, especially not right away. I think the time lapse between the appearance of a paper and its wide appeal may grow QUADRATICALLY with the volume of publications. I know that I now take about 2 years to catch up with papers of interest to me. A decade ago, I used to finish reading relevant papers in about 6 months. For example, six months after the '73 and '75 IJCAIs, I had managed to read or scan relevant papers from those proceedings. Now, I am behind even with AAAI-83 and -84. All this says, we need to cultivate patience as the discipline grows! The process of knowledge diffusion will take longer. Our respective distractions engendered by commercial/business hoop-la, only aggravates this. To do anything state-of-the-art, and to push the frontiers will take more effort as time goes on. People who write papers, now have an increased responsibility to do more thorough checks of existing literature. Given that we have the use of very advanced computational tools, we ought to be able to do this more thoroughly than most other disciplines. ------------------------------ Date: 7 May 1985 19:50-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Seminar - Mechanized Hypothesis Formation (SMU) Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern Methodist University TOPIC: Progress in Automated Research SPEAKER: Dr. Fred N. Springsteel, Visitng Professor University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri WHERE, WHEN INFO: Thursday May 9, 1985 1:30-2:30 PM Thursday May 9, 1985 315 SIC, Southern Methodist University Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is a lesser-known field that outgrew the bounds of statistics. Originated by J. W. Tukey in 1962, EDA works toward an open-ended meta-goal: to discover "all interesting" (nontrivial, normal form, valid) hypotheses about a domain that is represented by a large scientific sample of data, e. g. a suburban census matrix. One very active brand of EDA is being purused by a 20-year-old Czech research circle that I visited in 1976. Their EDA is called Mechanized Hypothesis Formation (MHF); it can heuristically generate-and-test many types of logical/statistical forms. MHF algorithmic decision problems have been shown, by me, to have complexities that swift shiftly from P-time to NP-hard (TCS '79 IJMMS '81). Users of such complex, multilevel software packages need expert advice! Lately, consulting system technics have been applied to make a Test Advisor for users, based on their special needs; it recommends which statistic (of many) to run and how to parametrize the load module. A much larger project (GUHA-80) is planned, which hopes to apply the results of AUTOMATED EDA to the big bottleneck in building expert systems: KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION. ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 1985 2115 From: mcvax!enea!liuida!jbl@seismo.ARPA Subject: Description - CS at Linkopings University, Sweden [Edited by Laws@SRI-AI.] The Department of Computer and Information Science at Linkopings University in Sweden announces the availability of postdoctoral research and sabbatical leave positions. The department provides a wide range of research and educational activities as indicated in the areas of faculty specialization. The university is located in the town of Linkoping, approximately 200 kilometers south of Stockholm. Linkoping has a population of 120000 and is in the heart of the rapidly expanding Ostergotland high technology industrial area. Linkopings University employes approximately 1600 people and has faculties of engineering, science, liberal arts, medicine and education. The department of Computer and Information Science has approximately 80 employees (faculty, staff and graduate students) of whom 15 have attained the doctoral degree. [...] Faculty members (for academic year 1984-1985) Par Emanuelson, functional languages, program verification, program analysis and program manipulation, programming environments, software engineering. Peter Fritzson (on leave to SUN MicroSystems during 1985), tool generation, incremental tools, programming environments. Anders Haraldsson, programming languages and systems, programming methodology, program manipulation. Roland Hjerppe, library science and systems, citation analysis and bibliometrics, fact representation and information retrieval, hypertext, human-computer interaction and personal computing. Sture Hagglund, database technology, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence applications. Harold W. Lawson, Jr. (Professor of Telecommunications and Computer Systems), computer architecture, VLSI, computer-aided design, methodology of computer-related education and training. Bengt Lennartsson, programming environments, real-time applications, distributed systems. Andrzej Lingas, complexity theory, analysis of algorithms, geometric complexity, graph algorithms, logic programming, VLSI theory. Bryan Lyles (guest researcher), computer architecture, VLSI, user interfaces, distributed systems. Jan Maluszynski, logic programming, software specification methods. Erik Sandewall (Professor of Computer Science), representation of knowledge with logic, theory of information management systems, office information systems, autonomous expert systems. Bo Sundgren, database design, conceptual modelling, statistical information systems. Erik Tengvald, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, planning and problem solving, expert systems. Associated Faculty Members Jan-Olaf Bruer (Dept of Electrical Engineering), office automation systems, especially security issues. Ingemar Ingemarsson (Professor of Information Theory), information theory, security and data encryption, error correction codes and data compression. Ove Wigertz (Professor of Medical Informatics), medical information systems, expert systems. During the next academic year (85/86) additional Ph.D. faculty will be joining the department in the areas of computational complexity, computational linguistics, software engineering and computer systems. Department and University Computing Resources The department has as research computers a DEC 2060, a DEC VAX11/780, several SUNs, six Xerox 1108 InterLisp machines, and numerous smaller machines such as PDP-11s and micro-VAXs. Department plans include significant near-term expansion of research computing. Undergraduate computing systems include two DEC 2065s, a DEC 2020, a DEC PDP 11/70 and PDP 11/73 running Unix, a large number of Apple Macintoshes and a variety of small machines such as PDP 11s used for operating system labs. As is the case with research computing, major expansions of undergraduate computing capacity are planned in the near future. Since the total number of undergraduates enrolled in computer related lines of study is less than at some large U.S. universities, each student gets significant computer time. Linkoping is part of the UUCP and SUNET networks. The campus is wired with Ethernet and all major machines are connected via TCP/IP, DECNET or XNS protocols. For further information about Linkoping University and the Department of Computer and Information Science contact: Graduate Division c/o Mrs. Lillemor Wallgren Department of Computer and Information Science Linkopings University S-581 83 Linkoping SWEDEN Telephone (+46) 13-281480 Telex: 50067 LINBIBL S UUCP: {decvax, seismo}!mcvax!enea!liuida!lew ARPA: LEW%LIUIDA.UUCP@SEISMO.ARPA ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Mon May 13 03:47:23 1985 Date: Mon, 13 May 85 03:47:17 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a009646; 12 May 85 18:05 EDT Date: Sun 12 May 1985 14:15-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #62 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Mon, 13 May 85 03:43 EST AIList Digest Sunday, 12 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 62 Today's Topics: Book Review - Logic Programming Bibliography, Seminars - Proof of the Church-Rosser Theorem (UTexas) & Mechanical Proofs in Metamathematics (SRI) & Logic Programming Environments (Penn) & Qualitative Causal Reasoning (MIT) & AI in Manufacturing Design (SU), Conferences - AI and Simulation & Law and Technology ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 10 May 85 10:31:22 EST From: Simon MacDonald Subject: Book Review - Logic Programming Bibliography Logic Programming: a Classified Bibliography by I. Balbin, and K. Lecot. This exciting area in computer science is growing very quickly; so quickly in fact, that an overview of its origins, seminal papers, landmark treatises, pioneering articles etc., may be forgotten, or difficult to identify and obtain. Now, the authors of this comprehensive bibliography of well over 1,600 entries have brought it all together, classed the type of each paper or monograph into one of 18 broad categories. This is somewhat arbitrary, but very useful for those wishing to cover a specific sub-topic. If the item covers more than one category, it is entered in each relevant section. The bibliography is more than twice the size of the one which appeared in Journal of Logic Programming, and is very recent. It also has an author index, and subject index. Approx. 330 pages, softcovers,laminated, burstbound. Release date July 15, 1985. Prepublication price of A$17.95 [Australian] is valid only until June 30th, 1985. Publisher: WILDGRASS BOOKS, 289A Smith Street, Fitzroy, Victoria, 3065, AUSTRALIA. U.S. Distributor: Publishing House, 210 Broad Street, Washington, NJ, 07882. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 8 May 85 22:58:07 cdt From: briggs@ut-sally.ARPA (Ted Briggs) Subject: Seminar - Proof of the Church-Rosser Theorem (UTexas) A MECHANICAL PROOF OF THE CHURCH-ROSSER THEOREM by N. Shankar 1 PM Friday May 10 PAI 5.60 The talk outlines a formalization and proof of the Church-Rosser theorem that was carried out with the Boyer-Moore theorem prover. This celebrated theorem on the Lambda Calculus lacked a widely accepted proof for over thirty years. The mechanical proof is based on the one due to Tait and Martin-Lof. The proof illustrates the effective use of the Boyer-Moore theorem prover in checking difficult metamathematical proofs. The above proof effort led to a much clearer understanding of the proof and brought certain representational issues to light. No familiarity with the Boyer-Moore theorem prover or Lambda Calculus will be assumed. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 10 May 85 17:08:40-PDT From: WALDINGER@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Mechanical Proofs in Metamathematics (SRI) Wednesday, May 15, 4:15, in EJ232, SRI International This is different from Shankar's talk at Stanford. MECHANICAL PROOFS IN METAMATHEMATICS N. Shankar University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas Metamathematics is a source of many interesting theorems and difficult proofs. Among these are theorems which express the soundness of derived inference rules. The talk will describe a formalization of first-order logic within the Boyer-Moore logic and discuss some well-known derived inference rules that were proved to be sound using the Boyer-Moore theorem prover. The most important of these is the tautology theorem which states that every tautology has a proof. The proof of the tautology theorem will be discussed in some detail. Such proofs demonstrate a feasible way to construct sound, efficient, and extensible proof-checking programs. No familiarity with automated theorem-proving will be assumed. Visitors from outside SRI should come to the Engineering building reception, on Ravenswood Avenue opposite Pine street. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 10 May 85 13:50 EDT From: Tim Finin Subject: Seminar - Logic Programming Environments (Penn) A MODEL AND AN IMPLEMENTATION OF A LOGIC PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT Henryk Jan Komorowski (Harvard) 10:30 May 17; room TBA, Moore School, Univ. of Pennsylvania It has been claimed that logic programming offers out- standing possibilities for new concepts in programming environments. But with the exceptions of the pioneering work of Shapiro on algorithmic debugging, Pereira's rational debugging and early work on expert systems from Imperial College, there has been little progress reported in the field of logic programming environments. This summary describes our current work on a generic software engineering shell for logic programming. We use reflection and the amalgamation of meta-level language with the object level to express and support the INCREMENTAL character of specifying/programming. An important facet of the shell is that we formalize some aspects of programming methodology and provide heuristics for avoiding errors. These heuristics formalize what experienced programmers may already know. The shell bears similarities to an expert system since it has explanation mechanisms and provides programming- knowledge acquisition. Currently, it supports single user Prolog programming and runs in C-Prolog. The shell is gen- eric in that it provides support for activities ranging from artificial intelligence programming to formal specification development. This is a joint work with Shigeo Omori. ------------------------------ Date: 10 May 1985 22:15 EDT (Fri) From: "Daniel S. Weld" Subject: Seminar - Qualitative Causal Reasoning (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] AI Revolving Seminar Tues 5/14/85 4:00pm 8AI Playroom Qualitative Causal Reasoning in Diagnosis Benjamin Kuipers The classical approach to diagnosis in medical AI programs has been based on accumulating confidence scores from weighted associations between findings and diseases. Some of the weaknesses in this approach can be avoided by incorporating a "causal model" of the mechanisms involved in the disease. We have developed a causal model representation based on qualitative simulation of the structures of physiological mechanisms to yield qualitative predictions of behavior. The causal model elaborates the diagnostic hypothesis and derives its evolution through time from its primary causes. We demonstrate QSIM, an efficient, flexible algorithm for qualitative simulation. QSIM is a qualitative abstraction of differential equations, which makes it possible to prove some useful properties. We show some examples of output from QSIM on significant physiological mechanisms, and we demonstrate our progress toward integrating hypothesis evocation and qualitative simulation into a single diagnostic system. ------------------------------ Date: Thu 9 May 85 20:33:57-PDT From: Elliott Levinthal Subject: Seminar - AI in Manufacturing Design (SU) AI in Manufacturing and Design Seminar May l5, l985 2:l5 p.m. Terman 2l7 Speaker: Professor David C. Brown Worcester Polytechnic Institute We are investigating the structure and operation of expert systems for the design of mechanical components by computer. As design in general is a poorly understood activity we have chosen to limit ourselves to a particular class of design activity, understand it thoroughly, and built expert systems that simulate that activity in a realistic way. ------------------------------ Date: 9 May 1985 19:24-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Conference - AI and Simulation Southwestern Region Simulation Council Spring Technical Meeting Artificial Intelligence and Simulation May 16-17 1985 At: University of Houston/Clear Lake Bayou Building 2700 Bay Area Blvd. Clear Lake/NASA JSC Area Houston, Texas HIghlights: Thursday 11:00 Dr. John Pinkston Vice President and Chief Scientist Micro-Electronics, Computer Technology Corp (MCC) Austin, Texas PROLOG Tutorial, Friday 9-11:15 AM Dr. Ralph Huntsinger Senior Vice PResident, SCS Professor of Computer Science California State University, Chico Cost: $25.00 two days $15.00 one day students: $10.00 ------------------------------ Date: 9 May 1985 16:09-EST From: "George R. Cross" Subject: Conference - Law and Technology ======================================================== Second Annual Conference on Law and Technology Theme: Legal Language, Computational Linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence Organizers: Dr. Charles Walter, Director Program on Law and Technology University of Houston Law Center Houston, Texas 77004 713-749-1422 713-749-4935 Dr. Sidney Lamb, Chairman Department of Linguistics and Semiotics Rice University Houston, Texas When: June 24-30, 1985 Where: University of Houston, Houston, Texas Goal: To stimulate research between jurists, linguists, and computer scientists Format: Tutorials, Research Presentations, and Workshops (Tentative) Schedule Tutorials: June 24 A.M. Legal Language June 24 P.M. Programming the Law in PROLOG June 25 A.M. Natural Language Processing June 25 P.M. Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems Original Research Papers: June 26-June 28 Workshops: June 28-30 Workshop Topics to be determined by Participants Possible Sessions and Workshop Topics: --viewing legal language as the interface between legal concepts and computer code --the language of justice and legal logic: Cardozo's methods of sociology and philosophy --semantics of legal situations --viewing legal language as a computerizable process --structural & cognitive analysis of legal language --indeterminancy and uncertainty in legal language --the role of language in reasoning --linguistic & cognitive networks --computer-human interactions --understanding natural legal language --legal document analysis & linguistic theory --automatic representation of semantic relationships --non-Von Neumann architectures --parsing natural language --the role of language in human reasoning. ======================================================= Please contact Charles Walter for further information ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Mon May 13 03:59:09 1985 Date: Mon, 13 May 85 03:59:04 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a009896; 12 May 85 19:16 EDT Date: Sun 12 May 1985 14:32-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #63 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Mon, 13 May 85 03:45 EST AIList Digest Monday, 13 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 63 Today's Topics: Queries - Requirements Decomposition & Connectionism and Parallel Distributed Processing, Binding - Walter Reitman, Games - Nim, Expert Systems - Prospector on a PC, Psychology - Emotional Attachment & Reason and Emotion & Emotions and Memory & Simulation of Human Understanding ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 9 May 85 09:21 CDT From: David_Lagrone Subject: Requirements Decomposition: Correctness and Consistency Can someone help me with a solution or even an approach to a solution to the following problem? Given a set of requirements; e.g., a requirements specification, and a "first-level expansion" of those requirements into a top- level design. Can one "prove" or otherwise demonstrate whether the lower-level, more detailed requirements are a "necessary and sufficient" statement of the related higher-level requirement? It has been pointed out that this problem may mean "are you trying to find out if all requirements mentioned in higher levels are talked about in lower levels (by actual presence)" or "if things mentioned in lower levels contain the right content or meaning to fulfill higher level requirements." I am more interested in a solution to the "content analysis" problem; how- ever, the "presence" problem needs resolution as well. I would appreciate responses being sent to me at: LAGRONE%TI-EG@CSNET-RELAY Thank you, very much, for your time and help with this. ...Regards...David LaGrone ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 10 May 85 16:14:56 est From: "Marek W. Lugowski" Subject: Info-request: Connectionism and Parallel Distr. Processing This is a general info request concerning the design of a graduate AI course. Over here at Indiana University CS Dept. we are working on the updating our AI curriculum with a graduate-level course to be called "Connectionism and Parallel Distributed Processing". A prerequisite for this course would be our standard 2-semester sequence of AI courses taken both by undergraduates and graduates. It involves a hefty amount of programming in Lisp. The new course would have a programming project, too. And now, the questions: (1) Whose AI work do you feel is most appropriate for this course? (We're thinking along the lines of the Hinton/McClelland/Rumelhart/Sejnowski/ Smolensky axis, and Hofstadter. Others?) (2) What textbooks, if any, would you recommend? Or should the course be based on papers? Which ones? (3) Could you recommend a course along those lines already taught elsewhere? Perhaps you could send us a course outline? Thank you. Please reply to me. Will summarize if desired. -- Marek Lugowski IU CS Department marek@indiana.csnet ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 8 May 85 18:36 EDT From: Gibbons@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA Subject: Binding: Walter Reitman A friend of mine noticed an attempt to bind Walter Reitman in Volume 3, Issue 47 of the AI digest. I can provide current information for you. Walter spent some time at New York University and then, in the fall of 1983, became the department manager for the Artificial Intelligence Department at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, MA where he replaced Bill Woods. In the fall of 1984, he left BBN to become the Vice President of Palladian Software, Inc., also in Cambridge, where he has been, and is responsible for, assembling the technical staff. Several other BBN employees, some from the AI department (including myself), have since joined Palladian as have others in the community. For your information, Palladian Software is a well funded and fast growing startup developing very sophisticated applications in the domains of finance and manufacturing. We are constructing hybrid systems using appropriate mixtures of both conventional and artificial intelligence technologies. We are currently developing on Symbolics 3640's (every developer has his/her own machine - and office). If you wish to contact Walter, or Palladian, messages can be sent to me, Jeff Gibbons. My arpanet address is Gibbons at MIT-MULTICS. jeff ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 9 May 85 12:16:06 edt From: Dana S. Nau Subject: Nim I know of two different games that are sometimes called "nim". The first one (the _real_ nim) involves splitting piles of sticks into smaller piles of sticks in such a way the the smaller piles contain differing numbers of sticks. The second game involves removing various quantities of sticks from a pile of sticks until none are left. This game is called Bachet's game, but it has sometimes incorrectly been called nim--even in such well-known books as Horowitz and Sahni's "Fundamentals of Data Structures Using Pascal". I imagine the request for information on nim programs was for the real nim. But in the case of Bachet's game, it's trivial to tell whether a game position is a forced win or forced loss (for example, see "Mathematical Games and Pastimes" by Domoryad), and thus it's very easy to write a computer program to play the game perfectly. ------------------------------ Date: Thu 9 May 85 10:57:28-PDT From: Joe Karnicky Subject: Prospector on a PC The April 29, 1985 issue of COMPUTER ENGINEERING contains the following statement in an article entitled AI MOVES FROM LABS TO PERSONAL COMPUTERS "The power of AI is illustrated by Stanford Research International Inc.'s Prospector, a so-called knowledge-based system. Written in Lisp, it is considered a classic example of AI. This program, which integrated the knowledge of many US Geological Survey experts, was responsible for suggesting the existence of a molybdenum deposit in Cascades, Wash., a find estimated to be worth more than $100 million. It also exemplifies AI's future direction. The system can now be implemented on a personal computer for less than $3000 with available software." This rather startling statement deals with two issues about which I would very much appreciate receiving information from readers of the AIlist: (1) What exactly was the role of Prospector in this discovery? Would the discovery have been made without the program? How much of the discovery was made by the program, and how much by the programmers? If Prospector is so competent, are other geologists using it? If not, why not? I've never seen a thorough discussion of these issues, and responses by AIlist readers who are familiar with the project would be very welcome. (2) How good an expert system can be run on a pc using one of the many commercial tools available? What practical expert systems have been created that run on pc's? I've seen a lot of articles describing expert system software for pc's, but what useful systems have been/can be contructed? It's a long jump from choosing a red wine with fish to discovering a $100 million ore deposit. Again, any information would be appreciated. [I can provide a little info on the first query, although I have not been closely connected with Prospector. First, SRI International has not been Stanford Research Institute since May 16, 1977. Prospector was primarily developed by John Gashnig, Peter Hart, Dick Duda, and Rene Reboh, although others have contributed (including M. Einaudi, a USGS geologist). John died of lung cancer; Peter, Dick, and Rene have moved on to found Syntelligence. Prospector lives on, but is not under active development; the original code has suffered from hardware changes and bit rot, but versions have been ported to many systems. I don't know whether USGS is adding additional mineral models to its repertoire. The geologists working on the project seemed to feel that this was a useful exercise, whether or not the program ever became an expert geologist. As for it fitting on a PC, I'm not too surprised -- the core of the program is a [compiled] inference net that does not grow during execution. About the only thing that does grow is the history list used for the explanatory capability. I would assume that most of the difficulty in porting Prospector is in providing the software tools for editing graphs and knowledge bases. The story I heard about the molybdenum strike was that this particular site was fed into Prospector because geologists were already convinced that molybdenum should be there -- they just hadn't been able to find it over several decades of exploratory digging. Humans were thus "responsible for suggesting the existence" of the deposit, as well as for loading in the domain models, probability functions, and field data. What Prospector did was to highlight a spot under a large pile of tailings as being the best place to dig; sure enough, that's where the molybdenum was. A strike like that more than pays for the system's entire development cost, a fact which was not lost on the oil industry -- Schlumberger and others soon started large in-house projects. The majority of people interested in Prospector, however, have been looking for an off-the-shelf expert system capable of reasoning in any domain. ("Sure, we'll just rip out all that stuff about uranium and load in some knowedge about rubber tires. Anything else?") There has been surprisingly little interest in supporting the development of new uncertain-reasoning techniques appropriate for other problem domains. That is one reason Prospector has not been overtaken by a new generation of expert systems. Can anyone answer Joe's question about how sophisticated a PC expert system can be? -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 5 May 85 13:30 EDT (Sun) From: _Bob Subject: Emotional Attachment From: MINSKY%MIT-OZ at MIT-MC.ARPA Bob Carter has answered Batali's objections to my "assault" theory better than I would have. Thanks. You are more than welcome. The theory has a verisimilitude that attracts me, and I look forward to reading your book when it is published. But I am bowing out of this discussion and leaving it to those who prefer to see the world in clearer tones of black and white than I do. They are right. Ideas @i(are) dangerous. _B ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 6 May 85 8:57:20 EDT From: Bruce Nevin Subject: reason and emotion Reason is a good servant but a lousy master. Benjamin Franklin it was who said What a wonderful thing it is to be a rational being: for we can make up a reason for whatever we have decided to do! We have this truly marvellous ability to reason, and we use it most of the time to rationalize. We freely invent plausible premisses, complete with supporting histories, to make our cherished beliefs into reasoned conclusions. We can do this only by maintaining selective ignorance, by ignoring data that do not fit. My own impression is that artificial intelligence systems mirror the choices made by many persons who enter fields of science and engineering, in that they model only the intellectual fraction of human reasoning ability. Human belief-disbelief systems depend upon a variety of logics. (I am thinking of research of Milton Rokeach.) Emotions have their own logic, and this logic drives our ratiocination far more than many of us are comfortable acknowledging. At the risk of being trite, let me affirm that there is nothing wrong with emotional motivations or emotionally-directed reasoning. It is when we keep the emotional richness of our reasoning out of conscious awareness that something is wrong, because we have hobbled ourselves. Then there can be a great deal wrong with our reasoning and with our responses to experience. We cripple ourselves by cutting off a limb of our reasoning ability, and then attribute our distress and dysfunction to the alleged unruliness of the very limb we have tried to amputate. Integration is not a matter of reconciling contrary things. It is not nearly so complicated. Integration is rather a matter of recognizing unity from multiple perspectives. Binocular vision provides a simplistic model. With both eyes you see, not two conflicting images somehow reconciled, but one image with depth added. The third dimension is not predictable from either single image by itself. Allowing the full breadth of our premisses and our logic brings the equivalent of depth perception to our conclusions. And to our belief-disbelief systems. The self-insulated intellect can be very alarmed by this kind of talk. Quite emotional, in fact, in its cold, steely way. How difficult it can be to realize that this is not a Darwinian competition (poor Charles Darwin! He said that cooperation was far more important than competition in evolution, but his audience heard what they wanted to hear . . . ), not an either/or choice between intellect and that nameless other, but the removing of a patch over one eye! (Does the artificially intelligent computer look like a tyrannical pirate to the nontechnical majority of the world?) This relates very much to the `false sense of power' noted by M. Schoppers (marcel@SRI-AI) in his note on `living programs' (3.45), to our commonly shared Pollyana-ish beliefs about self and the world noted by jmyers (3.56), and to the call for some reality-checking issued by the rape survivor/counselor from Berkeley (3.56). It is difficult to go through childhood without experiencing deep humiliation--sometimes physical rape--at the hands of ignorant, half-blind adults. Because of its power, and especially because it keeps reality at arms length, we often sieze upon intellectual prowess as a means never again ever to be so humiliated. Altogether too often we carry with us a need to humiliate others `first'. This may be difficult to bring to conscious awareness in ourselves. Until we do it consciously, however, we cannot choose whether to do it or not. And this ignorance is not bliss. Something to consider during the discussion period after a paper or research proposal has been presented! ------------------------------ Date: 7-May-85 From: Wolf-Dieter Batz Subject: emotions & memory - public discussion Hello, Thanks a lot to all the folks who replied to my last advertisement in this place. To everyone who's interested but still didn't write: Please don't write to my personal address, but to the Digest - I'm convinced that there is enough stuff in our minds to be discussed in public. - ok? Next point: My thesis is written in German and is about 150 pages long. Anyway it is stored on disk so that it can easily be transmitted by means of network exchange. Such requests will be answered as fast as possible, but in general I won't transmit it all - so tell me about special questions. So long Folks & kind regards *** Wodi ------------------------------ Date: 8-May-85 From: Wolf-Dieter Batz Subject: Re: C. Mason on Simulation of Human Understanding While working in the field 'History of Memory Research' I discovered the writings of J.F. HERBART, a German philosopher living from 1776-1841. Writing about 'Psychologie als Wissenschaft neu gegruendet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik' he didn't use the term 'memory', although he dealt with various topics of information processing. My very personal opinion is now: HERBART's theory is a theory of memory. He just uses various synonyms for this term, like ideas, images and so on. If one substitutes this synonyms with 'memory' he got it made! This indicated to me that there's no possibility theorizing about HUMAN Information Processing without refering to memory mechanisms. Anyway this is a debatable point, and I'm looking forward to public replies to this proposal. So long folks & kind regards *** Wodi ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Fri May 17 12:47:21 1985 Date: Fri, 17 May 85 12:46:51 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a014944; 16 May 85 17:24 EDT Date: Thu 16 May 1985 11:14-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #64 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Thu, 16 May 85 22:28 EST AIList Digest Thursday, 16 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 64 Today's Topics: Queries - PROLOG on INTERLISP/LOOPS & Lisp Machines & Microcomputer Lisps & Statecharts, Machine Translation - Update, Expert Systems - Prospector on a PC, Seminars - Diagnosing Multiple Faults (SU) & Fixpoint Extensions of First-Order Logic (CMU) & A New "Turing" Thesis (CMU), Course - Model Theory (CMU) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 13 May 85 18:06:35 EDT From: Louis Steinberg Subject: PROLOG on INTERLISP/LOOPS Can anyone point me to an implementation of PROLOG that will run on a Xerox Lisp machine, i.e. is implemented in Interlisp-D or Interlisp-D with LOOPS? I know of Ken Kahn's version but that unfortunately does not use standard LOOPS. This is for an educational environment so efficiency is not essential. Also welcome would be advice on porting some other, existing version. Lou Steinberg STEINBERG @ RUTGERS ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 May 85 15:32:55 pdt From: Curtis L. Goodhart Subject: Lisp Machines Anybody have any pointers to some good references for explaining the architectural characteristics of a lisp machine, ie why do you need a specific kind of machine, as opposed to a conventional computer, to run lisp? Thanks, Curt Goodhart (goodhart@nosc ;on the arpanet) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 May 85 10:23 EST From: John N Frampton Subject: Microcomputer Lisps comparable to GCLISP I am writing a review of GCLISP for a computer magazine. I have used MULISP and IQLISP on an IBM PC previously but just found out yesterday that there are several new Lisp implementations for the IBM PC which are competitive with GCLISP. I would appreciate very much getting a short description of these products to include in the GCLISP review. I would have preferred to do a comparison, but it's too late for that. At least I can say what's out there. I'd like a short description (better shorter and sooner than longer and later) - particularly touching on the extent to which they implement Common Lisp (if they do) and if they have a compiler. Reply directly to me (and the board if you want). Thanks, John Frampton ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 13 May 1985 15:02-EDT From: rh@Mitre-Bedford Subject: STATECHARTS Dave Harel was to have given a talk "Statecharts: A Visual Approach to Complex Systems" last week at MIT. I'd be interested in anyone's impressions who attended or otherwise knows about this work. Are there any available references? Thanks, Rich Hilliard ------------------------------ Date: Tue 14 May 85 11:08:50-MDT From: Pete Tinker Subject: Machine Translation Update A friend of mine who works as a consultant for Weidner informs me of some corrections to the information posted by Petitpierre on Machine Translation. Only the address for ALPS was given, but the message could be construed to also be the address of their competitor, Weidner. Weidner is no longer in Provo, Utah, and is no longer called Weidner. The correct name and address are WCC Suite 300 40 Skokie Boulevard Northbrook, Illinois 60062 (312) 564-8122 Also, Siemens has an active MT group in Boca Raton, Florida; LOGOS does MT in Boston (Petitpierre mentioned only their European branches). ISSCO is also in Sorrento Valley, California, but I don't know if they work in MT there. -Pete Tinker ------------------------------ Date: Tue 14 May 85 10:57:37-PDT From: HART@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Prospector on a PC Ken, I saw a copy of the "Prospector on a PC" query, and thought your AIList readers might be interested in the following clarifications and update. First, the role of Prospector in the famous molybdenum strike: Unfortunately for journalists, an accurate account of the role played by Prospector is not simply stated, and a simple account is not likely to be accurate. Prompted by the confusion surrounding these events (notwithstanding a research report that appeared in Science in 1982), Dick Duda, Rene' Reboh and I submitted a rather lengthy letter to the AI Journal that lays out the details quite carefully. Since the letter should be appearing shortly, and in recognition of my own admonition about simple statements, I will say here only that the evaluation of the moly prospect was intended purely as a scientific experiment and that Prospector's predictions were confirmed to a high degree by independent means. Second, Prospector's origins and descendants: My first notes on the subject date from early 1974, and were motivated by the early success of MYCIN. The project began in earnest in 1975, with Dick Duda, Nils Nilsson, Georgia Sutherland and a geologist named Alan Campbell as the earliest contributors. Rene Reboh joined the project shortly thereafter, and John Gaschnig a couple of years after that. Since the earliest implementation there have been many other contributors and any number of implementations on other machines. Some of the earliest small-machine systems were done by Rene Reboh (on an Apple II) and by John Reiter on a PDP-11. These and other ports generally are not as powerful as the original PDP-10 version, but have been useful nonetheless. The USGS has done a port to the IBM/PC, and Alan Campbell has done an independent port to the IBM/PC and is marketing his as "The Deciding Factor." Coincidentally, a user's review of The Deciding Factor appeared in last Sunday's (May 12) San Jose Mercury by Ray Levitt, a Civil Engineering professor at Stanford. (He liked it, by the way.) I am told that some mining companies are interested in Campbell's version; however, any discussion of use by commercial companies must begin with the recognition that the North American mining industry has been in a severely depressed state for quite some years. The US Geological Service has an active program underway to extend and use Prospector. They have the PC version mentioned above, as well as a Xerox 1108 version. There are something like 30 - 35 models that have been developed (a "model" is a major module of the knowledge base). The Survey has used Prospector to evaluate mineral potential in Alaska and in New England, and has stated (in writing) that the results obtained were in their view superior to what would have been otherwise achievable. (Incidentally, the USGS has a charter to assess resource potential over large tracts of land rather than "to discover a mine".) The Survey also has some 8-10 models under active development for the PC version, and is planning to use the 1108 version for geographically-organized data. Finally, I am told that their systems and plans have achieved a very high level of visibility and excitement in their parent agency, the Dept. of Interior, although the current size of the effort is not large. Does this discussion answer the question of what a PC expert system can do? Obviously not, but I hope it adds more light than heat to the current discussions. In any case, a lot of the value of an expert system lies in the knowledge base; I agree with Karnicky's observation that, regardless of implementation, it's a long way from choosing red wine to discovering an ore deposit. Cheers, Peter ------------------------------ Date: Tue 14 May 85 12:41:00-PDT From: Carol Wright/Susie Barnes Subject: Seminar - Diagnosing Multiple Faults (SU) SIGLUNCH DATE: Friday, May 17, 1985 LOCATION: Braun Audiltorium, Mudd/Chemistry Building TIME: 12:05 SPEAKER: Johan Dekleer Xerox TITLE: Diagnosing Multiple Faults Diagnostic tasks require determining the differences between a model of an artifact and the artifact itself. The differences between the manifested behavior of the artifact and the predicted behavior of the model guide the search for the difference between the artifact and its model. The diagnostic procedure presented in this paper reasons from first principles, inferring the behavior of the composite device from knowledge of the structure and function of the individual components comprising the device. The novel contributions of this research are: Multiple-faults: No presupposition is made about the number of failed components. Measurements: Proposes optimal measurements to localize the fault. Probabilistic: A priori probabilities of component faultedness are taken into account. Intermittency: The approach is robust in response intermittent faults. The system is based on incorporating probabilistic information into an Assumption-Based Truth Maintenance System. ------------------------------ Date: 10 May 1985 1429-EDT From: Lydia Defilippo Subject: Seminar - Fixpoint Extensions of First-Order Logic (CMU) APPLIED LOGIC SEMINAR Speaker: Yuri Gurevich (University of Michigan) Date: Wednesday, May 15 Time: 2:00 - 3:15 Place: 5409 WeH Topic: Fixpoint extensions of first-order logic In 1979 Aho and Ullman noted that the relational calculus is unable to express the transitive closure of a given relation, and suggested extending the relational calculus by adding the least fixed point operator. From the point of view of the expressive power, the relational calculus is exactly first-order logic. Aho and Ullman's paper triggered an extensive study of the expressive power of fixpoint extensions of first-order logic with emphasis on finite structures. We survey the results of this study. ------------------------------ Date: 10 May 1985 1433-EDT From: Lydia Defilippo Subject: Seminar - A New "Turing" Thesis (CMU) JOINT LOGIC COLLOQUIUM Speaker: Yuri Gurevich (University of Michigan) Date: Thursday, May 16 Time: 2:00 - 3:30 Place: 4605 WeH Topic: A new thesis Turing's thesis is that every computable function can be computed by an appropriate Turing machine. The informal proof of the thesis gives more: every computing device can be simulated by an appropriate Turing machine. The following much stronger form of the thesis seems to be very much accepted today: every sequential computing device can be simulated by an appropriate Turing machine in polynomial time. Turing machines are computational devices with unbounded resources. First, we adapt Turing's thesis to the case when only devices with bounded resources are considered. Second, we define a more general kind of abstract computational devices, called dynamic structures, and put forward the following new thesis: Every computational device an be simulated by an appropriate dynamic structure - of approximately the same size - in real time: a uniform family of computational devices can be uniformly simulated by an appropriate family of dynamic structures in real time. In particular, every sequential computational device can be simulated by an appropriate sequential dynamic structure. A contribution of Andrea Blass is acknowledged. Descriptions of computational devices are solicited for further confirmation of the thesis. ------------------------------ Date: 7 May 1985 1140-EDT From: Lydia Defilippo Subject: Course - Model Theory (CMU) [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Department of Mathematics CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT - MODEL THEORY Instructor: Ana Pasztor Textbook: Model Theory, by Chang and Keisler, North Holland, 1973 When: Fall 1985, MWF - 2:30-3:20, Porter Hall 125C Note: If you would like to take this course and have conflicts with the time, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. (Room 7219 or phone x2558) Course No., Credit, and Grade: 21-753, 12 Units, based on homework. Aimed at: those who have had a basic course in logic and are interested in broadening their knowledge. What is model theory: Model theory is the branch of mathematical logic which deals with relation between a formal language and its interpretations, or models. We shall study the model theory of first order predicate logic. Models are structures of the kind which arise in mathematics or computer science. To arrive at a model theory, we set up our formal language of first-order logic by specifying a list of symbols and giving rules by which sentences can be built up from the symbols. The reason for setting up a formal language is that we wish to use the sentences to reason about the models. Typical results of model theory say something about the power of expression of first-order predicate logic. Lowenheim's theorem, for example, shows that no consistent sentence can imply that a model is uncountable, or Morley's theorem shows that first order predicate logic cannot, as far as categoricity is concerned, tell the difference between one uncountable power and another. Model theory also gives methods of constructing models. A special attention will be given in this course to ultraproduct constructions and their applications in mathematics and computer science. Much of model theory deals with the interplay of syntactical and semantical ideas. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Sat May 18 20:55:13 1985 Date: Sat, 18 May 85 20:55:06 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a006344; 18 May 85 17:26 EDT Date: Fri 17 May 1985 21:53-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #65 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sat, 18 May 85 20:47 EST AIList Digest Saturday, 18 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 65 Today's Topics: Administrivia - Seminar and Conference Notices, Seminars - A Procedural Logic (CSLI) & Planning and Scheduling (SU) & Modal Temporal Logics (SU) & Representations, Information, and the Physical World (CSLI) & Logical Query Languages for Databases (IBM-SJ), Conference - Symbolics Lisp Machine Users' Meeting ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri 17 May 85 21:51:31-PDT From: Ken Laws Subject: Seminar and Conference Notices The number of seminar notices varies with the academic season, but clearly AIList is now carrying far more seminar and conference announcements than two years ago. Many readers have expressed enthusiasm for the "clipping service" I have been providing, but this material is now so overwhelming that it swamps other functions of the discussion list. A couple of weeks ago I asked for volunteers to forward bboard messages from the major universities. No one has volunteered. I shall continue scanning the bboards for the present, but this service will be dropped if either AIList or my professional duties demand more of my time. Steve Crocker has suggested to me that a separate list be split off for seminar notices and [perhaps] conference announcements. Then people could subscribe to the lists separately, and could more easily archive and search just the data stream that they find relevant. I was originally opposed to such a split, but I have come to favor it -- as long as someone else takes over distribution of the seminar list. I would provide the current distribution list, and the new moderator could handle deletions and modifications without much trouble. New readers to either list would receive a welcome message mentioning the companion list. The new moderator would be free to set his/her own policies about what to include in the list. Do I hear any volunteers? -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Wed 15 May 85 16:59:50-PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - A Procedural Logic (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] THURSDAY, May 23, 1985 12 noon TINLunch Ventura Hall ``A Procedural Logic'' Conference Room Michael Georgeff (SRI and CSLI), Amy Lansky (SRI), and Pierre Bessiere (SRI) Much of our commonsense knowledge about the real world is concerned with the way things are done. This knowledge is often in the form of `procedures' or `sequences' of actions for achieving particular goals. In this paper, a formalism is presented for representing such knowledge based on the notion of `process'. A declarative semantics for the representation is given, which allows a user to state `facts' about the effects of doing things in the problem domain of interest. An operational semantics is also provided, which shows `how' this knowledge can be used to achieve given goals or to form intentions regarding their achievement. The formalism also serves as an executable program specification language suitable for constructing complex systems. --Michael Georgeff and Amy Lansky ------------------------------ Date: Wed 15 May 85 14:32:11-PDT From: Elliott Levinthal Subject: Seminar - Planning and Scheduling (SU) SIMA`s final Seminar on AI in Manufacturing and Design will take place next Wedneday, May 29th, at 2:l5 in Terman, Room 2l7. Dr. Karl Kempf McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories Principal scientist, Artificial Intelligence Group The scheduling of tasks to be executed in the real world is difficult because the world contains an inescapable element of unpredictability. However much effort has been expended in preparing a schedule prior to execution, surprises are virtually inevitable once execution commences. Additional difficulties are often encountered through the unnecessary confounding of planning and scheduling. Planning requires knowledge of the capabilities of classes of resources while scheduling uses knowledge of the availability of individual resources. It is generally not possible for the planner to have, at plan time, the timely data necessary for efficient scheduling. The objective of the research described here is the clarification of the differences between planning and scheduling, and the development of a representation for schedules which is robust in the face of real world unpredictability. Examples are given for the off-line construction of schedules using both domain-independent and domain-dependent knowledge, and for the on-line real-time knowledge-based execution of schedules. The examples are drawn from robotic machine tending and robotic assembly. ------------------------------ Date: 1 Jun 85 0100 PDT From: Arthur Keller Subject: Seminar - Modal Temporal Logics (SU) CS Colloquium, June 4, 4:15pm, Terman Auditorium MODAL TEMPORAL LOGICS: A SURVEY OF RECENT RESULTS Daniel Lehmann Hebrew University (visiting Brandeis University) In a joint work with S. Shelah, some extensions of the propositional temporal logic of discrete time were advocated as useful for stating and proving properties of probabilistic concurrent programs. Deductive completeness theorems were proved. In a joint work with S. Kraus corresponding decision procedures were investigated. Recently a system for describing time and knowledge has been proposed. All those systems can be characterized as two-dimensional modal logics, i.e. they involve two essentially orthogonal modalities, one of them being time, that satisfy some interchange law. The techniques involved in studying such systems and some open problems will be described. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 15 May 85 16:59:50-PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Representations, Information, and the Physical World (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] THURSDAY, May 23, 1985 2:15 p.m. CSLI Seminar Redwood Hall ``Representations, Information, and the Room G-19 Physical World'' by Ivan Blair Discussion led by Meg Withgott The notions of representation and information have been much used in recent cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind, yet much remains to be done to determine more precisely what is meant by these notions, particularly in elucidating the basis of their intentionality. I think that the place to start with an investigation of these matters is the analysis proposed by Howard Pattee. Pattee has for a long time wrestled with the question of how symbols are related to their referents, and has tried to establish some general principles of the symbol-referent or symbol-matter relation. I shall attempt to do two things in this presentation. Firstly, I want to explain as briefly as possible Pattee's view of symbolic information (information carried by a symbol or string of symbols) and the relation of symbolic information to the physical world. Secondly, I shall consider a prominent theory of information -- Dretske's, as presented in his book, ``Knowledge and the Flow of Information'' (1981), -- in the light of various results about the nature of symbols and information that emerge from Pattee's analysis. --Ivan Blair ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 May 85 13:12:18 PDT From: IBM San Jose Research Laboratory Calendar Reply-to: IBM-SJ Calendar Subject: Seminar - Logical Query Languages for Databases (IBM-SJ) [Excerpted by Laws@SRI-AI.] IBM San Jose Research Lab 5600 Cottle Road San Jose, CA 95193 Mon., May 20 Computer Science Seminar 10:30 A.M. LOGICAL QUERY LANGUAGES FOR DATABASE SYSTEMS Audit. A In an advanced form of relational database system, a collection of rules, probably Horn clauses, will stand between the user's query and the database. Because these rules may involve recursion, straightforward methods of query evaluation may not work, and a variety of strategies have been proposed to handle subsets of recursive queries. We shall express such query evaluation techniques as "capture rules" on a graph whose nodes represent the rules and the terms in those rules. Nodes may be "adorned" by codes for a limited number of special cases, such as an indication of which variables or arguments are free and which are bound. One essential property of capture rules is that they can be applied independently, thus providing a clean interface for query-evaluation systems that use several different strategies in different situations. Another important property is that we be able to test in polynomial time whether a capture rule applies, so that we can plan queries in less time than it takes to execute them. We show how rules suggested previously can be fit into this framework, and we propose some new capture rules and generalizations of old ones. In particular, a result with Y. Sagiv characterizes exactly the sets of rules for which a simple top-down query-evaluation algorithm with "sideways" passing of variable binding works. L. Naish gave an exponential algorithm to test whether this query-evaluation strategy works, but our theory provides a polynomial algorithm for the case when the number of arguments in predicates is bounded. We also show that the problem is NP-hard if the number of arguments is part of the problem instance. To apply top-down capture rules, we need to be able to prove convergence of certain iterations. We therefore consider "unique" (logical) rules and the way that testing their convergence can be reduced to linear programming. An algorithm developed with A. Van Gelder provides an even more efficient test for applicability of the top-down capture rule in the case of unique rules. Prof. J. D. Ullman, Computer Science Department, Stanford University Host: P. Lucas (LUCAS@IBM-SJ.CSNET) ------------------------------ Date: Tue 14 May 85 00:33:14-PDT From: Mabry Tyson Subject: Conference - Symbolics Lisp Machine Users' Meeting Early next month there will be a national Symbolics Lisp machine users group in SF. Details are in the two messages below. Return-Path: Date: Mon 13 May 85 22:44:20-CDT From: Rich Cohen Subject: Info on National Meeting A complete agenda of the 1985 National SLUG meeting follows in a separate message. Printed copies of the agenda and registration form were mailed out to people for who we had US Mail addresses. Copies were also sent to all SLUG leaders and to all Symbolics sales offices. So, everyone interested should be able to get a copy of the printed announcement and registration form from one of those sources. Summary: The 1985 National Meeting of SLUG will be held Monday, June 3, and Tuesday, June 4, at the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco. There will be sessions all day Monday and Tuesday, and round table discussions both Monday and Tuesday evenings. Symbolics will host a wine & cheese reception at their San Francisco Training Center Sunday evening. The hotel has agreed to hold open a block of rooms for SLUG until Friday May 17th. There is still time to call for a reservation. The rate is $75/single, $85/double. Please tell them you are with the Symbolics Users Group. There is no registration fee. No meals or proceedings are included. (There is no free lunch.) However, please to register so that we can estimate attendence and coordinate arrangemens with the hotel. If possible, try to get a copy of the registraion form, and mail it in. If you can't get a form, just send a letter or post card stating your intent to: SLUG '85 c/o Tom Fall GTE Western Division M/S B 212 100 Furgeson Drive P.O. Box 7188 Mountain View, California 94039 See you in San Francisco! Return-Path: Date: Mon 13 May 85 22:45:23-CDT From: Rich Cohen Subject: Agenda for National Meeting SLUG '85 THE 1985 SYMBOLICS LISP USERS GROUP NATIONAL SYMPOSIUM Monday, June 3 & Tuesday, June 4, 1985 Cathedral Hill Hotel San Francisco This is the planned agenda for the 1985 National Symposium of the Symbolics Lisp Users Group (SLUG). The purpose of SLUG is to promote communications among users of Symbolics Lisp Machines, and between the users and Symbolics. Non-technical sessions: - Corporate directions. - Company organization ... or "who to contact about what." - Field Service & Hardware Maintenance ... or "where the spares are." - Software Support ... including HOSS, FOSS, and source distribution policies. - Questions for Symbolics Sales/Service/Management. General Question & Answer session with Symbolics managers from Software Products, Documentation, Field Service, Software Support, Education Services, Sales, and Marketing. Technical Sessions: - Living with Release 6.0. Jon Balgley (Symbolics). Now that you've gotten the tape, what do you do with it? Discussion to include new features (such as Dialnet, the Mailer, the Document Examiner, the Command Processor), and effects on user code (e.g., coping with lexical scoping). - Technical Q&A. - Performance measurement and program tuning. Dave Moon & Dave Plummer (Symbolics). - The Symbolics Window System: a conceptual model with practical applications. Rich Bryan & Jon Balgley (Symbolics). - 3600 Hardware Architecture. Dave Stryker & Linda Birch (Symbolics). - Networks. Charlie Hornig & Scott Matsumoto (Symbolics). Chaosnet support under VMS, Berkeley UNIX; 3600 support for various network protocols, such as TCP/IP, DECNet, Symbolics Namespace Protocol. - Common Lisp. Dave Moon, Dan Weinreb, and Bob Kerns (Symbolics). Discussion of the Common Lisp language definition, and how Symbolics Zetalisp, and Symbolics Common Lisp relate to it. (LISP in a changing world.) - Prolog and the 3600. Bob Cassels (Symbolics). The chief implementor of Symbolics Prolog talks about Prolog, LISP, and the 3600. Round Table Discussions: - Tools for Building Expert Systems -- Some Practical Experience. Tom Fall (GTE), chairman. A discussion of users' experience building expert systems on the 3600; how they chose among the available tools, and their experience in trying to use the tools effectively. - Dealing with Symbolics: What we really do in the field. Ken Olum (Fairchild), chairman. An open discussion with general users and a panel of people who manage and support large sites. Possible topics to be discussed: * User experience with hardware maintenance, * Service contracts vs. time-and-materials. * Installing new Symbolics releases -- how well does it work, what do you need to know besides what's in the installation guides. * Management of worlds, tapes, and disk space. * Installing larger disk drives. * Maintaining multiple releases at one time & migrating from one release to the next. * Sending bug reports and getting fixes from Symbolics. * Maintaining local patches and modifications to worlds. SLUG Business Meeting: - SLUG Charter. - Election of officers - Establishing a program library. - Menu of our concerns & suggestions to be presented to Symbolics. There will be a wine & cheese reception Sunday evening at the San Francisco Symbolics Training Center (a few blocks from the hotel). The session schedule is not complete, but we expect to hold sessions both Monday and Tuesday evening. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: COMSAT 25-JUN-1985 22:53 To: FRANCE Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a006290; 25 Jun 85 12:22 EDT Mail-From: LAWS created at 18-May-85 15:00:19 Date: Sat 18 May 1985 14:51-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #66 To: AIList@SRI-AI ReSent-date: Tue 25 Jun 85 09:19:37-PDT ReSent-From: Ken Laws ReSent-To: France%VPI.CSNet@CSNET-RELAY Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 25 Jun 85 22:49 EST AIList Digest Sunday, 19 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 66 Today's Topics: Query - Exploring Language with Logo, Binding - Mark Grover, Tools - STATECHARTS Reference & Lisp Machines & TI's Explorer, Opinion - Introspection and Communication & Emotional Reasoning, Journal - AI in Engineering ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 18 May 85 14:48 EDT From: Bill Caswell Subject: Exploring Language with Logo Last November, a seminar on material from a forthcoming book, "Exploring Language with Logo", by Paul Goldenberg and Wallace Feurzeig, was announced in this list. The book was to be published 'first quarter, 1985' by Harper and Row, and I have not seen anything about it since. Has it been published, or is it otherwise available? Bill ------------------------------ Date: 15 May 1985 1951-EDT (Wednesday) From: trwatf!maverick@seismo.ARPA (Mark D. Grover) Subject: Binding - Mark Grover Binding: Mark D. Grover Formerly: TRW Defense Systems Group (Advanced Technology Facility) Fairfax, Virginia [trwatf!maverick@SEISMO] Beginning 5/24/85: Advanced Information & Decision Systems Washington technical office [Arlington, Virginia] New ARPAnet address: GROVER@AIDS-UNIX ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 16 May 85 18:43:10 edt From: Walter Hamscher Subject: STATECHARTS reference Here's the reference: Harel, D. Statecharts: A Visual Approach to Complex Systems CS84-05, Department of Applied Math, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel. 1984. 35pp. Harel's developed a nice notation for complex finite-state machines by making use of hierarchic states, allowing both XOR-decomposition of a state (i.e. the system's in one & only one of the substates) and AND-decomposition (i.e. the system's in a state defined by the cross product of the substates). By defining some other conventions about transition arcs, the result is surprisingly compact and expressive. However, his discussion of adding actions to arcs and states seemed a bit less elegant. Worth a look. Incidentally, Harel's netadress is harel%wisdom@WISCVM.ARPA ... ------------------------------ Date: 17 May 85 08:27 PDT From: Masinter.pa@Xerox.ARPA Subject: Lisp Machines In reply to curtis L. Goodhart You don't need any specific kind of machine to run lisp. There are lisp implementations for lots of machines. Some of them can be quite fast. Specialized instruction sets for Lisp allow you to get performance without declarations, to retain full information for symbolic debugging, better garbage collection performance, and the ability to retain run-time type-checking even in performance critical loops. Memory utilization is generally much better; for example, the last time I measured, Interlisp-D programs took less than half the bytes to represent than the same programs on a VAX, and CDR-coding allowed the average size for a CONS cell to be 36 bits rather than 64. Lisp machines can afford to use compact data structures because the instruction set can be designed to deal with them; "conventional" instruction sets generally cannot be skewed to make otherwise obscure manipulations (fetch bits 4-5 and branch if 0) into single operations. All of the lisp machines on the market come with software as well as hardware. Dedicated machines allow the implementation of integrated environments and high performance graphical interfaces which are generally unavailable on conventional computers. The software enviornment can be major portion of the "value added" of the system; the proportion is likely to continue as hardware costs drop. What is true of larger machines today will be true of smaller ones in the future; while prices of all computer components drop, so do the prices that people expect to pay for them. The earliest reference I've found is Peter Deutsch's paper, "A Lisp machine with very compact programs," IJCAI 1973. "Programming environments" are quite popular these days, with whole conferences devoted to them, although most of the papers spend their time extolling individual environments rather than the notion of them. There are other justifications more recent found in the marketing literature of various vendors, written to make sure that its clear that each is the best. ------------------------------ Date: Sat 18 May 85 12:17:18-CDT From: Werner Uhrig Subject: TI's Explorer won Industrial Design Awards [ from the Austin American Statesman - May 18 ] TEXAS INSTRUMENTS' AUSTIN-developed EXPLORER artificial intelligence workstation has received one of 23 Industrial Design Awards given by ID Magazine. More than 800 entries were judged on innovation, problem-solving, aesthetics, materials and use of the products. The computer also won a design award in a competition at the Hannover Trade Fair in West Germany. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 May 85 9:28:33 EDT From: Bruce Nevin Subject: indignation and clarity From: _Bob (the Midnight Theorizer) I have some doubts about that part of AI which asserts the validity of scientific inquiry that gathers "data" by introspection. But I have even greater doubts about moral indignation as a criterion for rejection of hypotheses (or of humor, for that matter). Chomsky has argued that introspective data are necessary for a science of language. His followers and apostates have demonstrated how hazardous they can be. His teacher, Zellig Harris, has shown that appeals to introspective data can be well defined and few with no loss to linguistic science. As to moral indignation, it is possible to read this message and wonder whether it is allowed any legitimacy, and to ask under what circumstances the writer would find moral indignation appropriate. I believe this would be a misreading of the message, but nonetheless a possible reading. Ambiguity is ineluctable. I believe we have to anticipate, insofar as is possible, the ways in which we may be misconstrued, and make our communications clear IN TERMS APPROPRIATE TO THE MISCONSTRUING AUDIENCE. To insist that the burden of rightly understanding rests alone on those who have misunderstood is practically to guarantee a failure of communication. There is another well-known mechanism in which a social level of communication is incongruent with a psychological level. A simple example is the stereotype that has been made of Bateson's work on the double bind (Mother says `I love you, come here' while appearing fearful and angry, or in a context that punishes the child). The communication that is not consciously acceptable to the sender is kept out of the sender's awareness. The receiver must choose which message to believe and act on consciously, and believes and acts on the other message unconsciously. Most miscommunication, it has been argued, occurs when people make different choices about which parts of the complex message are socially acceptable and which are not. And people often vigorously resist recognizing the beliefs and disbeliefs that they have been communicating and otherwise acting on out of conscious awareness. The `talking past each other' that we have just seen on this list concerning rape and humor has this character. By the way, I recommend Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind, for a perspective on belief-disbelief systems that would be useful for modelling human `knowledge bases'. Bruce Nevin (bn@bbncch.arpa) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 17 May 85 04:52:50 est From: "Marek W. Lugowski" Subject: Emotion & AI and its discussion on the AIList The discussion of emotion in the context of AI can be of benefit to us all. For too long, AI has equated thinking with "reasoning", where reasoning is a something, and entirely apart from a something else called "passion". This dichotomy is Plato's, and likely an AI liability, given the affective basis for one's actions and one's interpretation of actions. Judgement as such crucially depends on emotional state, as psychiatrists well know. Judgment is what yesterday's Shakey the Robot lacked, and what today's naive physics is ostentatiously after. Alas, nothing's changed: Each confines itself to the rigid minuet of "reasoning" devoid of emotional context. Incidentally, the AIList-Digest's discussion of emotion has been stirring up ideas in the classical vein of emotional muckraking, not so much dispassionate analysis. What's needed is computational ideas on how to model emotions: to start with, in a "toy" domain. And don't assume that they are if-then rules! -- Marek Lugowski marek@indiana.csnet Indiana U. CS Department Bloomington 47405 ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 13 May 1985 23:34:24 EDT From: Duvvuru.Sriram@cmu-ri-cive.arpa Subject: New Journal - AI in Engineering A new journal on the applications of AI in Engineering will be launched at the First Conference on Applications of AI in Engineering next April. Details of the journal are provided below. The deadline for sending papers for the first issue is November 15, 1985. International Journal for ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN ENGINEERING Editors: D. Sriram Dr. K. J. MacCallum Dept. Civil Engineering Dept. of Ship & Marine Tech. Carnegie-Mellon University Marine Technology Centre Pittsburgh, PA 15213 100 Montrose Street, Glasgow USA Scotland Recent advances in the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) are begining to make a major impact in the world of engineering. As a consequence, important opportunities for using computers to tackle engineering problems in new ways are opening up. The engineering industry must keep itself fully informed of these developments and contribute to them, if it is to realize the potential of these advances. The aim of this journal is to establish a forum for a fruitful exchange of ideas through the publication of up-to-date research results and recent developments. While the range of AI topics covered by the journal is broadly based, the emphasis will be on research and development leading to problem solving. The journal should appeal to engineers for all disciplines who are involved in research, development or implementation of computer systems. Members of the journal's leading international Editorial Board will be responsible for the review of all papers submitted for publication to ensure that readers receive a consistently high quality of work in each issue. >From time to time review papers will be published to provide state-of-the-art analyses of various areas of current interest. In addition the journal will provide a review of books and reports in this expanding field as well as news letters, and a dairy of events of conferences, courses and meetings in AI. FIELDS COVERED - Expert systems - Knowledge representation - Knowledge-based simulation - Computer aided design - Design modelling - Cognitive modelling of engineering problems - Learning - Computer based training - Intelligent tutors - Robotics - Planning and scheduling - Constraint management - Natural language applications - Database interfaces - Graphical interfaces - Computer integrated manufacturing REGULAR FEATURES - Discussion of published papers - Conference and meeting reports - Personalia - Letters - Book reviews - Current literature - Calendar of events - News POLICY AND CALL FOR PAPERS The editorial policy encourages the publication of research articles on recent advances in AI in engineering. State-of-the-art papers will also be included from time to time. Details on presentation of papers for consideration of publication can be obtained from the editors. SUBSCRIPTION This journal will keep you abreast with the major research and development work around the world in AI applied to engineering problems. The editors and their international Editorial Board are well placed to keep you informed in these rapidly developing field. For more details contact: Lance Sucharov Publishing Director CML Publications Ashurst Lodge Ashurst Hants SO4 2AA England For a author's tookit (in US), write to D. Sriram or send mail to sriram@cmu-ri-cive.arpa. [The subscription price has not yet been determined. -- KIL] ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Tue May 21 06:37:16 1985 Date: Tue, 21 May 85 06:37:11 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id aa18514; 21 May 85 2:59 EDT Date: Mon 20 May 1985 23:32-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #67 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 21 May 85 06:29 EST AIList Digest Tuesday, 21 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 67 Today's Topics: Query - Cooking Knowledge, Theory - Classes of Turing Machines, Games - Computer Cheating, Humor - Qualitative Calculator, Seminars - Constraint-Interpreting Reference (MIT) & Exceptions in Data/Knowledge Bases (LBL) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 20 May 85 14:41:54 -0200 From: mcvax!vu44!klipper!biep@seismo.ARPA Subject: Cooking Knowledge Doing research on collaboration between robot systems, we need to implement knowledge about cooking. I've heard that long, long ago, a group in San Diego worked on that, and that some Mrs. Cordier in Paris has done research in that field. Does anyone have more information on these, or on other projects using cooking knowledge, or does someone have any ideas about the subject which might be useful? Thanks, Biep. {seismo|decvax|philabs|garfield|okstate}!mcvax!vu44!klipper!biep ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 May 85 15:06 CDT From: Patrick_Duff Subject: RE: a "new" turing thesis > From: Lydia Defilippo > Subject: Seminar - A New "Turing" Thesis (CMU) > > .... Turing machines are computational devices with unbounded resources. > First, we adapt Turing's thesis to the case when only devices with bounded > resources are considered. When I studied Turing machines in an AI course I took back in college, this had already been done. Here is a summary of the four types of Turing Machines (with various bounds on the available resources), from my class notes [if you have any corrections or additions, please send them to me]: TYPE 3 TURING MACHINE: Description: 1) Tape has finite length; 2) Control unit has one read head and no write heads; 3) Read head is initially positioned at beginning of tape; 4) Read head cannot be moved backwards; 5) Control unit is deterministic; 6) Control unit has finite memory. Remarks: 1) Recognizes exactly all regular languages; 2) Making control unit non-deterministic does not increase power; 3) Equivalent to a finite-state automaton; 4) Able to decide whether a number is odd, compute the sum of two numbers, or decide whether a number is divisible by 3, for instance. TYPE 2 TURING MACHINE: Description: 1) Tape has finite length; 2) Control unit has one read head and no write heads; 3) Read head is initially positioned at beginning of tape; 4) Read head cannot be moved backwards; 5) Control unit is deterministic; 6) Control unit has finite memory. 7) Control unit has a push-down stack. Remarks: 1) More powerful than TYPE 3; 2) Recognizes exactly all context free languages; 3) Making control unit non-deterministic does not increase power. 4) Ability to read any position in push-down stack would make it more powerful; 5) Letting read head move both ways adds power; 6) Letting head read and write adds power--more powerful than even without the push-down stack; 7) If a second push-down stack is added, it can do anything a TYPE 0 can do; 8) Using a single counter instead of a push-down stack is more powerful than TYPE 3 but less powerful than TYPE 2 [could check for an arbitrary string of symbols on tape or see if parentheses are balanced, for instance]. TYPE 1 TURING MACHINE: Description: 1) Tape has finite length; 2) Control unit has one read/write head; 3) Read/write head is initially positioned at beginning of tape; 4) Read/write head can be moved both forwards and backwards; 5) Control unit is deterministic; 6) Control unit has finite memory. Remarks: 1) Recognizes context sensitive languages; 2) Also called a linear bounded automata; 3) Adding multiple tapes does not increase power; 4) It is not known whether a non-deterministic control unit increases power. TYPE 0 TURING MACHINE: Description: 1) Tape has infinite length; 2) Control unit has one read/write head; 3) Read/write head is initially positioned somewhere on tape; 4) Read/write head can be moved both forwards and backwards; 5) Control unit is deterministic; 6) Control unit has finite memory. Remarks: 1) Adding multiple tapes does not increase power; 2) Adding multiple read/write heads does not increase power; 3) Adding push-down stack does not increase power; 4) Non-deterministic control unit does not increase power; 5) Infinite memory control unit does not increase power; 6) Able to determine whether a number is prime or whether a program has infinite loops, for instance; 7) Claimed to be "an adequate and complete model of processes that can be carried out mechanically (effective processes)" [Church-Turing thesis]. regards, Patrick Patrick S. Duff, ***CR 5621*** pduff.ti-eg@csnet-relay 5049 Walker Dr. #91103 214/480-1659 (work) The Colony, TX 75056-1120 214/370-5363 (home) (a suburb of Dallas, TX) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 21 May 85 00:46 EDT From: Henry Lieberman Subject: Computers cheat at chess? The chess columnist of the Boston Globe wrote an article claiming that computer programs cheat in chess tournaments! He had two arguments for this: * Tournament rules forbid the players to use an extra board to move pieces while considering their moves during the game. He argued that tree searching of moves in computer programs constitutes using an extra board. * Tournament rules forbid the players to consult books during the game. Most programs rely on a book to play openings. These arguments seemed silly to me at first, but on reflection, I think he might have a point, especially with the second point about book openings. It might be worthwhile to try human-computer chess tournaments with relaxed rules that, for example, permit the human to consult a book of openings, or even better, the same on-line data base of openings that the program uses. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 16 May 85 18:01:50 edt From: Walter Hamscher Subject: Revolting Seminar - Qualitative Calculator [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] DATE: Friday, 17 May TIME: 12 NOON PLACE: 8th FLOOR PLAYROOM HOST: Michael Kashket QUALITATIVE CALCULATORS IN CLINICAL DECISION MAKING (-: Tex Tuftsman :-) The classical approach to decision analysis in medicine has been based on constructing decision trees, giving numerical weights to outcomes, and banging away at the keys of an ordinary 16-key calculator to choose between appropriate therapies. Some of the weaknesses in this approach can be avoided by using a QUALITATIVE CALCULATOR (c) from Ronco. Envision yourself with a QUALITATIVE CALCULATOR (c) -- A QUALITATIVE CALCULATOR especially designed for Naive Physicists. Comes with [+], [-], and [0] keys, plus a Clear key and a DeClear key. Was $20.99, marked down to [+]. But wait -- There's more! Qual before [0] tonight and get a free State Map for your locality. Operators are standing by! Don't miss this landmark value! ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 May 85 18:02 EDT From: jcma@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Constraint-Interpreting Reference (MIT) AI REVOLVING SEMINAR John Mallery (JCMa@MIT-MC) "Constraint-Interpreting Reference" Tuesday, May 21, 1985 at 4pm 8th Floor Playroom, AI Laboratory, MIT This talk will discuss the theory of reference used in the Relatus Natural Language System, an AI program developed at the MIT AI Laboratory in collaboration with Gavan Duffy. Relatus parses sentences and uses a reference system to incrementally construct a semantic model. The reference system matches graphs and creates (interns) graph structure in a semantic network. The separation of the constraint interpreter from specific constraints describing the matching problem yields various benefits. For instance: * Matching speed is independent of database size, normally faster than linear in the size of the smallest accessible set of potential referents. * A powerful and extensible constraint language provides the ability to describe an infinite number of matchers, each tuned to recognize and prefer specific structures. In addition to the theoretical ideas, some practical uses of the implemented reference system will also be discussed: * It is regularly used in intersentential reference, finding references to previously interned descriptions in new sentences. Relatus can presently parse and reference a 10-page text (250 sentences) in under 10 minutes while running on a Symbolics 3600 (1536K real memory). * It is regularly used to answer literal and explicit questions. The approach to question answering depends on both the reference system and a procedure which is actually the inverse of reference. Semantic inversion builds constraint descriptions from the graph structure previously created by the reference system. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 May 85 13:32:05 pdt From: (Frank Olken [csam]) olken@lbl-csam Subject: Seminar - Exceptions in Data/Knowledge Bases (LBL) CSRD Colloquium Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory ********************************************************** Living with Exceptions in Data/Knowledge Bases ********************************************************** Alexander Borgida Department of Computer Science Rutgers University The ``schema'' of a large database is usually used to vali- date the data being entered and to help set up efficient access structures. Because the real world is irregular, unpredictable and evolves, we contend that useful data management systems, including large ``knowledge bases,'' must be tolerant of deviations from the constraints imposed by the schema, including type and semantic integrity con- straints. We therefore examine the problems involved in accommodating exceptions to constraints, and propose a solu- tion based on the concept of exception handling in Program- ming Languages. This technique can also be used to deal with problems such as null values and estimates, and in addition has good Software Engineering properties. We con- clude by discussing the formal logic of assertions with exceptions, and hint at the utility of exceptions in data- base re-design through learning. Wednesday, May 22, 1985, 2:00pm - 4:00pm Bldg. 50D, Room 116 - Conference Room For further information, call Harry Wong at (415) 486-6884. Dept. of Computer Science Research; LBL; One Cyclotron Road; Berkeley, CA 94720. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Wed May 22 06:10:33 1985 Date: Wed, 22 May 85 06:10:17 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a024779; 22 May 85 0:55 EDT Date: Tue 21 May 1985 21:09-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #68 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Wed, 22 May 85 05:54 EST AIList Digest Wednesday, 22 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 68 Today's Topics: Conference - 1985 Symposium on Logic Programming, Tutorials - Computational Linguistics ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 17 May 1985 12:03:27-PDT From: conery%uoregon.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Conference - 1985 Symposium on Logic Programming -- Preliminary Schedule -- -- 1985 Symposium on Logic Programming -- For more information, contact: John Conery (jc@uoregon.csnet) 503-686-4408 Jacques Cohen (jc@brandeis.csnet) 617-647-3370 MONDAY, July 15 Tutorials (Two parallel sessions, 9:00 - 4:30) (Two more tutorials on Friday) "Expert Systems Using Prolog", Bob Kowalski, Imperial College "Parallel Logic Programming", Gary Lindstrom, Univerity of Utah 8:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. Early Registration and Reception TUESDAY, July 16, 1985 8:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. Registration 9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Robert Kowalski, Imperial College London, England 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. PARALLELISM Semi-intelligent Backtracking of Prolog Based on a Static Data Dependency Analysis, Jung-Herng Chang and Alvin M. Despain, University of California, Berkeley User-defined Parallel Control Strategies, J. I. Glasgow, M. A. Jenkins, and C. D. McCrosky, Queen's University, Canada AND-parallelism with Intelligent Backtracking for Annotated Logic Programs, J. Maluszynski, Linkoping University and P. Dembinski, Chalmbers University of Technology, Sweden 2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. EXTENSIONS An experiment in Programming with Full First-Order Logic, Zerkis D. Umrigar and Vijay Pitchumani, Syracuse University A Meta-Level Extension of Prolog, Kenneth A. Bowen, Syracuse University, and Tobias Weinberg, Digital Equipment Corporation Logic Programming Cum Applicative Programming, Nachum Dershowitz and David Plaisted, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. LANGUAGE ISSUES On the Treatment of Cuts in Prolog Source-Level Tools, R. A. O'Keefe, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom All Solutions Predicates in Prolog, Lee Naish, University of Melbourne, Australia Unification-free Execution of Logic Programs, Jan Komorowski, Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard University and Jan Maluszynski, Linkoping University, Sweden Wednesday, July 17, 1985 9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. INVITED SPEAKER Dr. Herve Gallaire, European Computer Research Center, Munich, West Germany 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. CONCURRENT PROLOG Concurrent Prolog in a Multi-process Environment, Rosanna Lee and Randy Goebel, University of Waterloo, Canada A sequential Implementation of Concurrent Prolog Based on the Shallow Binding Scheme, Toshihiko Miyazaki, Akikazu Takeuchi and Takashi Chikayama, ICOT, Japan 2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. SEMANTICS The Declarative Semantics of Logical Read-only Variables, G. Levi and C. Palamidessi, Universita'di Pisa, Italy Narrowing as the Operational Semantics of Functional Languages, Uday Reddy, University of Utah Towards an Algebra for Constructing Logic Programs, R.A. O'Keefe, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES A Microcoded Unifier for Lisp Machine Prolog, Mats Carlssn, Uppsala University, Sweden SLOG: A Logic Programming Language Interpreter Based on Clausal Superposition and Rewriting, Laurent Fribourg, Laboratoires de Marcoussis, France A Real Time Garbage Collector for Prolog, Edwin Pittombils and Maurice Bruynooghe, K.U. Leuven, Belgium Evening Banquet Speaker Dr. Maurice Wilkes, Digital Equipment Corporation Thursday, July 19, 1985 9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. THEORY Recursive Unsolvability of Determinacy, Solvable Cases of Determinacy, and Their Applications to Prolog Optimization, Jajime Sawamura and Taku Takeshima, International Institute for Advanced Study of Social Information Science, Japan Graph-based Logic Programming Interpreters, Jean Gallier and Stan Raatz, University of Pennsylvania Surface Deduction: A Uniform Mechanism for Logic Programming, P. T. Cox and T. Pietrzykowski, Technical University of Nova Scotia, Canada 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. SPECIAL TOPICS Towards a Programming Environment for Large Prolog Programs, Jan Chomicki and Naftaly H. Minsky, Rutgers University Modular Logic Programming of Compilers, Harald Ganzinger and Michael Hanus, University Dortmund, West Germany An(other) Integration of Logic and Functional Programming, Amitabh Srivastava, Don Oxley and Aditya Srivastava, Central Research Laboratories, Texas Instruments, Inc. A Technique for Doing Lazy Evaluation in Logic, Sanjai Narain, Rand Corp. FRIDAY July 19 Tutorials: (Two concurrent sessions, 9:00 - 4:30) "Concurrent Logic Programming Techniques", Ehud Shapiro, Weizmann Institute "Prolog and Software Engineering", Susan Gerhart, Wang Institute. ------------------------------ Date: 17 May 1985 17:39:24 PDT From: Bill Mann Subject: Tutorials on Computational Linguistics: July 8 TUTORIALS ON TOPICS IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS The conference schedule for the 1985 Association for Computational Linguistics is now available. The conference will be held July 8-12 at the University of Chicago, with the first day devoted to Tutorials in Computational Linguistics, described below. Each tutorial is a presentation of the state of the art in an important area of computational linguistics--not just the speakers' work on the subject--the whole range of approaches being actively pursued. PARSER CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUES Jonathan Slocum, MCC Corporation The tutorial on Parser Construction Techniques will cover, briefly, the various approaches to parsing (algorithms) and implementation methodologies; included will be discussion of matters relating to runtime (CPU) performance. Focus will then shift to matters concerning the user interface: what tools ought to be provided to the linguist/developer, and how those tools can be tied to the central parsing program. Several different parsers employing the same user interface will be introduced (and their source code distributed in the handout). It will be assumed that participants are somewhat familiar with LISP, that they know enough about formal linguistics to understand such concepts as "context free," context sensitive," and "phrase structure grammar," and that they know what is meant by "parsing" and related technical terms from the computational perspective. PROLOG WITH NATURAL-LANGUAGE EXAMPLES Dr. Fernando C.N. Pereira, SRI International The logic programming language Prolog is becoming an important tool in artificial intelligence and, in particular, in computational linguistics. This tutorial is intended as an introduction to Prolog and its programming methodology. Rather than making an abstract presentation of the language, we will build up a vocabulary of Prolog programming concepts and techniques by examining a progression of examples that show how Prolog can be used in simple natural-language-analysis tasks. Topics covered include facts and queries; rules; the logical variable; terms as structured information; unification; axiomatization of phrase-structure grammars; definite-clause grammars; the Prolog execution model; control mechanisms (sequencing and cut); metalogical operators and alternative execution models; program transformation and embedded formalisms; the relation between Prolog and logic programming. Although there are no formal prerequisites of this course, some familiarity with elementary concepts of logic and traditional syntax would be useful. UNIFICATION APPROACHES TO GRAMMAR Stuart M. Shieber, SRI International Current trends in syntactic theory and computational syntax seem to be converging toward a type of grammatical formalism based on complex feature systems and an operation called "unification." This tutorial presents this approach to the syntax and semantics of natural language. Beginning with a characterization of the principles that underlie grammar formalisms in general, a particular simple formalism based on these ideas will be derived. Its relation to many of the currently prevalent unification-based grammar formalisms--including functional unification grammar, lexical-functional grammar, head grammar, generalized phrase-structure grammar, and definite-clause grammar--will be explicated as more general or more particular variants motivated by linguistic or computational considerations. Finally, the manner in which these approaches may be applied to the modelling of a number of linguistic constructs will be described, and the implementation of such formalisms discussed briefly. A very rudimentary knowledge of traditional syntax is recommended as a prerequisite of the course. Familiarity with Prolog, definite-clause grammar, or elementary logic would be helpful, but is not essential. Although intended as a sequel to Fernando Pereira's "Prolog with Natural Language Examples," this tutorial can be taken independently. NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACES Norman K. Sondheimer, USC/ISI and Madeleine Bates, BBN This tutorial will outline the role of natural language interfaces in man-machine interaction: their uses, limits, and technology. These systems allow a user to communicate with a computer in much the same way as he communicates with other humans. To date, english language interfaces to databases have achieved the greatest commercial success, but interfaces for other languages and applications, such as spreadsheet packages, are emerging. There are at least as many implementation technologies as systems: syntactic grammars, semantic grammars, conceptual parsers, pattern matchers, etc. Each has its strengthens and weaknesses. The greatest variability is found in language coverage, ease of developing new applications, and, of course, cost. Current research promises to improve the integration of natural language with other types of interfaces and support extended human-machine conversations. Nevertheless, they will not be appropriate for every application. The purpose of this tutorial will be to introduce the technology and allow the attendee to evaluate the alternatives. WHO SHOULD ATTEND: designers, managers, and users of human-machine interfaces. This tutorial is aimed primarily at the individual who requires the information to understand or evaluate natural language interfaces, but who is not now a natural language processing professional. It should also be of use to more experienced individuals seeking a survey current applied state-of-the-art. About the instructors: Dr. Norman Sondheimer is a computer scientist at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute and past President of the Association for Computational Linguistics. His research has been into natural language understanding. Dr. Madeleine Bates is one of the primary architects of BBN'S IRUS, a highly advanced nl system, and has developed other systems in speech understanding, text generation, intelligent computer assisted instruction, interfaces to databases and human factors studies. She is currently President of the ACL. Both instructors have more than a decade of research and development experience in AI and have authored numerous publications. SPEECH RECOGNITION AND SYNTHESIS Dr. Jared Bernstein SRI International Dr. Beatrice T. Oshika System Development Corporation The tutorial will include a review of commercial speech recognition and synthesis products, metrics for evaluation, and research issues crucial to continued development. The synthesis section will discuss the linguistic and phonetic problems to be solved in designing text-to-speech systems, including letter-to-sound conversion, prosodic assignment and spectral composition. The recognition section will cover the problems associated with modelling continuous speech, including discussion of phonological variation, lexical retrieval and matching, and control structures required to handle multiple sources of knowledge. Familiarity with phonology and data structures is helpful but not required. Dr. Jared Bernstein is a Senior Computer Scientist at SRI International working on applied speech recognition projects, and has ten years experience in speech synthesis and speech processing. At Telesensory Systems he led the effort that resulted in the Prose 2000 text-to-speech converter. Prior to that he was with the MIT Speech Communication Group working on speech perception, phonetics and the analysis of deaf speech. Dr. Beatrice T. Oshika is manager of the Research and Development program at System Development Corporation and has seventeen years experience in linguistics and speech processing. At Speech Communications Research Laboratory she was responsible for formulation and testing of phonological rules in conversational speech as part of the DARPA Speech Understanding Research program in the 1970s. Each tutorial is a half-day in length. They cost only $50 each, including handouts. The conference brochure and registration form for both the tutorials and the paper presentations are available from Don Walker Bell Communications Research 445 South Street, MRE 2A379 Morristown, NJ 07960 USA on the ARPANET: bellcore!walker@berkeley.arpa ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Fri May 24 10:05:37 1985 Date: Fri, 24 May 85 10:05:32 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a008197; 24 May 85 1:46 EDT Date: Thu 23 May 1985 21:48-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #69 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 24 May 85 05:06 EST AIList Digest Friday, 24 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 69 Today's Topics: Seminars - Acquiring Control Knowledge in BB1 (SU) & Computers and Emotion (CSLI) & Knowledge, Beliefs, Time and More Puzzles (IBM-SJ) & Functional Programming and the Logical Variable (SU), Workshop - Applications of Expert Systems ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue 21 May 85 10:03:38-PDT From: Carol Wright/Susie Barnes Subject: Seminar - Acquiring Control Knowledge in BB1 (SU) SIGLUNCH DATE: Friday, May 24, 1985 LOCATION: Braun Auditorium, Mudd/Chemistry Bldg. TIME: 12:05 SPEAKER: Mike Hewett Knowledge Systems Laboratory TITLE: MARCK: A Module for Acquiring and Refining Control Knowledge in BB1 MARCK is the first step in exploiting the capabilities for knowledge acquisition and learning within the BB1 blackboard architecture. MARCK automates the role of a BB1 knowledge engineer by assisting the expert with defining, formulating, and integrating new control knowledge into a knowledge base during a problem-solving session. While running a system in BB1, an expert may take an action which indicates that some piece of control knowledge is missing. MARCK uses its knowledge of the control architecture in BB1 to guide the expert toward identifying the missing knowledge. It then uses a set of data analysis routines and a library of generic heuristic forms to postulate some applicable control heuristics. Although MARCK has no knowledge of the domain, it can generate domain-dependent control knowledge. MARCK communicates to the expert through a translator which converts heuristic forms and LISP code into English sentences. MARCK is currently being used in the PROTEAN project at KSL and several examples will be presented where MARCK has formulated important and useful pieces of control knowledge. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 22 May 85 17:10:28-PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Computers and Emotion (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] *NEXT* THURSDAY, May 30, 1985 12 noon TINLunch Ventura Hall ``Computers and Emotion'' Conference Room Discussion led by Helen Nissenbaum Emotion is an integral part of human consciousness. Yet common practice in AI takes its ideal to be an intelligent, goal-driven agent entirely devoid of passion. The assumption behind the practice is that emotionless intellect is possible, and that a purely cognitive agent is a valid abstraction from the total human individual. The TINLunch, inspired by a TINLunch held October 13, 1981, titled ``Will Robots Need Emotions?'', probes the AI assumption. I offer the following as starting points for the discussion: - What would it take to have a computer with emotions? - Why worry about this? A passionless automaton is fully rational and far better off for not having emotions. (Too bad we humans suffer this affliction.) - These are idle speculations. A sufficiently complex robot, that could truly be said to understand and be goal-driven, will, of necessity, have emotion, no matter what the intentions of its creators. Background readings are excerpts from Hume's ``Of the Passions'', Jerome Shaffer's ``An Assessment of Emotion'' and TINLunch Outline ``Will Robots Need Emotions?'' by A. Archbold and N. Haas. --Helen Nissenbaum ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 85 18:36:12 PDT From: IBM San Jose Research Laboratory Calendar Subject: Seminar - Knowledge, Beliefs, Time and More Puzzles (IBM-SJ) IBM San Jose Research Lab 5600 Cottle Road San Jose, CA 95193 Wed., May 29 Computer Science Seminar 10:30 A.M. KNOWLEDGE, BELIEFS, TIME AND MORE PUZZLES Cafe. A In "Knowledge, Common Knowledge and Related Puzzles," PODC 84, a logical system for formalizing reasoning about knowledge and time was proposed. Ongoing research around this system will be described and touch on subjects such as: restrictions on how one may acquire knowledge, surprises, beliefs, and knowledge about time. Prof. D. L. Brandeis Host: J. Halpern (HALPERN@IBM-SJ) ------------------------------ Date: 23 May 85 0000 PDT From: Yoni Malachi Subject: Seminar - Functional Programming and the Logical Variable (SU) Thursday 6-6-85, 11am in MJH 352 FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING AND THE LOGICAL VARIABLE Gary Lindstrom Department of Computer Science University of Utah Salt Lake City, Utah 84112 Logic programming offers a variety of computational effects which go beyond those customarily found in functional programming languages. Among these effects is the notion of the "logical variable," i.e. a value determined by the intersection of constraints, rather than by direct binding. We argue that this concept is "separable" from logic programming, and can sensibly be incorporated into existing functional languages. Moreover, this extension appears to significantly widen the range of problems which can efficiently be addressed in function form, albeit at some loss of conceptual purity. In particular, a form of side-effects arises under this extension, since a function invocation can exert constraints on variables shared with other function invocations. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that determinacy can be retained, even under parallel execution. The graph reduction language FGL is used for this demonstration, by being extended to a language FGL+LV permitting formal parameter expressions, with variables occurring therein bound by unification. The determinacy argument is based on a novel dataflow-like rendering of unification. In addition the complete partial order employed in this proof is unusual in its explicit representation of demand, a necessity given the "benign" side-effects that arise. An implementation technique is suggested, suitable for reduction architectures. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 85 11:49:55 EDT From: johannes@BRL.ARPA Subject: Workshop - Applications of Expert Systems The U. S. Army Research Office is sponsoring a Summer Workshop on Application of Expert Systems. The workshop will be held on July 16,18 1985 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City, Arlington, Virginia. The workshops objective is to assess the application of expert systems to military applications and to identify the state-of-the-art and research needs. Particular emphasis shall be given to diagnostic and automatic test applications. The four main topics for discussion in the working sessions are: 1. Preventive maintenance -- Prognostics 2. Diagnostic maintenance 3. Automatic logistics planning 4. Automatic training The keynote speaker for the workshop will Lieutenant General Robert Moore Deputy Commander for Research Development and Acquisition - US Army Materiel Command. The workshop attendance is limited to 50 participants from the US Army industry, and academia. The program will consist of invited and submitted papers. A 200 word abstract must be submitted to the program committee prior to June 15, 1985 for consideration. Abstracts should be sent to Dr. Johannes of the Program committee. The author will be notified of acceptance of the paper and particpation by June 21, 1985. Accepted papers will published in the proceedings of the conference and will be allocted a maximum of five pages. Program Committee Dr. J. D. Johannes Dr. C. R. Green Dr. W. M. Holmes Univ of Alabama US Army Research Office US Army Missile Command Computer Science Electronics Division Redstone Arsenal, AL Huntsville, AL P.O. Box 12211 35898-5252 35899 Research Triangle Pk. NC 27709-2211 205-895-6255 919-549-0641 205-876-1048 johannes@brl-bmd.arpa green@brl-bmd.arpa holmes@brl-bmd.arpa ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Fri May 24 10:02:14 1985 Date: Fri, 24 May 85 10:02:11 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a008532; 24 May 85 3:18 EDT Date: Thu 23 May 1985 21:57-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #70 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 24 May 85 05:08 EST AIList Digest Friday, 24 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 70 Today's Topics: Queries - Reasoning by Analogy & Functional/Procedural Translation, Books - OPS5, Cognition - Animal Cognition Notes, Games - Computers Cheating in Chess, Humor - AI Limericks ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 21 May 85 18:27:14 pdt From: Cindy Mason Subject: Reasoning by Analogy Does anyone have a bibliography (preferably refer format) or references for reasoning by analogy? I'm especially interested in learning by analogy, but any nice articles relating to this area would be helpful. ------------------------------ Date: 22 May 1985 at 1634-EDT From: jim at TYCHO.ARPA (James B. Houser) Subject: Computer Language Translation Has any work been done in the area of machine translation of functional languages into procedural languages? As an example LISP -> C or PROLOG to ADA. At first glance it seems useful but also potentially very tricky transformation. Also do any reasonable C compilers/environments exist for LISP Machines? I have heard rumors that something is available for the CADR. ------------------------------ Date: 22 May 1985 1547-EDT From: Lee Brownston@CMU-CS-A Subject: OPS5 Book Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] "Programming Expert Systems in OPS5: An Introduction to Rule-Based Programming," by Lee Brownston, Robert Farrell, Elaine Kant, and Nancy Martin, is scheduled to be published by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company on May 31 at a list price of $35.95. The blurb from Addison-Wesley's flier for Spring 1985 says the following about this book: Presents practical techniques for rule-based programming of expert systems in OPS5. This comprehensive book will prove itself indispensible to the experienced programmer. The first section of the book is a tutorial, teaching both the OPS5 language and effective programming techniques. The development of a small, self-contained OPS5 programmed is followed from problem definition to testing. The second section takes a broader view, considering the nature of production-system architectures and comparing OPS5 with other tools for programming corporate systems. It is also the only book-length treatment of OPS5 and production-system programming. [...] ------------------------------ Date: 20 May 85 14:14:04 EDT From: Tim Subject: Animal Cognition For those of you who missed the symposium on "The Question of Animal Cognition", which was presented by the psychology department in early May, I've written a paper which is somewhere between a transcription of the notes I took and an informal summary of the proceedings of that symposium. This is on ANIMAL.SYMPOSIUM in case anyone is interested in reading it. Twinerik [I can mail a copy to interested readers who can't FTP it. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 21 May 1985 0734-PDT From: MEYERS%UCI-20A@UCI-ICSA Subject: computers cheating in chess I think there is a misconception about what it means for a computer to "use a second board" and for a computer to have access to a book of openings. We don't penalize a human who has memorized a book of openings, and we don't penalize a human who can using several "mental boards".. I think it is proper to regard the computer memory as analogous to the human chess player's mind -- we should not penalize the computer for having perfect rote memory and for perfect ability to "mentally" visualize the chess board, just as we allow any mental capabilities and mental acts of the human chess player. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 21 May 85 07:40:01 EDT From: cugini@NBS-VMS Subject: cheating at chess > * Tournament rules forbid the players to consult books during the game. > Most programs rely on a book to play openings. This raises some interesting points. It seems that the thrust of the rules is that a player should play with no "external" help - ie the player is expected to rely solely on his/her/its internalized knowledge of the game. For humans, the interpretation is clear - ie I assume it would be cheating if a human utilized *any* externally recorded knowledge or advice (say on a handy micro). But what interpretation can this idea have for a computer? Well, there is a long tradition of referring to "external" storage, ie disk, drum, and tape. Conversely "main" storage (known as "core" to the old-timers) does really seem to be "inside" of the computer, more an intrinsic part of it. Sooo... rather than bend the rules to allow humans to cheat also, why not restrict computers to the use of internal storage during play? ie they can load up from disk, tape, whatever, but once the clock starts, we unplug all the I/O ports, and may the best rational agent win. John Cugini National Bureau of Standards Bldg 225 Room A-265 Gaithersburg, MD 20899 phone: (301) 921-2431 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 21 May 85 15:08 IDT From: Henry Nussbacher Subject: Humor >From Datamation - March 15, 1985 - page 166: AI YI YI The following can be attributed to a novice system with an ignorance base and an unnatural language interface, programmed to produce Artifical Humor (AH). Of a planning aid using AI, A customer said with a sai, "If they think we know whai, We decide what to trai, There's no chance that their product will flai." After giving a robot AI, An inventor rushed out the next dai. With a tear in his ai, He gave a sad crai, "I've made a machine that can lai!" ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Sat Jun 1 04:38:03 1985 Date: Sat, 1 Jun 85 04:38:00 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a004311; 1 Jun 85 2:51 EDT Date: Fri 31 May 1985 23:04-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #71 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sat, 1 Jun 85 04:30 EST AIList Digest Saturday, 1 Jun 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 71 Today's Topics: Administrivia - Mailer Problems, Games - Computer Scrabble, Query - Self-Reproducing System, Applications - Tax Rules, PROLOG - The Berkeley PLM Benchmarks, Humor - Contest, Games - Cheating at Chess, Conference - Submission Date for AIE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri 31 May 85 22:54:09-PDT From: Ken Laws Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Mailer Problems SRI-AI has been down for five days, since Sunday morning. If you have sent mail to AIList during that time, you should probably send it again. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Thu 30 May 85 11:47:54-EDT From: John R. Kender Subject: Computer Scrabble What is the state of the art in computer Scrabble? I am aware of a company called Ritam that produces a device called Monty that is "pretty good", according to the president of the Scrabble Players' Club. I have no idea what, if any, AI techniques it uses. Further, the Club president knows of no tournaments involving computers. At first glance this does not appear because the game would be trivial to program, rendering computers invincible to humans or making games between them boring. My interest is more in using the game as a task domain in an AI course. Thus: o What work has been done? References? Software? Anecdotal remarks? o How deep is the strategy of the game: is it more on the level of blackjack, or of go? Are there commonly known or articulated heuristics? How far ahead do human players look? Is a multi- handed game qualitatively different from a two-handed one? o Assuming a word data base, is Scrabble a game of difficulty appropriate to the level of a homework assignment? a term project? a Master's degree project? Would it be worth doing: are their sufficiently interesting issues of representation, search, and control that are not overwhelmed by bookkeeping details or brute force methods? ------------------------------ Date: 24 May 85 06:35:12 EDT (Fri) From: zim@mitre.ARPA Subject: size of self-reproducing system; intelligence? Q: What's the minimum "size" for a self-reproducing thing? For an "intelligent" thing?? These are half-baked questions and I need help in sharpening then up. Maybe this subject has been all worked out and all I really need is a few pointers to the appropriate literature? I don't know... Here are some preliminary thoughts, to clarify the question I'm trying to ask: A measure of "size" probably needs to include the complexity of the environment ... for instance, a virus takes advantage of a highly-ordered set of cell mechanisms and can reproduce with only a few thousand (or so?) bits of information ... its "size" measure should be bigger than the amount of DNA in it might seem to imply. All living creatures make use of some of the physical laws of the universe (mostly chemistry), and should be charged some for that in "size" measure ... though they probably shouldn't be charged for remote-seeming physics such as general relativity, high-energy particle physics, etc. (On the other hand, maybe the information "cost" of those theories is tiny compared to the more immediate environmental "size" around a living cell??) The problem is to define a "relevant" environment. Self-reproducing cellular automata that I've heard of seem to generally require billions and billions of cells or so (as in Conway's LIFE); they live in a very simple universe, where there is almost no information stored in their environment. On the other hand, most of the self-reproducing automata I've seen are quite huge and inefficient, because they're structured to be comprehensible to people.... Are the questions of self-reproduction and intelligence related? I'm thinking vaguely about notions of Godel's theorem, complexity of human brains, self-reference, etc. Maybe an appropriate size measure would come out about the same for a single cell and for a brain?? Presumably brains should be charged for their structure, not for the details of how neurons metabolize, in a size measure.... On the Godel's theorem again, the coding schemes needed in producing the self-referential statement typically seem to require really huge numbers (unless a lot of information is hidden somewhere else). Maybe one could define "intelligence" in terms such as "capable of formulating Godel's theorem", or some other definition (with malice aforethought) to make the self-reproducing size measure come out the same as the intelligence size measure? So to restate the question, can one define an appropriate measure and prove that any self-reproducing (or intelligent?) system has to be at least of a certain size? This might have interesting implications as to how hard it will be to make AI systems with human-like consciousness ... how many logic elements or gates will be required, how many gigaflops (or gigalips) are needed to think at a human pace, etc.... -zim@mitre [I remember John DeVore at K-State building a self-replicating 2-D binary pattern as his master's project circa 1978. I'm sure it had millions of cells rather than billions. AIList readers interested in such questions should be aware of the Self-Org@MIT-MC discussion list. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20-May-85 09:52:10 PDT From: (David Sherman) pesnta!dave@UCB-Vax Subject: Suggestions needed for tax rules [Forwarded from the Prolog Digest by Laws@SRI-AI.] I am trying to design a system which will apply the rules of the Income Tax Act (Canada) to a set of facts and transactions in the area of corporate reorganizations. This is not a typical "AI and law" problem, because the Income Tax Act is highly technical and extremely specific about what rules apply and when. To the extent there is "open texture", or issues which require legal judgment (e.g., whether an amount is "reasonable"), I assume the lawyer using the system will provide the judgment as an input fact. The problems are therefore quite different from those addressed by McCarty@Rutgers' TAXMAN program, because the approaches of the Income Tax Act and the Internal Revenue Code are very different. The difficulty in programming the system is simply the complexity of the Income Tax Act. On a given transaction, a large number of rules have to be examined to determine possible tax effects. Some of these rules create new facts (e.g., a deemed dividend or a deemed disposition). The passage of time is very important: steps happen in a particular sequence, and the "state of the world" at the moment a step is taken is crucial to determining the tax effects. In the context of corporate transactions, this state includes such things as who controls a corporation; who owns what assets; the residence and status of and relationships among taxpayers; cost bases and proceeds of disposition; and so on. (My background to this: I'm a tax lawyer and an experienced C programmer. I'm doing this work towards an LL.M. thesis.) I've tried several approaches to this field before. Last year I did a small version in C which uses an event-driven simulation, and as it encounters each event calls a function for each rule in the database to generate new events and tax results. (Incidentally, if anyone wants a copy of that paper, "Towards a Comprehensive Computer-Based Problem Solving Model of the Income Tax Act: A Suggested Approach and Implementation of Examples from Corporate Reorganizations", let me know.) One of the problems with the C implementation was designing the order in which the rules should be applied. For even the small subset I implemented, this was awkward and difficult. I came across Prolog at an ICS course on expert systems a few weeks ago. It looks like the perfect tool for much of what I want to do. Besides the workshops at the course (taught=sdcsvax!vis!greg), I've now read Clocksin & Mellish and skimmed through How To Solve It In Prolog. The definitional stuff is fine. Using C-Prolog 1.4 on a VAX (not this machine), I've already coded the Income Tax Act's definitions for things like "resident", "private corporation", etc. The problem I have (if you've read this far, thank you!) is how to deal with _time_. I suppose the overall model I need to work with is one of "changing states", where a transaction (e.g., X transfers property to corporation Y in exchange for shares in Y) changes the world from state A to state B, and the rules can examine differences between the states to determine the effects. But then how does that jive with definitional tests which may need to look back in time (e.g., a corporation is resident in Canada in a given year if it meets certain conditions and it was resident in Canada, or carried on business in Canada, in the previous year. This is a perfect recursive definition for Prolog, and I've implemented the rule, but only as a fixed definition, not as part of a "changing state" system.)? I guess part of my problem is that I'm not working in an AI department, or even a Computer Science department, and so I don't have knowledgeable people to bounce my ideas off. If you have any suggestions as to approaches I should be taking, I'd greatly appreciate hearing from you. I'd be happy to send you a copy of the code I've written so far to explain what I mean. (You could even learn all about Canadian tax law!) -- David Sherman The Law Society of Upper Canada Osgoode Hall Toronto, Canada M5H 2N6 (416) 947-3466 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 May 85 10:47:11 pdt From: (Tep Dobry) Tep%ucbdali@Berkeley Subject: The Berkeley PLM Benchmarks [Forwarded from the Prolog Digest by Laws@SRI-AI.] At the Warren Abstract Machine Workshop a few weeks ago I was asked to publish the set of benchmarks programs I've been using on my simulator for the Berkeley Prolog Machine(PLM). I've finally got them all collected together in Prolog form (CProlog) and have sent them to the Digest. They're really too big to just publish in the Digest, so they are being set up in a directory in the PROLOG directory at SU-SCORE. There are 11 files with a total of 400 lines. Since our machine is based on compiled Prolog, the top level queries are also compiled in, generally as the predicate main/0. The benchmarks were primarily chosen to exercise all of the features of the PLM, not for any complexity of program- ming. About half of them come from Warren's thesis, and the others we've added here. Our original performance figures were based on simulations of hand compiled versions of these benchmarks. We are currently looking for larger, more com- plex benchmarks to run on the hardware when it is available. So I'd be interested seeing large benchmarks sent to the Digest. -- Tep Dobry [ the code for these benchmarks is available from the SCORE PROLOG library under the subdirectory PS: ] ------------------------------ Date: Wed 29 May 85 12:50:32-EDT From: Bob Hall Subject: You thought it was over... [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] No, but AI JOKES II: THE WRATH OF CONS is entering its final week, so if you've heard any good ones and want to get in on the glory, send your entry to me before June 7, 1985. Remember to include T-shirt size and school from the list on the announcement. ------------------------------ Date: 24 May 85 11:39:32 EDT (Friday) From: MJackson.Wbst@Xerox.ARPA Subject: Re: cheating at chess From: cugini@NBS-VMS: "Sooo... rather than bend the rules to allow humans to cheat also, why not restrict computers to the use of internal storage during play? ie they can load up from disk, tape, whatever, but once the clock starts, we unplug all the I/O ports, and may the best rational agent win." Surely if we unplug *all* the I/O ports, one of the rational agents will lose by exceeding the time limit before making its first move? Mark ------------------------------ Date: Thursday, 30 May 1985 22:41:31 EDT From: Duvvuru.Sriram@cmu-ri-cive.arpa Subject: Submission Date for AIE A number of people have inquired about the due date for the Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Conference, to be held in April 1986 at University of Southampton, UK. The due date is extended to June 15th. If you still plan to send an abstract don't waste your money on overnight mail, good old US mail would do the job. Sriram ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Tue Jun 4 23:45:05 1985 Date: Tue, 4 Jun 85 23:44:57 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a008095; 4 Jun 85 14:25 EDT Date: Tue 4 Jun 1985 09:50-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #72 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 4 Jun 85 23:33 EST AIList Digest Tuesday, 4 Jun 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 72 Today's Topics: Seminars - Expert System for Fault Diagnosis (SRI) & Temporal Logic (SU) & Assumption-Based Truth Maintenance (CSLI) & Spreadsheets in Logic Programming (MIT) & PCs as Vehicles for LISP (BBN), Conferences - Association for Computational Linguistics & Law and Technology ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat 25 May 85 12:48:58-PDT From: Michael Georgeff Subject: Seminar - Expert System for Fault Diagnosis (SRI) Time: Wednesday May 29 at 11:00 am Location: EJ232 Speaker : Guy A. Boy (NASA-Ames & ONERA, France) Topic : HORSES HORSES ( Human - [Orbital Refueling System] - Expert System ) is a malfunction procedure-oriented diagnosis aid. It takes into account two types of logic, the functioning logic of the system to be controlled and the user logic. HORSES will be used to study a theoretical framework of the situation recognition problem. As a strategy for research in the use of expert systems for fault diagnosis this example focuses attention on three interrelated issues; 1) The characterization of the fault diagnosis process with the current ORS implementation (shuttle orbital refueling system simulator); 2) Improved understanding of how humans recognize, diagnose, and respond to system failures; and, 3) A deeper analysis of the fault diagnosis process concentration a better understanding of the knowledge and inferences required. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 24 May 85 14:19:25-PDT From: Andrei Broder Subject: Seminar - Temporal Logic (SU) 5/30/85 - Daniel Lehmann (Hebrew U. visiting Brandeis U.) "The temporal logic of probabilistic programs" In a joint work with S. Shelah, some extensions of the propositional temporal logic of discrete time were advocated as useful for stating and proving properties of probabilistic concurrent programs. Deductive completeness theorems were proved. In a joint work with S. Kraus corresponding decision procedures were investigated. Recently a system for describing time and knowledge has been proposed. All those systems can be characterized as two-dimensional modal logics, i.e. they involve two essentially orthogonal modalities, one of them being time, that satisfy some interchange law. The techniques involved in studying such systems and some open problems will be described. ***** Time and place: May 30, 12:30 pm in MJ352 (Bldg. 460) ****** ------------------------------ Date: Wed 29 May 85 17:16:33-PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Assumption-Based Truth Maintenance (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] THURSDAY, June 6, 1985, 4:15 p.m. CSLI Colloquium, Redwood Hall, Room G-19 ``An Assumption-Based Truth-Maintenance System'' Johan De Kleer, Xerox PARC, Intelligent Systems Lab. This paper presents a new view of problem solving motivated by a new kind of truth maintenance system. Unlike previous truth maintenance systems which were based on manipulating justifications, this truth maintenance system is, in addition, based on manipulating assumption sets. As a consequence it is possible to work effectively and efficiently with inconsistent information, context switching is free, and most backtracking (and all retraction) is avoided. These capabilities motivate a different kind of problem-solving architecture in which multiple potential solutions are explored simultaneously. This architecture is particularly well-suited for tasks where a reasonable fraction of the potential solutions must be explored. --Johan De Kleer ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Jun 85 13:10:37 EDT From: jan@harvard.ARPA (Jan Komorowski) Subject: Seminar - Spreadsheets in Logic Programming (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Harvard University Center for Research in Computing Technology COLLOQUIUM Spreadsheets as a Subset of Logic Programming Maarten van Emden University of Waterloo Tuesday, June 4, 1985 4:00 PM Aiken Lecture Hall 101 (Tea in Pierce Hall 213 at 3:30) ABSTRACT: We believe that currently marketed programs leave unexploited much of the potential of the spreadsheet interface. The purpose of our work is to obtain suggestions for wider application of this interface by showing how to obtain its main features as a subset of logic program- ming. Our work is based on two observations. The first is that spreadsheets would already be a useful enhancement to interactive languages such as APL and BASIC. Although Prolog is also an interactive language, this interface cannot be used in the same direct way. Hence our second observation: the usual query mechanism of Prolog does not provide the kind of interaction this application requires. But it can be provided by the incremental query, a new query mechanism for Prolog. The two observations together yield the spreadsheet as a display of the state of the substitution of an incremental query in Prolog. Recal- culation of dependent cells is achieved by automatic modification of the query in response to a new increment that would make it unsolvable without the modification. Host: Professor Henryk Jan Komorowski ------------------------------ Date: 3 Jun 85 10:20-EDT From: Peter Mager Subject: Seminar - PCs as Vehicles for LISP (BBN) ACM GREATER BOSTON CHAPTER SICPLAN Thursday, June 13, 1985 8 P.M. Bolt Beranek and Newman, Newman auditorium 70 Fawcett St., Cambridge The Personal Computer as a Delivery Vehicle Gerald R. Barber Gold Hill Computers Cambridge, MA The growing interest in artificial intelligence technologies is stimulating interest in how the benefits of these technologies can be delivered on a low cost and low risk basis. This talk focuses on the elements of a personal computer based delivery vehicle for artificial intelligence applications. The combination of a growing market for artificial intelligence applications and dropping development costs have created a need for an inexpensive, PC based delivery vehicle. Some desirable characteristics of a PC delivery vehicle will be discussed including characteristics of the Golden Common Lisp implementation, performance, networking, memory needs, and use of backend machines. A strategy for the implementation of artificial intelligence technology in a cost effective and incremental fashion will also be discussed. ACM GREATER BOSTON CHAPTER SICPLAN Dear Colleague, Our June speaker, Gerry Barber, is president of Gold Hill Computers and the prime mover behind their implementation of Common Lisp for the IBM/PC. Their product Golden Common Lisp originated when Gerry spent a post-doc year in France at INRIA and found himself without adequate access to Lisp processors; hence a Lisp implementation for the IBM/PC. Prior to that Gerry studied under Carl Hewitt at MIT's AI Lab, receiving a Ph.D. in 1982. The talk should give a good perspective on where AI application languages are going and how well they are penetrating into the everyday world of low cost environments. 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 661-1840 before the day of the talk - early please. Peter Mager chairperson, Boston SICPLAN ------------------------------ Date: 28 May 1985 13:53:18 PDT From: Bill Mann Subject: ACL program information: papers July 9-12th Association for Computational Linguistics Annual Conference University of Chicago Presentations of Papers July 9 - 12, 1985 TUESDAY - 9 July morning ------- Carole D. Hafner Semantics of Temporal Queries and Temporal Data Klaus Obermeier Temporal Inferences in Medical Texts Kenneth Man-kam Yip Tense, Aspect and the Cognitive Representation of Time Shozo Naito, Akira Shimazu & Hirosato Nomura Classification of Modality Function & its Application to Japanese Language Analysis John C. Mallery Universality and Individuality: The Interaction of Noun Phrase Determiners in Copular Clauses William J. Rapaport Meinongian Semantics for Propositional Semantic Networks afternoon --------- INVITED SPEAKER Fernando Pereira A Survey of Natural Language Research at Japan's Institute for New Generation Computing Technology Philip Cohen and Hector Levesque Speech Acts and Rationality Jerry Hobbs Ontological Promiscuity Sam Pilato & Robert Berwick Reversible Automata & Induction of the English Auxilary System G. Edward Barton, Jr. The Computation Difficulty of ID/LP Parsing Aravind Joshi & K. Vijayshankar Some Computational Properties of Tree Adjoining Grammars David McDonald & James Pustejovsky TAGs as a Grammatical Formalism for Generation WEDNESDAY - 10 July morning ------- Michael McCord Modular Logic Grammars Robert Berwick & Sandiway Fong New Approaches to Parsing Conjunctions Using Prolog Mark Johnson Generalizing the Early algorithm Lauri Karttunen and Martin Kay Structure Sharing with Binary Trees Fernando Pereira A Structure-Sharing Representation for Unification-Based Grammar Formalisms Stuart M. Shieber Using Restriction to Extend Parsing Algorithms for Complex-Feature-Based Formalisms afternoon --------- INVITED SPEAKER William Woods Knowledge and Language: A New Frontier Philip Hayes Semantic Case Frame Parsing & Syntactic Generality Mark Jones & Alan Driscoll Movement in Active Production Networks Derek Proudian and Carl Pollard Parsing Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar Carl Pollard & Lewis Creary A Computational Semantics for Natural Language Leonardo Lesmo & Pietro Torasso Analysis of Conjunctions in a Rule-based Parser THURSDAY - 11 July morning ------- INVITED SPEAKER Barbara Grosz The Structures of Discourse Structures Remko Scha The Dynamic Discourse Model: A Formal Approach to Discourse Segmentation Sandra Carberry A Pragmatics-Based Approach to Understanding Intersentential Ellipsis Douglas Appelt Some Pragmatic Issues in the Planning of Definite & Indefinite Noun Phrases Brad Goodman Repairing Reference Identificaiton Failures by Relaxation afternoon --------- INVITED SPEAKER Bonnie Webber Raymonde Guindon & Burton Wagner Focusing in Anaphora Resolution: Allocation of Short-term Memory Karen Kukich Explanation Structures in XSEL Cecile L. Paris Description strategies for naive & expert users Kenneth Church Stress Assignment in Letter to Sound Rules for Speech Synthesis Brian Phillips, Michael Freiling, James Alexander, Steven Messick, Steve Rehfuss & Sheldon Nicholl An Eclectic Approach to Building Natural Language Interfaces FRIDAY - 12 July morning ------- Daniel Flickinger, Carl Pollard & Thomas Wasow Structure-Sharing in Lexical Representation Thomas Ahlswede A Tool Kit for Lexicon Building Roy Byrd & Martin Chodorow Using an On-line Dictionary to Find Rhyming Words and Pronunciations for Unknown Words Uri Zernik & Michael G. Dyer Towards a Self-Extending Phrasal Lexicon Andrew D. Beale Grammatical Analysis by Computer of the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus of British English Texts Martin Chodorow, Roy Byrd & George Heidorn Extracting Semantic Hierarchies from a Large On-Line Dictionary afternoon --------- INVITED SPEAKER George Miller Dictionaries of the Mind Nan Decker The Use of Syntactic Clues in Discourse Understanding Helen M. Gigley Grammar Viewed as a Functioning Part of a Cognitive System (The tutorial program on July 8 was described in a previous AILIST message.) ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 01 Jun 85 08:19:05 cet From: CSCROS%NSNCCVM.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA Subject: Conference Program - Law & Technology Final Program of Second Annual Conference on Law and Technology Legal Language, Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence June 24-30, 1985 Conrad N. Hilton Hotel Campus of the University of Houston University Park Tutorials: June 24 a.m. Understanding Legal Language Layman Allen, Jeff Roberts, Peter Linzer Discussion: Jon Bing, Donald Berman, Hector Castaneda, Grayfred Gray, Jay Hook, and Peter Seipel June 24 p.m. Programming the Law in PROLOG Marek Sergot, Elizabeth MacRae Discussion: Michael Heather, Sidney Lamb, Duncan MacRae, and Charles Walter June 25 a.m. Natural Language Processing George Heidorn, Martin Kay Discussion: Jean-Claude Gardin, David Hays, Michael Hoey, Sidney Lamb, and Peter Reich June 25 p.m. Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems L. Thorne McCarty and Donald Waterman Discussion: Cary deBessonet, Michael Dyer, Carole Hafner, Michael Heather, and Michael Lebowitz Research Presentations: June 26-June 28 Legal Language Processing Representing Open-Textured Legal Concepts Cognitive Processes Non-von Neumann Architectures Computer-Lawyer Inteface Workshops: June 28-30 Conference faculty workshop topics will be determined by the participants. Microcomputuers and micro-PROLOG will be available. Conference Participants: Layman Allen (Law, Michigan) Donald Berman (Law, Northeastern) Jon Bing (Informatics, U of Oslo) Hector Castaneda (Philosophy, Indiana) George Cross (Computer Science, Louisiana State) Cary deBessonet (Law, Southern U) Bethany Dumas (Linguistics and Law, Tennessee) Michael Dyer (Computer Science, UCLA) Margot Flowers (Computer Science, UCLA) M. Jean-Claude Gardin (Linguistics, Ecole Pratique de Haut Etudes) Grayfard Gray (Law, Tennessee) Carole Hafner (Computer Science, Northeastern) David Hays (Computational Linguistics, New York) Michael Heather (Law and Computer Science, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Poly) George Heidorn (Linguistics and Computer Science, IBM) Michael Hoey (Linguistics, U of Birmingham, England) Jay Hook (Law and Psychology, U of Houston) Martin Kay (Linguistics, Xerox) Sidney Lamb (Linguistics, Rice) Michael Lebowitz (Computer Science, Columbia) Peter Linzer (Law, U of Houston) Duncan MacRae (Artificial Intelligence, Washington, D.C.) Elizabeth MacRae (PROLOG and AI, Washington, D.C.) L. Thorne McCarty (Law and Computer Science, Rutgers) Jose Carlos Neves (Legal Informatics, U of Minho) Michael Parks (Information Science, Houston) Peter Reich (Linguistics and Psychology, Toronto) Jeff Roberts (Roberts, Markel & Folger, Houston) Charles Saxon (Computer Science, Easter Michigan U) Marek Sergot (Law and PROLOG, London) Peter Seipel (Legal Informatics, Stockholm) B. Vauquouis (Linguistics, Grenoble) Charles Walter (Law and Computer Science, Houston) Donald Waterman (AI and Linguistics, RAND) Tutorials: _ $250/4 Tutorials (before 6/7/85) (Includes lunch 6/24 & 6/25) _ $75/Tutorial (before 6/7/85) _ $350/4 Tutorials (after 6/7/85) _ $100/Tutorial (after 6/7/85) Research Presentations: _ $300/five sessions (before 6/7/85) (Includes lunch 6/26 & 6/27) _ $75/session (before 6/7/85) _ $400/five sessions (after 6/7/85) _ $100/session (after 6/7/85) Mail to: Charles Walter Director, Program on Law and Technology University of Houston Law Center 4800 Calhoun Houston, Texas 77004 Phone: (Not on network mail) 713-749-4935 713-749-4196 Accommodations: Call University of Houston Hilton Hotel (713-741-2447) for reservations. Additional rooms may be available at University Park Inn, (713-224-5971). ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Tue Jun 4 23:58:17 1985 Date: Tue, 4 Jun 85 23:58:12 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a009697; 4 Jun 85 19:56 EDT Date: Tue 4 Jun 1985 15:37-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #73 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Tue, 4 Jun 85 23:41 EST AIList Digest Wednesday, 5 Jun 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 73 Today's Topics: Queries - AI and Proctology & Range Data Images for Robotics & Explorer/Symbolics Compatibility & LISP on SUN Workstations & Lisp User Survey & AI and the CAIS & Man-Machine Interaction, Natural Language - McDonnell Douglas Announcement, Expert Systems - Expert Systems vs "Conventional" Programming, Conference - IJCAI-85 UCLA Campus Housing Available ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 1 Jun 85 22:34:36 PDT From: Michael Pazzani Subject: AI and proctology I am about to start my Phd research on an expert system for proctology. I am interested in finding out what others have done in this area. Also I'd like to have some opinions on the best language for implementing expert systems: PROLOG EURISKO or OPS5? Thanks, Mike Pazzani ------------------------------ Date: Mon 3 Jun 85 17:02:30-MDT From: Tom Henderson Subject: Range Data Images for Robotics The IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Robotics has asked me to look into the creation of a database of range data images. We would like to get an idea of both the availability of range imagery and the demand for such imagery. If you have range data images (perhaps with registered intensity images) or you would like to have access to such images, please answer the following questions and send to henderson@utah-20. Name: Address (Net and US Post): Range Data Available (give format): Would like access to range data (give any special requirements): ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 4 Jun 85 13:18:21 edt From: Mark Weiser Subject: Explorer/Symbolics compatibility We have a Symbolics 3600, and are looking at Explorers from TI now. What is the software compatibility between these two? Is it the very same zetalisp, windowing, etc.? Or is the only software similarity that of ancient common ancestry? Thanks for any help or advice. -mark ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 30 May 85 14:41:20 BST From: Ewgorc@ucl-cs.arpa Subject: LISP on SUN Workstations Can anyone gine me information about LISP availability on the SUN workstation range? I am interested in what variants are available, COMMON Lisp, Inter Lisp or whatever. Comments from actual users on how they have found the implementation would be very useful. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 03 Jun 85 20:32:36 CDT From: marick@GSWD-VMS Subject: Lisp user survey I'm making a survey of what users need from Lisp systems. If you use Lisp for work other than developing Lisp itself and you would mail me answers to the following questions, I'd much appreciate it. I will of course summarize the results to the net. 1. (I hesitate to start this battle.) What do you consider the most cost-effective system on which to develop programs? Special-purpose Lisp machines? General purpose personal workstations with Lisp (e.g., Suns, Apollos)? Timeshared systems? What about the most cost-effective system on which to deliver programs? 2. How important is the ability to call functions written in another language? If it's important, will those functions be specially written for the application or will they tend to be parts of libraries like the IMSL math library or a plotting package? If they're specially written, are they making up for some deficiency in your Lisp (e.g., no or weak support for handling strings)? 3. Should the editor be a part of the Lisp environment or should it be separate? What are the important differences between an embedded Emacs-like editor and an external Emacs-like editor that allows you to run Lisp in a window? 4. How often could your programs run "standalone", without the support of the full Lisp environment? Would it be useful to have some way to dump a set of Lisp functions as an executable file, so that you could, for example, write a reasonably-sized UNIX filter in Lisp? 5. How important is some sort of object-oriented programming package, like Flavors or Loops? Do you have any preferences? 6. How important is the speed of your compiled code? Obviously, everyone wants a Cray on their desk, but how many of your programs are truly limited by machine speed or compiler quality and would be significantly more useful if they ran faster? What operations are most common in your tight inner loops? 7. How adequate is the standard set of debugging tools (trace, single-stepper, debugger that lets you poke around in the stack)? 8. What other things make a Lisp system better? If there's a question I haven't asked, please tell me. Brian Marick Gould Computer Systems -- Urbana USENET: ...ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!marick ARPA: Marick@GSWD-VMS ------------------------------ Date: 3 Jun 1985 08:10-PDT From: JWOLFE@USC-ECLB Subject: AI and the CAIS [Also forwarded by Larry@JPL-VLSI.] Dear Colleagues: The Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) is investigating the Common APSE Interface Set (CAIS) for Ada Programming Support Environments (APSE). Although it is a proposed DoD standard, it is unlike other standards in that it will evolve as interface needs are identified. My particular interest is in what needs are generated by the introduction of AI languages and techniques (e.g. LISP, PROLOG, Knowledge Bases, Inferencing, etc.) to software engineering environments. This issue may effect the CAIS at two levels: First, tools may be written using AI languages and techniques; second, applications may use AI languages or techniques which may require unique tools. I am coming to the Ada and AI communities to solicit your help and advise. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has experience in: * Using AI languages and techniques to develop software tools. * Developing tools for the life cycle maintenance of AI software. * Anyone else who can contribute. Since the results of this study will influence the evolution of the CAIS standard, it is important to have the participation of government, industry, and acedemia. Please note that since IDA is a FCRC, issues of proprietary information and non-disclosure CAN be resolved. Your participation is needed and appreciated. James Wolfe Institute for Defense Analysis 1801 N. Beauregard Street Alexandria, VA 22311 ARPA: JWOLFE@USC-ECLB.ARPA Voice: (703) 845-2109 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 4 Jun 85 17:31:28 edt From: Rob Jacob Subject: Query - AI and man-machine interaction I'm trying to put together an entry on "man-machine interaction" for an encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. My initial reaction is that the main areas are natural language, speech, and maybe intelligent CAI-type dialogues. Another area might be user interface techniques first pioneered by AI people (as a byproduct of their work), like the Interlisp-D user interface. Have I missed your favorite topic? I'd appreciate any comments, pointers, suggestions, vicious attacks, etc. on this topic. Please reply to me directly, because I'm often too far behind in reading the lists. Thanks in advance, Rob Jacob ARPA: jacob@nrl-css UUCP: ...!decvax!nrl-css!jacob SNAIL: Code 7590, Naval Research Lab, Washington, D.C. 20375 ------------------------------ Date: 4-Jun-85 12:26 PDT From: Kirk Kelley Subject: McDonnell Douglas announcement McDonnell Douglas has announced a "breakthough" in Natural Language processing on the back cover of this week's Business Week. Of course there are no specific references. Does anyone know what they are talking about or if there is any substance to the hype: ... practical thinkers at our McDonnell Douglas Computer Systems Company have created the first computer that accepts you as you are -- human. They emulated the two halves of the human brain with two-level software: One level with a dictionary of facts and a second level to interpret them. The resulting Natural Language processor understands everyday conversational English. So it knows what you mean, no matter how you express yourself. It also learns your idiosyncracies, forgives your errors, and tells you how to find what you're looking for. Now, virtually anyone who can read and write can use a computer. ... That is essentially all the "information" given. If you know what this refers to, or what the nature of the "breakthrough" is please let me know. -- kirk ------------------------------ Date: Tue 4 Jun 85 13:16:32-PDT From: Michael Walker Subject: expert systems vs "conventional" programming Curt, You sent a message to the ailist some time ago on expert systems vs. "conventional" programming. I drafted a reply, but have been slow in sending it to you. Here it is, perhaps better late than never. There is a great deal of value in asking questions about what expert systems are good for. It is important for an emerging science to seek clear statements of its capabilities and boundaries. I think your observations on the value of ES are accurate. There is a third advantage which I feel is moderately well substantiated: that non-programmers can build certain types of programs using an expert system shell that they could not otherwise build. A specific example is the Blue-Box pharmacology therapy advisor built by two non-programmer medical students using Emycin. A reference is: Benoit Mulsant and David Servan-Schreiber (1984) "Knowledge Engineering: A Daily Activity on a Hospital Ward" Computers and Biomedical Research 17, pp 71-91. I recommended that they use Emycin when they visited during their medical clercship at Stanford. Neither of them had the knowledge to build the system in an ordinary programming language, but were successful in building their advisor in a remarkably short time using the expert system shell. Your question addressed the issue of what expert systems were good for. We should probably also ask what expert systems research, as opposed to just expert systems, is good for. I think that expert systems research is valuable, in part, because it is concerned with seeking ways to represent and use knowledge that cannot currently be readily represented or used. In this sense, we can view knowledge representation research as being concerned with developing new data structures and algorithms, appropriate for representing and manipulating symbolic information. There are many other arguments that could be made about the value of expert systems research, but I think I'll leave that for further discussion. Cheers, Mike Walker ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Jun 85 15:39:31 PDT From: Phyllis O'Neil Subject: IJCAI-85: UCLA campus housing available Economical UCLA dormitory rooms and suites are still available for IJCAI-85 this August. You can stay in dorm rooms for the 6-night period beginning Saturday, August 17, or for the 4-night period beginning Monday, August 19. Dorm rooms sleep one or two people. Residential suites are available starting Monday, August 19. Suites sleep two to four people; each suite has two bedrooms, bath, and living room. Breakfast and dinner are included when you stay in the dorms or suites. Additionally, you can use UCLA's swimming pools, raquetball courts, and other atheletic facilities. Campus housing forms are on pages 27 and 29 of the IJCAI-85 conference brochure. For copies of the brochure, contact: AAAI 445 Burgess Dr. Menlo Park, CA 94025 (213) 328-3123 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From: COMSAT 7-JUN-1985 23:54 To: FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX Subj: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a004109; 6 Jun 85 14:01 EDT Date: Thu 6 Jun 1985 09:53-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #74 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 7 Jun 85 23:49 EST AIList Digest Thursday, 6 Jun 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 74 Today's Topics: Games - Scrabble References, Terminology - MMI/HMI, Automata - Size of Self-Reproducing Systems, Report - Computational Natural Language, Bibliography - Recent Literature ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 3 Jun 85 09:31:54 edt From: "William J. Rapaport" Subject: scrabble reference What is the state of the art in computer Scrabble? What work has been done? References? Software? Anecdotal remarks? Here's one reference that I know about: Shapiro, Stuart C., "A Scrabble Crossword Game Playing Program," IJCAI-79, Vol. Two, pp. 797-99. William J. Rapaport Assistant Professor Dept. of Computer Science, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260 (716) 636-3193 uucp: ...{rocksvax|decvax}!sunybcs!rapaport csnet/arpanet: rapaport%buffalo@csnet-relay ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Jun 85 09:55:47 edt From: "Stuart C. Shapiro" Subject: scrabble reference There are two papers on SCRABBLE in the book, Computer Game-Playing: Theory and Practice, edited by M.A. Bramer, Ellis Horwood Ltd (distributed in the U.S. by Halsted Press, a division of John Wiley & Sons), 1983: A competitive Scrabble program, by P.J. Turcan, pp. 209-220 Scrabble crossword game-playing programs, by S.C. Shapiro, pp. 221-228 ------------------------------ Date: 6 June 1985 0912-PDT (Thursday) From: gross@nprdc (Michelle Gross) Subject: MMI/HMI Ron Jacob-- List "man-machine interaction" as "human-machine interaction," or HMI. This is how the field is referred to by people at the university that I attend. Some link should be made between the two names. --Michelle Gross ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 03 Jun 85 07:39:55 EDT From: cugini@NBS-VMS Subject: size of self-reproducing system; intelligence? > Q: What's the minimum "size" for a self-reproducing thing? > For an "intelligent" thing?? > A measure of "size" probably needs to include the complexity of the > environment ... for instance, a virus takes advantage of a highly-ordered > set of cell mechanisms and can reproduce with only a few thousand (or so?) > bits of information ... its "size" measure should be bigger than the amount > of DNA in it might seem to imply. All living creatures make use of some > of the physical laws of the universe (mostly chemistry), and should be > charged some for that in "size" measure ... > Self-reproducing cellular automata that I've heard of seem to > generally require billions and billions of cells or so (as in > Conway's LIFE); they live in a very simple universe, where there is almost > no information stored in their environment. On the other hand, most of > the self-reproducing automata I've seen are quite huge and inefficient, > because they're structured to be comprehensible to people.... I recently ran across a new book, "The Recursive Universe" by William Poundstone that covers a lot of these issues. It's written in a somewhat gee-whiz style, but there's a lot of good information, especially for Life aficianados. Anyway, according to the book: Von Neumann could have allowed a distinct cellular state for every possible component of a machine. The fewer the states, the simpler the physics, however. After some juggling, he settled on a cellular array with 29 different states for its cells...The [next] state of a cell...depends only on its state and the states of its...neighbors.... What Von Neumann did is this: he proved that there are starting patterns that can reproduce themselves...Von Neumann's pattern, or machine reproduced in a very powerful way. It contained a complete description of its own organization. It used that information to build a new copy of itself. Von Neumann's machine reproduction was more akin to the reproduction of living organisms than to the growth of crystals, for instance. Von Neumann's suspicion that a self-reproducing machine would have to be complicated was right. Even in his simplified checkerboard universe, a self-reproducing pattern required about 200,000 squares. > Are the questions of self-reproduction and intelligence related? I'm > thinking vaguely about notions of Godel's theorem, complexity of human > brains, self-reference, etc. > > This might have interesting implications as to how hard it will be to make > AI systems with human-like consciousness ... how many logic elements or gates > will be required, how many gigaflops (or gigalips) are needed to think at a > human pace, etc.... > -zim@mitre My feeling is that many people are too ready to assume self-reference= intelligence=consciousness, eg Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach" and/or "The Mind's I". Von Neumann's machine seems self-referential enough, but not too bright, and hardly conscious. I assume that dogs, cats, birds, lizards...?? are conscious (feel pain, have visual experience,..) but some of them aren't too bright either. I say this knowing that they perform complex tasks such as nest-building, but I don't believe that such performance is prima facie evidence for intelligence, in that intelligence should include some notion of a *general* ability to deal with abstract problem representation (calculators can do trig functions, but they're not intelligent). John Cugini National Bureau of Standards Bldg 225 Room A-265 Gaithersburg, MD 20899 phone: (301) 921-2431 ------------------------------ Date: Tuesday, 4 Jun 1985 10:16:06-PDT From: billmers%rayna.DEC@decwrl.ARPA (Meyer Billmers) Subject: Re: size of self-reproducing system; intelligence? > Q: What's the minimum "size" for a self-reproducing thing? For an >"intelligent" thing?? ... >the self-reproducing automata I've seen are quite huge and inefficient, >because they're structured to be comprehensible to people.... I'm not sure I agree. For straightforward replication, it has been shown (Fredkin, Winograd, and others) to be easy. For example, in a 2-D cellular automaton, if the states are 0 and 1 and if the result state is computed by taking the sum of the neighbors modulo 2, then any initial configuration will replicate forever. It could be argued that this doesn't count as "self-reproducing" because there is no agent which "intentionally" reproduces itself (whatever that means). But Banks (MIT MAC TR-81, Jan. 1971) showed that a 4 state, 5 neighbor 2-D cellular automaton could be constructed which was a) a universal computer, e.g. given the correct encoding of a function, could compute any function, and b) a universal constructor, e.g. could "build" another configuration in the space which would then be capable of computing any function. a) and b) taken together imply a self-reproducing automaton which certainly displays some degree of intentionality. And it doesn't seem to require even millions of cells; indeed, Banks outlines its construction as an appendix of about 10 pages (although he doesn't actually display the entire beast). Hope that helps. -Meyer ------------------------------ Date: Wed 5 Jun 85 16:59:26-PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: Report on Natural Language [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] Report No. CSLI-85-24, ``Computationally Relevant Properties of Natural Languages and Their Grammar'' by Gerald Gazdar and Geoffrey K. Pullum, has just been published. This report may be obtained by writing to David Brown, CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305 or Brown@SU-CSLI. ------------------------------ Date: 5 Jun 1985 16:12-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: New Bibliography Format I am using a new format in handling submissions of material. This format is the BIB citation format. BIB comes in the BSD UNIX 4.2 release. This is similar to the refer available with UNIX in general. The only major difference is the allowance of a definition file which I use for things like many articles from the same conference. That is I can define a string like BOOK11 for a specific conference in a definition file and then type BOOK11 for each paper in the conference for the information about editor, conference title, etc. Those users who use refer can insert the definitions in manually with a text editor. Definitions: D BOOK11 First Conference of Robotics Europe--Robot Technology and Applications\ %C Brussels, Belgium\ %D June 27-28 1984\ %E K. Rathmill\ %E P. Mac Conaill\ %E S. O'Leary\ %E J. Browne bib citations: %T Early Users Give Thumbs Up to TI's Expert System Tool %D April 15 %P 13 %J ComputerWorld %A P. Macconaill %T Esprit and Robotics Europe %J BOOK11 %P 1 %A H. J. Warnecke %A G. Schiele %T Performance Characteristics and Performance Testing of Industrial Robots - State of the Art %J BOOK11 %P 5 %A M. Priel %A B. Schatz %T Project for Development of a Photogrammetric Method for the Evaluation of the Dynamic Performance of Industrial Robots %J BOOK11 %P 18 %A J. H. Gilby %A R. Mayer %A G. A. Parker %T Dynamic Performance Measurement of Robot Arms %J BOOK11 %A 31 %A H. J. Warnecke %A R. D. Schraft %A M. C. Wanner %T Application of the Experimental Modal-Analysis in the Performance Testing Procedure of Industrial Robots %J BOOK11 %P 45 %A N. Percival %T A review of Safety Standards %J BOOK11 %P 55 %A J. P. Vautrin %T Safety of Robot Installations in France %J BOOK11 %P 61 %A R. Bell %T Assessment of Programmable Electronic Systems with Particular Reference to Robotics %J BOOK11 %P 68 %A P. Nicolaisen %T Occupational Safety and Industrial Robots - Present State of Discussions Within the Tripartite Group on Robotic Safety %J BOOK11 %P 74 %A F. Duggan %A R. H. Jones %A K. Khodabandehfoo %T Towards Developing Reliability and Safety Related Standards Using Systematic Methodologies %J BOOK11 %P 90 %A J. J. Hunter %T International Standards Activities in the Field of Industrial Robots %J BOOK11 %P 108 %A B. Knoerr %T Standardization in the Industrial Robot Field %J BOOK11 %P 116 %A H. Tipton %T International Standardization Related to Industrial Robots %J BOOK11 %P 122 %A G. Gini %A M. Gini %T Robot Languages in the Eighties %J BOOK11 %P 126 %A C. Launer %T Robot Programming Using a High-Level Language and CAD Facilities %J BOOK11 %P 139 %A C. Blume %T Implicit Robot Programming Based on a High-Level Explicit System and Using the Robot Data Base RODABAS %J BOOK11 %P 156 %A R. Dillman %T Robot Architecture for the Integraiton of Robots into Manufacturing Cells %J BOOK11 %P 172 %A K. Collins %A A. J. Palmer %A K. Rathmill %T The Development of a European Benchmark for the Comparison of Assembly Robot Programming Systems %J BOOK11 %P 187 %A H. Ford %A L. R. Hunt %A Renjeng Su %T A simple algorithm for computing canonical form %J Computers and Math %V 10 %N 4-5 %D 1984 %P 315 %A C. V. Negoita %T Fuzzy Systems in Knowledge Engineering %J Kuberneles %V 14 %N 1 %D 1985 %A Michael Strizenec %T Cognitive Psychology and AI %P 3 %J Kybernetika %V 21 %N 1 %D 1985 %A K. B. Zun %A V. V. Malyshev %T Generalized Minimax Approach to Solving Optimization Problems with Chance Constraints %J Engineering Cybernetics %V 22 %N 1 %P 105 %A L. A. Sholomov %T On Representation of a Binary Relation by a Collection of Criteria %J Engineering Cybernetics %V 22 %N 1 %P 93 %A Michael Georgeoff %T Transformations and Reduction Strategies for Typed Lambda Expressions %J ACM TOPLAS %V 6 %N 4 %D OCT 1984 %P 603 %A P. H. Winston %T The AI Business - A Perspective %J Manufacturing Engineering %V 94 %N 3 %D MAR 85 %P 75 ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Sat Jun 8 00:07:52 1985 Date: Sat, 8 Jun 85 00:07:46 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a010423; 7 Jun 85 13:25 EDT Date: Fri 7 Jun 1985 09:06-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #75 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 7 Jun 85 23:56 EST AIList Digest Friday, 7 Jun 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 75 Today's Topics: Conferences - Probability in AI Workshop & 5th Int. Workshop on Expert Systems and Applications ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu 6 Jun 85 23:22:51-PDT From: CHEESEMAN@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Probability in AI Workshop Information on the Workshop on: Probability and Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence Sponsored by: AAAI and RCA University of California, Los Angeles, August 14-16, 1985 Registration Fee: Early (before July 10) $25 Late $30 The registration fee includes admission to all presentations, discussions, patio lunches as well as the published proceedings. Registration and refund requests will not be accepted after 5th. of August. Registrations will be accepted on-site. Accomodations: Single Residence Hall Room 4 nights $160 Single room accomodations have been reserved through the UCLA conference services in university dormitories. Rates are based on a four day period starting the evening of Tuesday August 13th. and ending Sat. morning Aug. 17th. Check in is after 3:00p.m., check out by 12:00 noon. Breakfast and dinner are included starting with dinner on Tue. and ending with breakfast on Sat. 17th. Residence hall rooms are provided with linens and towels. Shared bathroom facilities are provided. The entire room payment for the four nights period must be enclosed with your reservation (unless you are making your own accomodation arrangements). Parking: Parking permit $15 Note: -No registration or refund after Aug. 5th. -There are a limited number of rooms--please make your reservations early. -Return registration and accomodation forms to the arrangements chairman. Arrangements Chair: General Chair: Program Chair: Rob. Suritis Peter Cheeseman John Lemmer Par Technology Corp. NASA/Ames Research RCA Advanced Tech. 220 Seneca Turnpike Center, Mail Stop 244-7 Labs., Route 38, New hartford, NY 13413 Moffett Field, CA 94035 Moorestown, (315)738-0600 x233 (415)694-6526 NJ 08057 (609)866-6650 Registration Information should include: Name, address, ARPA address (if any), phone number, parking permit required ($15), date and time of arrival and whether you will be attending IJCAI. Checks payable to AI Workshop at UCLA, and the registration information (and checks) should be sent to Rob. Suritis, PAR Technology Corp., 220 Seneca Turnpike, New Hartford, NY 13413. The workshop will occur in Sproul Hall, UCLA. Proposed Agenda --------------- Tue. Aug. 13th. 3:00 Registration and check-in, front desk, Sproul Hall Wed. Aug 14th. 8:30 Session 1: Foundations of Probability Theory 10:00 Break (20 min) 10:20 Session 1 (cont.) 12:00 Patio Lunch 1:00 Session 2: Comparison of Different Uncertainty Formalisms 3:00 Break 3:30 Session 2 (cont.) 5:00 Break for day Thurs Aug. 15th. 8:30 Session 3: Induction of Models Under Uncertainty 10:00 Break 10:20 Session 4: Combining Uncertain Information and Model Update from Data 12:00 Patio Barbecue 1:00 Session 5: Alternative Uncertainty Formalisms 3:00 Break 3:30 Session 6: Subjective Probability and Uncertainty 5:00 Break for day Fri. Aug. 16th. 8:30 Session 7: Applications of Probability theory 10:00 Break 10:20 Session 8: Decision Making Under Uncertainty 12:00 End of Workshop ------------------------------ Date: 5 Jun 1985 22:07-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Conference - 5th Int. Workshop on Expert Systems and Applications Fifth International Workshop Expert Systems & Their Applications Conference & Exhibition Palais des Papes - Avignon, France May 13 1985 Session 1: Parallelism & Real Time Parallelism in production systems: The sources and the expected speedup A. Gupta CMU The PICON expert system for process control G. C. Knickerbocker, R. L. Moore, L. B. Hawkinson and M. E. Levin LISP Machine Inc. Session 2A Theoretical Issues Automatic theorem proof & expert systems Y. Kodratoff and J. G. Ganascia Universite Paris-Sud (Orsay, France) Session 2B Case Studies I Distributed intelligence in alternative analysis for computer systems selection and configuration F. T. Zeviar Boeing Computer Services Session 3A Environments 1 The role of the knowledge engineer in instantiating the MP parameterizable inference engine C. Roche CRIl (Puteaux, France) Efficient expert system development through domain-specific tools J. A. Alexander Tektronix EX-TRAN 7 a different approach for an expert system generator T. Hassan M. A. Razzak and D. Michie Intelligent Terminals Ltd (Glasgow UK) R. Pettipher -ITT (Harlow UK) Session 3B Medicine A diabetes expert system using videotex technology J. C. Buisson, H. Farreny and H. Prade-Enseeiht & Universite Paul Sabatier (Toulouse, France) Spatial knowledge represenation in diagnostic expert systems Z. Xiang S. N. Srihari SUNY at Buffalo GROK - a natural language front end for medical expert systems K. K. Obermeier Battelle (Columbus, OHIO) Session 4A Theoretical Issues II Control in inference engines M. O. Cordier ECRC (Munich, FRG), M. C. Rousset Universite Paris-Sud Session 4B Case STudies II A knowledge based expert system used to prevent the disclosure of sensitive information at the US Environmental Protection Agency J. L. Feinstein - Booz, Allen & Hamilton (Bathesda, Maryland) Session 5 Expert systems and data bases Expert database systems: evolutionary and revolutionary approaches L. Kerschberg University of South Carolina Session 6A Knowledge Representation and Management I Knowledge representation and intentional logic F. Lepage Universite du Quebec KAUS - a tool for model building and evaluation H. Yamauchi and S. OHsuga University of Tokyo Prolog and Objects P. Albert - BULL (Louveciennes, France) LKJ-ex: an expert system for modifying a knowledge base P. Mazas Renault (Rueill-Malmaison, France) Session 6B Chemistry Learning spectrum-structure relations for automatic interpretation of carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance spectra S. Belaid - CISI (Paris, France) The DARC-EPIOS system - Structural elucidation by carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance M. Carabedian, I. Dagaine, and J. E. Dubois ITODYS (Paris, France) EXSYLA - an expert system for interpeting laser spectrometry data M. Lamboulle (Universite de Metz, France) JH. P. Haton (Universite de Nancy, France) J. F. Muller (Universite de Metz, France) Feasibility study concerning the use of expert systems for the development of formulas in pharmaceutical analysis D. L. Massart, M. R. detaevernier, Y. Michotte, L. Buydens, M. P. Derde, M. Desmet, L. Kaufman, G. Musch, J. Smeyers-Verbeke, A. Thielemans and L. Dryon Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) Session 6C Technical Diagnosis Naive causal reasoning for diagnosis W. Van de Velde - Vrije Universiteit Brussel (belgium) Rule categories and their use in technical diagnosis J. C. Emond Philips (Brussels, Belgium) A general model to troubleshooting and its applications to computer support A. Farley Hewlett-Packard (Palo Alto, CA) A diagnosis expert system M. Marrakchi, B. Houriez, F. Grzesiak and D. willaeys Universite de Valenciennes (France) Session 7 ONboard expert systems Military applications of expert systems J. F. Gilmore Georgia Tech Research Institute (Atlanta, Georgia) Session 8A Environments II The architecture of an expert system environment M. T. Harandi University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaigne) Babylon-kernel system of an integrated environment for expert system development & Operation F. Di Primio and G. Brewka - GMD (Sankt Augustin, FRG) Reasoning explication in expert systems B. Safar Universite Paris-Sud (Orsay, France) Session 8B Pattern Recognition & Signal Processing A design expert for digital signal processing I. Hartimo, O. Hyvarinen, K. Kronlog, O. Simula and J. Skytta Helsinki University of Technology (Finland) Expert graph prediction system J. P. Tsai Y. C. Chen, R. Krelling and W. Kabat Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) An expert system for pattern recognition A. Giordana, G. Ippolito and L. Saitta Universita di Torino (Italy) Session 8C Applied Linguistics NLI-ESD: An expert antural language interface to a statistical data bank P. Bucci G. Lella and S. Pavan SARIN SpA (Pomezia, Italy) An expert system for educational diagnosis based on default logic M. Jones and D. Poole University of Waterloo The twelve chairs and onamaturge - The representation of synonyms nad of related terms in the frames of an expert system for word coinage E. Nissan Ben gurion University of the Neguev (Beer Sheva, Israel) Session 9A Computer Engineering The Analyst - A workstation for analysis and design M. Stepehns and k. Whitehead - SDL (Camberley, Surrey, UK) An expert system for computer room facility layout T. Watanabe, Y. Nagai, C. Yasunobu, Y. IIzuka, K. Sasaki, and T. Yamanaka Hitachi (Kawasaki and Tokyo, Japan) Session 9B Law & Management Law-Expert Systems and decison aids J. Gros and C. Bernad - IRETJ (Montpellier, France) SESP - an expert system for personnel seleciton X. Debanne - Data Base Informatica (Pomezia, Italy) Session 9C Computer-Aided Manufacturing SOJA - an expert system for daily workshop planning B. Sauve and C. Lepape - CGE (Marcoussis, France) Knowledge organisation in an expert system for spot-welding robot configuraiton R. Rehmnert and K. Sandahl - Linkoping University (Sweden) O. Granstedt - ASEA Robotics (Vasteras, Sweden) Session 10A Knowledge Acquisition KADS - structured knowledge acquisition for expert systems J. A. Breuker and B. Wielinga - University of Amsterdam Generating expert knowledge using data analysis techniques V. Rialle - Faculte de Medecine de Grenoble (France) Session 10B finance & Fiscality FINEX - an expert support system for financial analysis L. Kerschberg and J. Dickinson - University of South Carolina The development of an expert tax system A. E. Roycroft - ICL (Manchester, UK) and P. Loucopoulos - UMSIT (Manchester UK) Session 10C Architecture Considerations concerning expert systems in the architectural design process K. H. Oey Technische Hogeschool Delft (Netherlands) ACE - an aid for architectural design F. Iselin, J. Menu and L. de Trentinian - EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) Session 11A Knowledge Represenation and Management II Control knowledge in expert systems - relaxing restrictive assumptions S. Fickas and D. Novick University of Oregon (Eugene, Oregon) Conflict detection in knowledge bases E. Pipard - Universite Paris-Sud (Orsay, France) Session 11B - Agriculture and Botany Counsellor - an agricultural advisory system combining expert system and videotex technology N. J. Jones and D. T. Crates -ICI (Franham, Surrey, UK) An expert system for determining the families of the Swiss flora J. M. Mascherpa - Conservatoire et Jardin Botaniques (Chabesy, Switzerland) C. Pellegrine Universite d CGeneve Sesison 11C - CADD Infering geometric description of objects from their functional specifications F. Ingrand - IMAG LIFIA (Grenoble, France) A domain-independent knowledge engineering architecture for CAD M. Barbuceanu - Central Institute for Management and Informatics (Bucarest, Rumania) Sesison 12A Environments III BOUM - an instantiation of the (PS) sup 2 concept J. M. PUGIN BULL (Louveciennes, France) MI 3: A set of tools for knowledge representaitons & processing. Its descriptiona nd use P. Tallibert - ESD (saint-Cloud France) Session 12 B Earth Sciences MEPRA- A feasibility study for an avalance prediction expert system J. M. Lefevre and T. Granier - IMAG LIFIA (Grenoble, France) Structure and function of the SIES system G. Jiwen, Y. Yuchuan and H. Jun - Jilin University (PRC) Z. Guosen and C. Qianyuan China National Oil and Gas (PRC) Session 12C engineering software An expert system aiding developers of engineering software packages C. Saurel - CERT (Toulouse, France) Symatrau - an expert system for 3D finite element modelling P. Trau - Enset (Cachan, France) Session 13A inexact reasoning Programming in fuzzy logic for expert systems design I. P. Orci - Stockholm University and KTH (Stockholm, Sweden) A hybrid-uncertainty theory E. M. Oblow - Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA) The LEZARD sytem: an experiment in inexact reasoning in medical applications O. Gascuel, J. charlet, S. genetet and B. Mari INSERM (Paris, France) Session 13B Speech Recognition SYSTEXP - an expert system for acousticophonetic speech decoding N. Carbonell, D. Fohr and J. P. Haton- CRIN (NANCY, France) An expert system for identifying analytically words in continuous speech H. Meloni - Faculte des Sciences (Avignon, France) J. Gispert and J. Guizol - GIA (Marseilles, France) An expert system for speech recognition by signal segmentation S. Minault, M. Invernizzi and B. Dupeyrat CEA (Saclay, France) Session 13C electronics CAD Knowledge based selection and coordination of existing algorithms V. Jonckers - Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) KnowPLACE - Knowledgebased placement of PCBS Hyung-Sik Park and W. C. Kabat Northwestern University PECOS - an expert hardware synthesis system C. R. Green US Army Research Office (Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA) and S. G. Shiva Unviersity of Alabama (Huntsville, Alabama, USA) Session 14 - Artificial intelligence or intelligent artificats The polarisation approach to intelligent artificats - a hyper-hemispherical model S. Kableshkov - Burroughs Machines Ltd (Glasgow, UK) ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Sat Jun 8 05:07:12 1985 Date: Sat, 8 Jun 85 05:07:07 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a003225; 8 Jun 85 3:21 EDT Date: Fri 7 Jun 1985 21:50-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #76 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sat, 8 Jun 85 04:57 EST AIList Digest Saturday, 8 Jun 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 76 Today's Topics: Queries - Expert System-Based Databases & Military and Financial Expert Systems & Technophobia, AI Tools - Lisp on the Sun, Humor - Capitalization, New Journal - Applied Artificial Intelligence, Obituary - King-sun Fu, Philosophy - Self-Reproduction and Consciousness ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 6 Jun 85 16:44 EDT From: susan watkins Subject: expert system based database I'm interested in finding out whether database systems using expert system technology (or other AI techniques) have been developed. Is it, for example, fruitful to think about the difference between an expert-system-database and a conventional database with an `intelligent' user-interface front end (presumably holding the `reasoning' part of the knowledge that are domain specific to the application) ? [The 1st Int. Conf. on Expert Database Systems will be held in Charleston, April 1-4, 1986. See AIList vol. 3, no. 57, for an announcement and list of the program committee. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 7 Jun 1985 20:56-EDT From: RSHU@BBNG.ARPA Subject: Military and Financial Expert Systems I noticed that the Intl. Workshops on Expert Systems and Applications will include two areas which I am interested in. The first is J.F. Gilmore's talk on military applications of expert systems. The second is Kershberg & Dickinson's talk on an expert support system for financial analysis. I would appreciate the following: 1) Pointers to the above mentioned researchers. Net addresses are preferred physical mail would also be appreciated. 2) Pointers to anyone else working in either of these two fields. I am currently working on a support system for tank platoon tactics. Our work centers around reasoning with a terrain database to make conclusions about visibility and trafficability. This project is not classified so I'll gladly provide more information if anyone is interested. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 7 Jun 85 17:20:23-PDT From: MARCEL@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Love-Hate Computers At present, computer science and especially artificial intelligence work is very highly regarded by those outside the field. When people find out what my trade is I can sometimes watch the points go up on their prestige score- board. On the other hand there is something about computers and AI that can arouse strong instinctive fears. For the most part it's a matter of speculation what those fears are. Few people know the field well enough to judge it accurately, and those who do know the field (and its resemblance to alchemy) no longer fear it. That, and the fact that the articulated reason for fear is unlikely to be the actual reason, makes it largely a matter of guesswork as to what the problem is. Let me propose a few possibilities: - AI threatens to make machines autonomous - it's humiliating that mere machines can be smarter than us - AI hopes to make machines capable of improving their own techniques, thus automating the invasion of technique over spontaneity, and multiplying Future Shock - people don't know how to use computers, so feel intimidated - people worry about being controlled by/dependent on machines - we have to redefine what it is that makes us humane -- some kinds of intelligence will become unimportant, and people are just emotional machines -- so we lose some aspect of "what's special about me" - we may be machines ourselves, devoid of free will/responsibility - machines will take over our jobs I'd like to know of: - other causes of technophobia - references to literature analyzing technology (I know about Asimov, Weizenbaum, Dreyfus, Dennett, Turkle, Ellul, Toffler, Wiener, Huxley and the like) Please send replies directly to me: Marcel@SRI-AI.ARPA ------------------------------ Date: 7-Jun-85 10:08:49-PDT From: mhb@FORD-WDL1.ARPA Subject: Lisp on the Sun Regarding query concerning Lisp on Sun, I am familiar with the following three versions. (1) Franz Lisp as part of the Berkeley Distribution Tape (2) Franz Lisp sold by "Franz, Inc." in Berkeley This has some Common Lisp features added to it. Vendor: (415) 540-1224 (3) Common Lisp, currently under development by "Lucid" in Palo Alto Phone: (415) 424-8855 Mike Bender Ford Aerospace ------------------------------ Date: Fri 7 Jun 85 09:30:24-CDT From: David Throop Subject: Capitalization: Various Entities Class Capitalization Pronoun Capitalization ============================================================================= Inanimate Object Normally lowercase Normally lowercase (bugs, desks, toaster) (it, them) People First letter Normally lowercase (Tom, Dick, Harry) uppercase (him, her, they) Dieties First letter Always uppercase (Christ, Krishna, Athena) uppercase (He, Him, Her) Expert Systems All letters (Answer uncertain, (EMYCIN, ISIS, SOLOMON) uppercase ask One) ============================================================================= [Aside from the humor in this progression, there seem to be at least the following factors at work: 1) FORTRAN, COBOL, and other relics of the golden age of punched cards; 2) copyright/trademark conventions; 3) acronym syntax; and 4) the right of a developer to name a system whatever he wants. I have been told by an editor that any nonacronym of more than five letters (4? 6?) should have only a single capital, e.g., Prospector, but I think that rule 4 should take precedence. Personally, I like all caps (except for AIList). -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 7 Jun 85 14:42:48 edt From: rada@nlm-mcs (Roy Rada CSB) Subject: New Journal - Applied Artificial Intelligence Perhaps you too have recognized the same need that we, a group of American and European AI researchers and practi- cioners have felt regarding the absence of a journal devoted to practical information such as - applications of AI, e.g. use of expert systems, natural language systems, speech, vision, and robotics, for solving tasks in industry, management, administration, and education, - evaluations of existing AI systems and tools, espe- cially comparative studies, - user experience, - theoretical research with relevance to potential appli- cations, - economic, social, and cultural impacts of AI. An established publisher has joined our forces, and we are now happy to announce: AAI Applied Artificial Intelligence, an International Journal. The first issue of AAI will appear in January, 1986. If you are interested in - being informed about the subscription prices, which are drastically reduced for members of AAAI, ACM, IEEE, and of member organisations of ECCAI and IFSR, - submitting a paper and want the Information for Authors (accepted papers will be published rapidly--at least now!), please contact Hemisphere Publishing Corporation 79 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016. June 7, 1985 ------------------------------ Date: Fri 7 Jun 85 09:43:18-PDT From: Ken Laws Subject: Obituary - King-sun Fu, 1930-1985 [Reprinted from IEEE Computer, June 1985.] King-sun Fu, Goss Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineerinr at Purdue University died April 29 in Washington, DC. Fu was born October 2, 1930, in Nanking, China. He earned a BS degree in electrical engineering in 1953 from National Taiwan University, an MA in science in 1955 from the University of Toronto, and a PhD degree in 1959 from the University of Illinois. Fu was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a member of Academia Sinica, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He was the first president of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. He received the IEEE Award of Service in 1971, ASEE Senior Research Award in 1981, IEEE Educational Medal in 1982, and AFIPS Harry Goode Memorial Award in 1982. He authored four widely adopted textbooks and edited more than 15 books, was author or coauthor of over 100 journal papers and over 200 conference papers. He also produced over 60 doctoral students. He was a distinguished member and dedicated officer of the IEEE Computer Society. He was elected a fellow of the IEEE in 1971 for his contributions to the field of pattern recognition and leadership in engineering education. He was the first editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and served as vice president for publications for the Computer Society in 1982-83. He received several awards from the Computer Society, including the Outstanding Paper Award in 1973, Honor Roll in 1973, Certificate of Appreciation in 1977 and 1979, and Special Award in 1982. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 7 Jun 85 11:51:44 edt From: FRAWLEY <20568%udel-cc-vax1.delaware@UDEL-LOUIE.ARPA> Subject: Self-Reproduction and Consciousness I'd like to make a few comments on the discussion about self-reproduction and consciousness/intelligence. As several people have pointed out (and I agree), size does not ensure self-reproduction. This, of course, depends on what is meant by "self-reproduction," but, Fodor's arguments against paramecia not having mental representations notwithstanding, it looks as if there is some evolutionatry continuity in consciousness: see Griffin's book, The Question of Animal Awareness. Thus, size is not the issue. After all, computers are very large, but they have no consciousness and, in my opinion, no intelligence (this of course is just Dreyfus' and Searle's arguments). I think this discussion would profit if "self-reproduction" were defined. Cugini is correct, I'd say, in pointing out that self- reference does not equal intelligence or consciousness (i.e., the Hofstadter argument pushed to the extreme). I think that we ought to consider self-reference as "self-communication" or "symbolic self-interaction." See Dennett's great book, Elbow Room. A computer has self-reference, but no self-communication: A computer can "say" "I'm a computer" (self-reference), but that "utterance" doesn't mean anything to the machine (no self-communication); again, this is just Searle's argument put in terms of Dennett. "Self-communication" is important because it changes our ideas about other human cognitive processes and the whole size/self-reference problem. Memory is not a data-structure, but a way that a human communicates with himself/herself through time (Michael Cole's argument). That's why it doesn't matter how large the memory is: if memory is not a self-communication method, the organism will never be conscious. In any case, Dennett's book is excellent on this problem, as is Searle's Minds, Brains and Science. Some of these issues are addressed directly in the journal Human Development, though that journal may be a little too social-psychological for the hardcore AI community. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Sat Jun 8 21:22:17 1985 Date: Sat, 8 Jun 85 21:22:11 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a006508; 8 Jun 85 19:44 EDT Date: Sat 8 Jun 1985 09:05-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #77 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sat, 8 Jun 85 21:11 EST AIList Digest Saturday, 8 Jun 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 77 Today's Topics: Conference - 8th European Cybernetics and Systems Research, Bibliography - Recent Technical Reports ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 7 Jun 85 14:58:27 edt From: rada@nlm-mcs (Roy Rada CSB) Subject: Conference - 8th European Cybernetics and Systems Research ANNOUNCING Eighth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research April 1-4, 1986 at the University of Vienna Contact: Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies A-1010 Wien 1, Schottengasse 3, Austria (Europe) We draw your attention to symposium E "Cybernetics in Biology and Medicine" which is being chaired by: Gerold Porenta Department of Medical Cybernetics and AI University of Vienna Freyung 6/2, A 1010 Vienna, Austria June 7, 1985 ------------------------------ Date: 4 Jun 1985 23:59-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: recent technical reports %A Bipin Indurkhya %T A Computational Theory of Metaphor Comprehension and Analogical Reasoning %R BUCS Tech Report #85-001 %I Boston University %D February 1985 %A Michael Siegel %A Edward Sciore %T Automatic Constraint Generation for Semantic Query Optimization %I Boston University %D April 1985 %R BUCS #85--006 %A Bruce Abramson %A Mordechai Young %T Construction through Decomposition: A Linear Time Algorithm for the N-Queens Problem %I Columbia University %R CUCS-129-84 %A Rodney Farrow %T Covers of Attribute Grammars and Sub-Protocol Attribute Evaluators %I Columbia University %R CUCS-71-83 %A Rodney Farrow %T Experience with a Production Compiler Automatically Generated from an Attribute Grammar %I Columbia University %R CUCS-102-84 %A Hussein A. H. Ibrahim %T Image Understanding Algorithms on Fine-Grained Tree-Structured SIMD Machines %I Columbia University %R CUCS-139-84 %A Toru Ishida %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %T Simultaneous Firing of Production Rules on Tree Structured Machines %I Columbia University %R CUCS-109-84 %A John R. Kender %T Environmental Relations in Image Understanding: The Force of Gravity %I Columbia University %R CUCS-47-83 %A John R. Kender %T Surface Constraints From Linear Extents %I Columbia Universtiy %R CUCS-49-83 %A Richard E. Korf %T An Analysis of Abstraction in Problem Solving %I Columbia University %R CUCS-108-84 %A Michael Lebowitz %T "Abstract" Understanding: The Relation Between Language and Memory %I Columbia University %R CUCS-12-81 %O describes system to "remember" patent abstracts %A Michael Lebowitz %T Memory Based Parsing %I Columbia University %R CUCS-13-81 %O describes system to "read" news stories %A Michael Lebowitz %T Representing Complex Events Simply %R CUCS-14-81 %I Columbia University %A Michael Lebowitz %T Implementing Descriptions Using Non-Von Neumann Parallelism %R CUCS-52-83 %I Columbia University %O describes implementing memory search on Columbia's Non-Von computer %A Michael Lebowitz %T Classifying Numeric Information for Generalization %R CUCS-53-83 %I Columbia University %A Michael Lebowitz %T Researcher: An Overview %R CUCS-54-83 %I Columbia University %O describes system read natural text and create an intelligent information system %A Michael Lebowitz %T Creating a Story Telling Universe %R CUCS-55-83 %I Columbia University %A Michael Lebowitz %T Putting Pieces Together: Understanding Patent Abstracts %R CUCS-98-84 %I Columbia University %A Michael Lebowitz %T Creating Characters in a Story-Telling Universe %R CUCS-99-84 %I Columbia University %A Micheal Lebowitz %T Ill-Formed Text and Conceptual Processing %R CUCS-101-84 %I Columbia University %A Michael Lebowtiz %T Interest and Predictability: Deciding What to Learn, When to Learn %R CUCS-110-84 %I Columbia University %A Michael Lebowitz %T Concept Learning in a Rich Input Domain: Generalization-Based Memory %R CUCS-111-84 %I Columbia University %A Michael Lebowitz %T Using Memory in Text Understanding %R CUCS-121-84 %I Columbia University %A Andy Lowry %A Stephen Taylor %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %T LPS Algorithms: A Detailed Examination %R CUCS-112-84 %I Columbia University %O logic program system for parallel architectures %A Andy Lowry %A Stephen Taylor %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %T LPS Algorithms: A Critical Analysis %I Columbia University %R CUCS-113-84 %O logic program system for parallel architectures %A Kevin Matthews %A Katthleen McKeown %T Taking the Intitiative in Problem-Solving Discourse %R CUCS-114-84 %I Columbia University %A Katthleen R. McKeown %T Recursion in Text and Its Use in Language Generation %R CUCS-39-83 %I Columbia University %A Katthleen R. McKeown %T The Text System for Natural Language Generation %R CUCS-23-82 %I Columbia University %A Kathleen R. McKeown %T Focus Constraints on Language Generation %R CUCS-40-83 %I Columbia University %O responding to questions about database structure %A Kathleen R. McKeown %T Natural Language Systems: How are They Meeting Human Needs? %R CUCS-76-83 %I Columbia University %A Kathleen R. McKeown %T Natural Language For Expert Systems: Comparisons with Database Systems %R CUCS-91-84 %I Columbia University %A Kathleen R. McKeown %T User-Oriented Explanation for Expert Systems %R CUCS-85-83 %I Columbia University %A Marcia A. Derr %A Kathleen R. McKeown %T Using Focus to Generate Complex and Simple Sentences %I Columbia University %R CUCS-86-83 %O system to decide whether to use a sequence of simple sentences or a single complex one. student advisor expert system. Prolog Definite Clause Grammar Function %A Daniel P. Miranker %T Performance Analysis of Two Competing DADO PE Designs %R CUCS-118-84 %I Columbia University %O DADO is a system designed for AI production systems %A Daniel P. Miranker %T Performance Estimates for the DADO Machine: A comparison of TREAT and RETE %R CUCS-140-84 %I Columbia University %A Cecile Paris %T Determining the Level of Expertise of a User of a Question Answering System %R CUCS-115-84 %I Columbia University %A Alexander Pasik %A Marshall Schor %T Table-Driven Rules in Expert System %R CUCS-69-83 %I Columbia University %O interfacing database systems and knowledge based systems %A Theodore M. Sabety %A Brian Mathies %A David Elliot Shaw %T The Semi-Automatic Generation of Processing Element Control Paths for Highly Parallel Machines %R CUCS-127-84 %I Columbia University %A David Elliot Shaw %A William R. Swartout %A C. Cordell Green %T Inferring Lisp Programs From Examples %R CUCS-1-75 %I Columbia University %A David Elliot Shaw %T Structure and Abstraction in a System for Conceptual Matching %R CUCS-2-77 %I Columbia University %A David Elliot Shaw %T Knowledge-Based Retrieval on a Relational Database Machine %R CUCS-9-80 %I Columbia University %A David Elliot Shaw %T Non-Von: A Parallel Machine Architecture for Knowledge-Based Information Processing %R CUCS-18-81 %I Columbia University %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %T Learning Control of Production Systems %R CUCS-6-79 %I Columbia University %A Malcolm C. Harrison %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %T Learning Meta-Rule Control of Production Systems from Execution Traces %I Columbia University %R CUCS-10-80 %A Salvatore J. STolfo %A David Elliot Shaw %T Specialized Hardware for Production Systems %R CUCS-16-81 %I Columbia University %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %A David Elliot Shaw %T Dado: A Tree-Structured Architecture for Production Systems %R CUCS-24-82 %I Columbia University %A Salvatoe J. Stolfo %A Gregg T. Vesonder %T Ace: An Expert System Supporting Analysis and Management Decision Making %R CUCS-33-82 %I Columbia University %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %A Daniel Miranker %A David Elliot Shaw %T Progamming the Dado Machine: An Introduction to PPL/M %R CUCS-34-82 %I Columbia University %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %A David Miranker %A David Elliot Shaw %T Architecture and Applications of Dado: A Large Scale Parallel Computer for Artificial Intelligence %R CUCS-43-83 %I Columbia University %K PROLOG tree-structured %A Salvaotre J. Stolfo %T Knowledge Engineering: Theory and Practice %R CUCS-56-83 %I Columbia University %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %T The Dado Parallel Computer %R CUCS-63-83 %I Columbia University %K RETE PROLOG %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %T On the Design of Parallel Production System Machines: Whats in a Lip? %R CUCS-77-83 %I Columbia University %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %T Five Parallel Algorithms for Productin System Execution on the DADO Machine %R CUCS-116-84 %I Columbia University %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %A Daniel P. Miranker %T Dado: A Parallel Processor for Expert Systems %R CUCS-123-84 %I Columbia University %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %T A Note on Implementing OPS5 Production Systems on DADO %R CUCS-130-84 %I Columbia University %X rebuttal to Anoop Gupta's performance analysis of DADO and conclusion that it is not an effective OPS5 machine %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %T Is Cad/CAM Ready for AI %R CUCS-128-84 %I Columbia University %A Stephen Taylor %A Christoher Maio %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %A David E. Shaw %T Prolog on the DADO Machine: A Parallel System for High-Speed Logic Programming %R CUCS-46-83 %I Columbia University %A S. Taylor %A A. Lowry %A G. Q. Maguire Jr. %A S. J. Stolfo %T Logic Programming Using Parallel Associative Operations %R CUCS-96-84 %I Columbia University %A Stephen Taylor %A Daphne Tzoar %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %T Unification in a Parallel Environment %R CUCS-97-84 %I Columbia University %A Stephen Taylor %A Gerald Maguire, Jr. %A Andy Lowry %A Salvatore J. Stolfo %T Analyzing Prolog Programs %R CUCS-117-84 %I Columbia University %A Michael K. van Biema %A Mark D. Lerner %A Gerlad Maguire %A Salvatore J. Stofo %T ||PSL: A Parallel Lisp for the DADO Machine %R CUCS-107-84 %I Columbia University %A Kenneth Wasserman %A Michael Lebowitz %T Representing Complex Physical Objects in Memory %R CUCS-37-82 %K frames patents Researcher %I Columbia University %A Kenneth Wasserman %T Physical Object Representation and Generalization A Survey of Natural Language Processing Programs %R CUCS-62-83 %I Columbia Univeristy %A Kenneth Wasserman %T Understanding Hierarchically Structured Objects %R CUCS-124-84 %I Columbia University %A C. R. Giardina %T The Universal Imaging Algebra %R Tech Rep. EECS 8307 %D March 1983 %I Stevens Institute of Technology %K translation thresholding erosion counting covariance function %A C. R. Giardina %T Observations on the Variety of the Universal Imaging Algebra %R Tech. Rep. EECS 8309 %I Stevens Institute of Technology %K convex hull %A C. R. Giardina %T A Bernstein Polynomial Feature Extraction Technique %R Tech. Rep. EECS 8310 %I Stevens Institute of Technology %D April 1983 %K Chebychev norm chain encoded %A C. R. Giardina %T The Method of Moments in the Universal Imaging Algebra %R Tech. Rep. EECS 8311 %D May 1983 %I Stevens Institute of Technology %K ellipse image segmentation %A C. R. Giardina %T Syntactical Pattern Recognition via the Universal Imaging Algebra %R Tech. Rep. EECS 8317 %D June 1983 %I Stevens Institute of Technology %A C. R. Giardina %T The Fuzzification of Morphological Operators in the Universal Imaging Algebra %R Tech. Rep. EECS 8321 %I Stevens Institute of Technology %D August 1983 %K dilation erosion indicator thinning thickening %A Christian Lengauer %A Chua-Huang Huang %T Automated Deduction in Programming Language Semantics: The Mechanical Certification of Program Transformations to Derive Concurrence %R TR 85-04 %I University of Texas at Austin %K automated theorem proving semantic relations %A Michael R. Eisler %A Armar Mukherjee %T An Approximate String Matching Chip %R CS-TR-85-01 %I University of Central Florida %A F. Gomez %T Objective Understanding: Explanatory Driven Comprehension of Elementary Scientific Test %R CS-TR-85-03 %I University of Central Flordia %A Fernando Gomez %T TQ: A Specification Language Based on Conceptualizations Underlying Natural Language %R CS-TR-83 %I University of Central Florida %A Fernando Gomez %T Prepositions and Participles in LLULL %R CS-TR-62 %I University of Central Florida %K natural language ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Fri Jun 14 22:46:41 1985 Date: Fri, 14 Jun 85 22:46:30 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a009767; 14 Jun 85 9:36 EDT Date: Thu 13 Jun 1985 23:05-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #78 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 14 Jun 85 22:38 EST AIList Digest Friday, 14 Jun 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 78 Today's Topics: Query - Animal Predation, Humor - Capitalization, Conference - IJCAI-85 Campus Housing, AI Tools - Explorer/Symbolics Compatibility & New List of PROLOGs, Reports - Semantics for Modal Logic & Recent Reports and Articles, Seminars - Plausible Reasoning (SU and SRI) & A Partial Correctness Logic for Procedures (MIT) Conferences - AI at Upcoming Conferences ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 13 Jun 1985 13:14-EDT From: SDMARTIN@BBNG.ARPA Subject: Animal Predation I would appreciate any information about the modelling of group intelligence among animals, particularly predatory behavior. Has anyone written any AI programs which "learn" the best strategies for group food collection, for example cooperation within a hunting wolf pack? Thanks. sdmartin@bbng. [This seems to have some similarity to studies of the "commons" problem, in which different strategies for sharing a common resources (such as the village "common" or "green" used to graze sheep) are seen to collapse if individual greed is not kept in check. I remember reading about psychological simulations, probably in Popular Psychology or the defunct Human Nature, but I don't know of any AI studies. Do any of the "core wars" automata learn cooperation? -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 8 Jun 1985 0358 PST From: Larry Carroll Reply-to: LARRY@JPL-VLSI.ARPA Subject: Capitalization The progression is obvious: pronouns referring to artificial intelligences are all caps. Thus you should have said: "Uncertain; ask ONE." Or one may say in another context, "Ask IT if IT's intelligent." Larry @ jpl-vlsi ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 10 Jun 85 11:32:22 PDT From: Phyllis O'Neil Subject: IJCAI-85: campus housing available Economical UCLA dormitory rooms and suites are still available for IJCAI-85 this August ... Campus housing forms are on pages 27 and 29 of the IJCAI-85 conference brochure. For copies of the brochure, contact: AAAI 445 Burgess Dr. Menlo Park, CA 94025 (415) 328-3123 The incorrect area code for AAAI's phone was given on the previous announcement. ------------------------------ Date: 10 Jun 1985 1743-CDT From: Doug Subject: Explorer/Symbolics Compatibility Texas Instruments has a document that is the result of our experience (and that of our customers) in porting code from Symbolics to Explorers. The document is available from me on request. I can send it via the net (preferred) or U.S. mail if desired. In general, porting is not a difficult task. The differences are largely the kind of things you would expect from software with common ancestry and different maintainers. -- Doug Johnson%ti-csl@csnet-relay Douglas Johnson MS 238 Texas Instruments P.O. Box 226015 Dallas, Texas 75266 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 7 Jun 85 17:27:27 edt From: Bruce Smith Subject: New LIST of PROLOGs [Forwarded from the Prolog Digest by Laws@SRI-AI.] The "LIST of PROLOGs" was started by Randy Harr (then at CWRU) and myself, largely from the USENET and ARPANET computer networks. It's grown over the last couple of years, with help from numerous Prolog folks. The list emphasizes Prolog systems that are currently available. Also, I've tried to note which vendors offer educational discounts. There are a lot of new Prolog systems being announced, with rumors of still more on the way. In particular, I expect that this list'll be very much out of date after this summer's Logic Programming Symposium and, of course, IJCAI. Please let me know of any additions or corrections to the list. Sorry, but I didn't have time to verify all the information. Some of the entries are also over a year old and are likely out of date. -- Bruce T. Smith [ this file is available from the SCORE:PS: directory as Prolog.NImplementations -ed ] ------------------------------ Date: Wed 12 Jun 85 16:53:43-PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: Report - Semantics for Modal Logic [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] CSLI REPORT Report No. CSLI-85-25, ``An Internal Semantics for Modal Logic: Preliminary Report'' by Ronald Fagin and Moshe Vardi, has just been published. This report may be obtained by writing to David Brown, CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305 or Brown@SU-CSLI. ------------------------------ Date: 9 Jun 1985 17:23-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Recent Tech Reports and some articles %A D. Rozenshtein %A J. Chomicki %T Unifying the Use and Evolution of Database Systems: A Case Study in PROLOG %R LCSR-TR-68 %I Laboratory for Computer Science Research, Rutgers University %K frame control %A C. V. Srinivasan %T CK-LOG, A Calculus for Knowledge Processing in Logic %R DCS-TR-153 %I Laboratory for Computer Research, Rutgers University %K MDS %A A. Hsu %A T. Imielinski %T Integrity Checking for Multiple Updates %R DCS-TR-155 %I Laboratory for Computer Science Research, Rutgers University %K and-or database %A S. M. Ehrlich %A J. R. Gabriel %A A. Gonen %A L. Kuchnir %T Graph Theoretic Approaches to Diagnostics: Applications of Logic Programming and Cutset Theory to Aspects of Reactor and Circuit Analysis %R ANL-84-74 %D JAN 1985 %I Argonne National Labs Mathematical and Computer Science Division %K PROLOG %A J. R. Gabriel %A T. G. Lindholm %A E. L. Lusk %A R. A. Overbeek %T A Short Note on Achieveable LIP Rates Using the Warren Abstract Prolog Machine %R MCS-TM-36 %I Argonne National Labs Mathematics and Computer Science Division %A J. R. Gabriel %A P. R. Roberts %T A Signal Flow Model for Sequential Logic Built from Combinatorial Logic Elements and Its Implementation in PROLOG %R ANL-84-89 %D SEP 1984 %I Argonne National Labs Mathematics and Computer Science Division %A E. Lusk %A R. Overbeek %T Comment atteindre le milliard d'inferences par seconde %J Intelligence Artificielle et Productique %V 3 %D NOV 1984 %P 5-7 %O (in French) %X describes work on the Denelcor Hep to get high number of logic inferences per second %A E. Lusk %A R. Overbeek %T Non-Horn Problems %J JAR %V 1 %N 1 %P 103-114 %D FEB 1985 %X Problems illustrating difficulties when a problem cannot be formulated naturally in Horn clauses %A E. L. Lusk %A R. A. Overbeek %T Research Topics: Multiprocessing Algorithms for Computational Logic %R MCS-TM-31 %I Argonne National Labs Mathematical and Computer Science Division %A L. Wos %T Achievements in Automated Reasoning %J SIAM News %D JUL 1984 %P 4-5 %A L. Wos %T Automated Reasoning %J American Mathematical Monthly %V 92 %D FEB 9185 %P 85-92 %A L. Wos %T Automated Reasoning Programs: How They Work %J SIAM News %D SEP 1984 %P 4-5 ------------------------------ Date: Mon 10 Jun 85 09:52:45-PDT From: LOWRANCE@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Seminars - Plausible Reasoning (SU & SRI) **** SPECIAL JOINT SEMINAR **** Sponsored by SRI International and the Stanford Medical Information Sciences Program Professor Judea Pearl Computer Science Department University of California, Los Angeles Friday, June 14 Room M-114, Stanford Medical School 1:30pm-3:30pm "A Graph-Calculus for Plausible Reasoning" or "How to Do with Probabilities what People Say You Can't" ABSTRACT Numbers are known to be bad summarizers of knowledge. However, probabilistic networks of conceptually related propositions, in which the numbers serve to regulate and propel the flow of information, allow reasoning about uncertainty to be as knowledge-intensive, accurate, and psychlogically plausible as the level of details which we care to explicate. The talk will describe a calculus which facilitates concurrent, self-activated and stable propagation of beliefs in such networks, and which is based on strict compliance with probability theory. Specific attention will be paid to the following issues: 1. Constructing probabilistic knowledge-bases without collecting "massive amounts of data". 2. Making explicit assertions about independencies without feeling guilty, without leaning on "Entropic" principles, and without hiding assumptions under the guise of new calculi. 3. Distinguishing ignorance from uncertainty, postponing judgments, and representing uncertainty about probabilities. 4. Handling uncertain evidence without "ad-hoc-ery". 5. Admiting implicit (i.e. "intangible") evidence. 6. Maintaining consistency without interpolations. 7. Identifying conflicting evidence. 8. Making sure that evidence in favor of a hypothesis would not be construed as partially suporting its negation. 9. Tracing back assumptions and sources of belief to produce sound explanations. 10. Updating beliefs in hierarchical hypotheses spaces, avoiding circular reasoning, using self-activated propagation mechanisms. 11. Optimizing the acquisition of data. 12. Recommending actions with meaningful guarantees and reasoned assumptions. Judea is planning to visit SRI the morning of June 14, before the joint seminar at Stanford. At that time we will discuss "a short appetizer" that he is preparing, "My strugles with Mr. Holmes." We will meet at 10:30 in EJ232. ------------------------------ Date: 06/10/85 10:57:52 From: AH at MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Seminar - A Partial Correctness Logic for Procedures (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] DATE: JUNE 12, 1985 TIME: 1:45PM Refreshments 2:00PM Lecture PLACE: NE43-374 A PARTIAL CORRECTNESS LOGIC FOR PROCEDURES (IN AN ALGOL-LIKE LANGUAGE) Kurt Sieber University of Saarlandes We extend Hoare's logic by allowing quantifiers and other logical connectives to be used on the level of Hoare formulas. This leads to a logic in which partial correctness properties of procedures (and not only of statements) can be formulated adequately. In particular it is possible to argue about free procedures, i.e. procedures which are not bound by a declaration but only "specified" semantically. This property of our logic (and of the corresponding calculus) is important from both a practical and a theoretical point of view, namely: - Formal proofs of programs can be written in the style of stepwise refinement. - Procedures on parameter position can be handled adequately, so that some sophisticated programs can be verified, which are beyond the power of other calculi. HOST: Professor Albert R. Meyer ------------------------------ Date: 9 Jun 1985 22:17-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: AI at upcoming conferences Twelth International Symposium on Computer Architecture Boston Park Plaza Conference June 17-19, 1985 Lisp Machines Architecture of the Symbolics 3600 D. Moon Symbolics Parallel Garbage Collection without Synchronization Overhead. A. Ram J. Patel Univ. of Illinois An Efficient LISP-Executive Architecture with a New Presentation for List Structures G. Sohi, Et. al. Univ. of Illinois LOGIC Programming Machines Performance Studies of a Prolog Machine Architecture T. Dobry, A. Despain, Y. Patt Berkeley Design of a High-Speed Prolog Machine R. Nakazaki et. al. NEC, ICOT A Hardware Unification Unit: Design and Analysis N. Woo, Bell Labs ____________________________________________________________________________ ACM Sigplan 85 Symposium on Language Issues in Programming Environments Session 2-3:30 Wednesday June 26, 1985 Debugging in a Side Effect Free Programming Environment Cordelia V. Hall, John T. O'Donnell, Indiana U. Session 6 11-12:30 Thursday June 27, 1985 An Algebra for Program Fragments Bent Bruun Kristensen, Aalborg U.; Ole Lehrmann Madsen, Aarhus U; birger Moller-Pedersen Norwegian Computing Center; Kristen Nygaard U. of Oslo Session 8 Friday June 28, 1985 9:30-1:00 An Environment for Logic Programming Nissim Francez, Technion, Shalom Goldenberg, Ron Pinter, Michael Tiom,kin, IBM Israel Scientific Center, Shalom Tsur, MCC Logic Programming Engineering Shell Henryk Jan Komorowski, Shigeo Omoro, Harvard U. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From comsat@vpics1 Fri Jun 21 04:09:39 1985 Date: Fri, 21 Jun 85 04:09:35 edt From: comsat@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: RO Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a028741; 18 Jun 85 2:03 EDT Date: Mon 17 Jun 1985 22:30-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #79 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Fri, 21 Jun 85 04:01 EST AIList Digest Tuesday, 18 Jun 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 79 Today's Topics: Education - Proposal for IJCAI ICAI Meeting, Psychology - Cooperation, Information Display - Typography, AI Tools - Lisp User Survey & Scheme ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri 14 Jun 85 13:59:39-PDT From: Mark Richer Subject: proposal for ijcai ICAI meeting I have suddenly gotten an urge to find out who is interested in applications of AI to educational computing. That would include knowledge based tutoring systems, interactive encyclopedias, etc. Is there a bboard on the net that discusses such issues? I was speaking with someone who is also interested in this area and It occurred to me that it would be neat to have an interest group meeting at IJCAI this august. Is anyone out there interested? Does anyone know who to contact about setting up such a meeting at IJCAI? (someone involved with setting up the conference). It would be nice to have a time and place to meet and an advance announcement about it in some form. Perhaps, 1 or more people want to volunteer to be discussion leaders. mark ------------------------------ Date: 17 Jun 85 08:44 EDT From: WAnderson.wbst@Xerox.ARPA Subject: Re: Animal Predation The two papers that I remember reading that refer to sharing commons are "The Tragedy of the Commons," by Garrett Hardin, and "Tragedy of the Commons Revisited" (I'm not sure of the author of this one). Both appeared in SCIENCE, Hardin's paper came out in the late 1960's or early 1970's, "The Tragedy ... Revisited" later in the 1970's. If anyone needs the exact references, I can dig them up at home upon request. Bill Anderson ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 16 Jun 85 15:15:22 edt From: hal%gvax@Cornell.ARPA (Hal Perkins) Subject: Typography [...] I don't want to start a holy war about typography in the digest, but ... > Personally, I like all caps (except for AIList). -- KIL Actually, an initial capital and small caps, or all caps in a slightly smaller size looks much better than all caps (in my non-expert opinion). All-caps is awfully obtrusive. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 Jun 85 13:39:36 CDT From: marick@GSWD-VMS Subject: Lisp user survey -- Results Here's a summary of my survey of what users want from Lisp systems. I've also produced a longer document containing the full text of each question together with the relevant text from each response. Send me mail (ARPANET: MARICK@GSWD-VMS; USENET: ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!marick) if you want it. Nine people responded; all of them were from the ARPANET. (No one on the USENET uses Lisp?) If anyone wants to send more responses, I'll take them and incorporate them. I hope I've summarized people's responses adequately. If you have more than a passing interest in the issues, please send for the full report. 1. Lisp machines vs. general-purpose workstations vs. timeshared "mainframes". For development purposes, Lisp machines or general-purpose workstations are the clear favorite. The argument is that people are very expensive compared to hardware, and that the productivity gain of a personal computer offsets the hardware cost. There is a counter-argument that the productivity gain is not necessarily due to features unique to Lisp machines, but which happen to be available only on Lisp machines. For delivery purposes, the obvious answer is "it depends". Dumb question. However, it's not clear that developers have considered delivery carefully enough. 2. Calling functions written in another language. A majority finds this feature necessary. It is less necessary on the Lisp machines, but there is still the need to use foreign code. People need to be able to invoke both canned packages and one-of-a-kind functions. 3. Embedded editor vs. external editor Most people don't care, provided the editor provides a good enough connection to LISP. The definition of "good enough" varies, and it's of course easier to provide if the editor is internal. 4. Creating as-small-as-possible stand-alone "application programs". No particular consensus. Some people would like it, some don't care, and some don't think as-small-as-possible is particularly small. 5. Object-oriented programming. Object-oriented programming is important. The right system has yet to be invented. 6. Speed. Speed is very important. Both the speed of the development system when doing development tasks and the speed of the final compiled code are important. 7. How adequate are the standard debugging tools? Most people think they're adequate, but could be better. (One person thought they were quite insufficient; one thought they were overkill.) The use of embedded languages creates the need to debug at the level of those languages. 8. Other important things. Tight integration, consistency of user interface, good documentation, availability of understandable source code, a standard dialect for portability, access to external devices, large address space, source code control. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 16 Jun 1985 23:19 PDT From: DAVIES@SU-SIERRA.ARPA Subject: Scheme [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The following is Hal Abelson's response to my request for information about what's good about Scheme: The following description of Scheme is taken from the "Chez Scheme Manual" by Kent Dybvig, with some editing by Hal Abelson: Scheme is an applicative-order, lexically-scoped, and block-structured dialect of Lisp. Like almost all Lisp dialects, Scheme is an interactive language with automatic storage management for data objects, including lists, strings, various numeric datatypes, and symbols. Because of this, Scheme is ideally suited to symbolic and dynamic computation. Because Scheme is interactive, it is easy to learn Scheme by experimenting with it. Scheme also employs lexical scoping and block structure. In this way, it is similar to Algol 60 and Pascal and unlike traditional (dynamically-scoped) Lisp dialects. But Scheme goes beyond either traditional Lisp or Algol-like languages by providing procedures as "first-class" data objects. A Scheme procedure may be passed as an argument, returned as a value, made part of a compostive data structure, and stored indefinitely while still retaining the environment of its definition. Like Scheme, Common Lisp also provides lexical scoping and first-class procedures. However, Common Lisp does not treat procedures and data in a uniform manner: Procedure identifiers are separate from data identifiers, evaluation of the operator position of a combination follows different rules than evaluation of the operand positions, and procedures must be "quoted" in a special way if they are to be treated as data. Scheme really does treat procedures and data uniformly, greatly simplifying evaluation rules and cutting down namespaces, and gaining expressive power with no loss of efficiency. Another difference between Scheme and Common Lisp is that Scheme is specified to be tail-recursive -- procedure calls can be evaluated without building up space for "control stack." This permits the definition of a wide variety of "imperative" constructs (such as loops and other iterators) purely in terms of procedure application. Additionally, Scheme does not prescribe the order of argument evaluation (as does Common Lisp) so there is more freedom for the Scheme implementor to rearrange programs for optimization or for parallel evaluation. As a consequence of lexical scoping and tail recursion, Scheme encourages functional (side-effect free) programming. The higher-order procedures that a Scheme programmer can easily construct and use provide alternative and more elegant ways to perform most of the computations that are usually accomplished with side-effects. Another feature of Scheme places it beyond other Lisp dialects, and most other programming languages as well. This is the provision for continuations, a general control facility based on solid semantic principles. Continuations allow the implementation of control structures such as coroutines, non-blind backtracking, and multiple tasks. These semantic attributes of Scheme help the programmer to create clear, concise, and maintainable programs and program systems. However, the most important attribute of Scheme supporting this goal is its simplicity. The Scheme community has staunchly resisited the addition of new language features that have not proven themselves to be general engough to warrant making the language larger. As a result, Scheme is a fairly small language that relies on a small set of underlying concepts, which once mastered, provide more power than the less general mechanisms found in other programming languages. A complete description of Scheme can be found in the "Revised Revised Report on Scheme," edited by Will Clinger. This is published as a joint technical report of the Indiana University Computer Science Department and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (June 1985). ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Sat Jun 22 00:32:45 1985 Date: Sat, 22 Jun 85 00:32:38 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a000564; 21 Jun 85 16:05 EDT Date: Fri 21 Jun 1985 11:50-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #80 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sat, 22 Jun 85 00:21 EST AIList Digest Friday, 21 Jun 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 80 Today's Topics: Seminars - A General Machine-Learning Mechanism (GM) & Distributed Decision Procedures (IBM-SJ) & Organisms' Internal Models (CSLI) & Design Expert Systems (CMU) & Unification of Logic, Function and Frames (MIT) & Automatic Example Generation (UTexas) & Qualitative Process Theory (CSLI) & Architectures for Logic Programming (GE) & Reasoning about Programs via Constraints (MIT) & Planning as Debugging (SRI) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 19 Jun 85 15:47 EST From: "S. Holland" Subject: Seminar - A General Machine-Learning Mechanism (GM) Towards a General Machine-Learning Mechanism Paul Rosenbloom Stanford University Thursday, June 27, 1985, 10:00 a.m. General Motors Research Laboratories Computer Science Department Warren, Michigan Machine learning is the process by which a computer can bring about improvements in its own performance. A general machine-learning mechanism is a single mechanism that can bring about a wide variety of performance improvements (ultimately all required types). In this talk I will present some recent progress in building such a mechanism. This work shows that the combination of a simple learning mechanism (chunking) with a sophisticated problem-solver (SOAR) can yield: (1) practice speed-ups, (2) transfer of learning between related tasks, (3) strategy acquisition, (4) automatic knowledge-acquisition, and (5) the learning of general macro-operators of the type used by Korf (1983) to solve Rubik's cube. These types of learning are demonstrated for traditional search-based tasks, such as tic-tac-toe and the eight puzzle, and for R1-SOAR (a reformulation of a portion of the R1 expert system in SOAR). This work has been pursued in collaboration with John Laird (Xerox PARC) and Allen Newell (Carnegie-Mellon University). -Steve Holland ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 19 Jun 85 16:25:22 PDT From: IBM San Jose Research Laboratory Calendar Reply-to: IBM-SJ Calendar Subject: Seminar - Distributed Decision Procedures (IBM-SJ) [Excerpted from the IBM-SJ Calendar by Laws@SRI-AI.] IBM San Jose Research Lab 5600 Cottle Road San Jose, CA 95193 Tues., June 25 Computer Science Seminar 11:15 A.M. DECISION PROCEDURES Aud. A Distributed artificial intelligence is the study of how a group of individual intelligent agents can combine to solve a difficult global problem. This talk discusses in very general terms the problems of achieving this global goal by considering simpler, local subproblems; we drop the usual requirement that the agents working on the subproblems do not interact. We are led to a single assumption, which we call common rationality, that is provably optimal (in a formal sense) and which enables us to characterize precisely the communication needs of the participants in multi-agent interactions. An example of a distributed computation using these ideas is presented. M. Ginsberg, Stanford University Host: J. Halpern (HALPERN@IBM-SJ) ------------------------------ Date: Wed 19 Jun 85 17:02:36-PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Organisms' Internal Models (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] *NEXT* THURSDAY, June 27, 1985 2:15 p.m. CSLI Seminar Redwood Hall ``An Organism and Its Internal Model of the World'' Room G-19 Pentti Kanerva, CSLI Discussion led by Alex Pentland ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR ``An Organism and Its Internal Model of the World'' There is a glaring disparity in how children and computers learn things. By and large, children are not instructed explicitly but learn by observation, imitation, and trial and error. What kind of computer architecture would allow a machine to learn the way children do? In the model I have been studying, an organism is coupled to the world by its sensors and effectors. The organism's mind-ware consists of a relatively small focus and a large memory. The sensors feed information into the focus, the effectors are driven from the focus, the memory is addressed by the contents of the focus, the contents of the focus are stored in memory, and the memory feeds information into the focus. The contents of the focus at a moment account for the subjective experience of the organism at that moment. The function of the memory is to store a model of the world for later reference. The memory is sensitive to similarity in that approximate retrieval cues can be used to retrieve exact information. It is dynamic in that the present situation (its encoding) brings to focus the consequences of similar past situations. The model sheds light on the frame problem of robotics, and it appears that a robot built according to this principle would learn by trial and error and would be able to plan actions and to perform planned sequences of actions. Reading: ``Parallel Structures in Human and Computer Memory,'' available from Susi Parker at the Ventura Hall receptionist desk and on line as COGNITIVA.PAPER at SU-CSLI.ARPA. --Pentti Kanerva ------------------------------ Date: 20 Jun 85 11:16:01 EDT From: Mary.Lou.Maher@CMU-RI-CIVE Subject: Seminar - Design Expert Systems (CMU) DESIGN RESEARCH CENTER BI-WEEKLY SEMINAR SERIES COPS - A Concurrent Production System BY Luiz Alberto Villaca Leao Department Of Electrical and Computer Engineering Wednesday, June 26 at 1:30 pm in the Adamson Wing, Baker Hall Existing tools for writing expert systems are most helpful when one wants to emulate a single human expert working alone and without the aid of large number crunching programs. Few engineering problems fit this template. Rather, they tend to require multiple experts, working concurrently and supported by numbers of CAD, CAM and other tools. COPS has been designed with these requirements in mind. It is an interpreter of a superset of the OPS5 language. It provides the means for implementing multiple blackboards that integrate cooperating, concurrent expert systems, running in a distributed network of processors. ------- Refereshments will be served at 1:15 ------------------------------ Date: Thu 20 Jun 85 10:49:56-EDT From: Monica M. Strauss Subject: Seminar - Unification of Logic, Function and Frames (MIT) Date: Friday 21 June, 1985 Time: 11:00AM Place: 8th Floor Playroom The Uranus System -- Unification of Logic, Function and Frames Hideyuki Nakashima Electrotecnical Laboratory Tsukuba, Japan Abstract Uranus is a knowledge representation system based on the concept of logic programming. The basic computational mechanism is the same as that of the famous (or infamous!) logic programming language, Prolog, with several extensions. One important extension is the introduction of a multiple world mechanism. Uranus consists of several independent definition spaces called worlds. Worlds are combined at execution time to form a context for predicate definitions. Regarding a given world as a frame for a given concept, and predicates as slots, you have a frame-like system in logic programming. Another extension is along the lines of functional notations within the semantics of logic. Uranus has only one semantics, that of logic programming. At the same time, it has the expressive power, or convenience, of functional programming. Lazy execution of functional forms follows naturally, since portions are computed only when they are necessary for unification. A brief demonstration of the system is scheduled following the talk. Host: Gerald J. Sussman REFRESHMENTS will be served. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Jun 85 15:11:31 cdt From: briggs@ut-sally.ARPA (Ted Briggs) Subject: Seminar - Automatic Example Generation (UTexas) EGS: A Transformational Approach to Automatic Example Generation by Myung W. Kim noon Friday June 28 PAI 5.60 In the light of the important roles of examples in AI, methods for automatic example generation have been investigated. A system (EGS) has been built which automatically generates examples given a constraint specified in the Boyer-Moore logic. In EGS examples are generated by successively transforming the constraint formula into the form of an example representation scheme. Several strategies have been incorporated: testing stored examples, solving equations, doing case-analysis, and expanding definitions. Global simplification checks inconsistency and rewrites formulas to be easy to handle. EGS has been tested for the problems of controlling backward chaining and conjecture checking in the Boyer-Moore theorem prover. It has proven to be powerful -- its power is mainly due to combining efficient procedural knowledge and general formal reasoning capacity. In this talk I will present the operational aspect of EGS and some underlying principles of its design. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 19 Jun 85 17:02:36-PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar - Qualitative Process Theory (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] *NEXT* THURSDAY, June 27, 1985 4:15 p.m. CSLI Colloquium Redwood Hall ``Qualitative Process Theory'' Room G-19 Ken Forbus, University of Illinois, Computer Science ``Qualitative Process Theory'' Things move, collide, flow, bend, stretch, break, cool down, heat up, and boil. Intuitively we think of the things that cause changes in physical situations as processes. Qualitative Process Theory defines simple notions of quantity, function, and process that allow interesting common-sense inferences to be drawn about dynamical systems. This talk will describe the basics of the Qualitative Process Theory, illustrate how it can be used to capture certain aspects of different models of physical phenomena, and discuss the claims it makes about causal reasoning. --Ken Forbus ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 Jun 85 10:04:54 EDT From: coopercc@GE-CRD Subject: Seminar - Architectures for Logic Programming (GE) Computer Science Seminar General Electric R & D Center Schenectady, N.Y. Experimental Computer Architectures for Logic Programming Prof. John Oldfield Syracuse University Tuesday, June 25 10:30 AM, Conference Room 2, Bldg. K1 (Refreshments at 10:15) ABSTRACT: Syracuse University is an established center for research in logic programming languages and their applications. In the last few years research has com- menced on ways of speeding-up the execution of logic programs by special-purpose computer architectures and the incorporation of custom VLSI components. The Syracuse Unification Machine (SUM) is a co- processor for a host computer executing LOGLISP. Unifi- cation is a fundamental and common operation in the execution of logic programs, and is highly recursive in nature. SUM speeds up unification by the combination of separate functional units operating concurrently, high- speed pattern matching and the use of content- addressable memory (CAM) techniques. Unification fre- quently requires a variable to be bound to something else, such as an expression, a constant or even another variable. The Binding Agent of SUM holds the set of current bindings in the form of a segmented stack, and with the aid of a CAM made up of custom nMOS circuits it is possible to check if a variable is already bound in under 150 nS. Binding is an operation which may be carried out concurrently in most situations, and an extra Binding Agent may be used to advantage. The Analysis Agent is another custom nMOS component which implements the pattern-matching and case-by-case analysis required. It is organized as a pipeline, and uses a state machine implemented as a PLA. (Note: the June issue of Byte Magazine contains an informative article on this work by Phillip Robinson) Notice to Non-GE attendees: It is necessary that we ask you to notify Marion White ((518) 387-6138 or WHITEMM@GE-CRD) at least two days in advance of the seminar. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Jun 1985 11:58 EDT From: DICK%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Reasoning via Constraints (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Tuesday, June 18 8th Floor Playroom 4:00PM REASONING ABOUT PROGRAMS VIA CONSTRAINT PROPAGATION Thomas G. Dietterich Department of Computer Science Oregon State University This talk describes a program reasoning system (PRE) and its application to problems of incremental program development in machine learning. PRE solves the following problem: given a program (in a modified Programmer's Apprentice notation) with tokens labeling some of the ports in the program, find the set of possible "interpretations" of the program. That is, compute the set of executions consistent with the given information. The characterization of these executions should be succinct and their computation should be efficient. To perform this task, PRE applies constraint propagation methods. The talk will focus on (a) modifications made to the P.A. notation, (b) techniques introduced to handle failure of local propagation, and (c) strategies for resolving the frame problem. PRE is part of a larger system, EG, whose task is to form (procedural) theories of the UNIX operating system through experimentation and observation. EG's theories take the form of programs, and PRE is applied to perform tasks of data interpretation and goal regression. Refreshments will be served. Host: Richard C. Waters ------------------------------ Date: Tue 18 Jun 85 19:27:09-PDT From: LANSKY@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Seminar - Planning as Debugging (SRI) PLANNING AS DEBUGGING Reid Simmons -- MIT AI Lab / SPAR 11:00 am, Monday, June 24 Room EJ232, SRI International We are currently building a domain independent planner which can represent and reason about fairly complex domains. The first part of the talk will focus on the representations used and the rationale for choosing them. The planner uses explicit temporal representations, based on time points and the notion of "histories". It also extends the traditional precondition/postcondition representation of actions to include quantification, conditionals and the ability to reason about cumulative changes. The second part of the talk will focus on techniques to organize and control the search for a plan. We view planning as "debugging a blank sheet of paper". We correct a bug (ie. unachieved goal) by changing one of the underlying assumptions in the plan which are responsible for the bug. This problem solving approach combines backtracking with traditional planning techniques, giving the planner the potential for finding a solution with much less search. We also present a simple, but effective, technique for choosing which plan modification to pursue, based on maintaining a complete goal structure of the plan. This planner has been partially implemented and tested on traditional blocks-world and register-transfer examples. It is currently being applied to the problem of geologic interpretation and to diagnosis of chip manufacturing problems. ------- ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ******************** From csvpi@vpics1 Sat Jun 22 04:15:16 1985 Date: Sat, 22 Jun 85 04:15:10 edt From: csvpi@vpics1.VPI To: fox@opus (FRANCE,RDJ,JOSLIN,ROACH,FOX) Subject: From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Status: R Received: from sri-ai.arpa by csnet-relay.arpa id a001450; 21 Jun 85 19:18 EDT Date: Fri 21 Jun 1985 12:04-PDT Reply-to: AIList@SRI-AI US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList Digest V3 #81 To: AIList@SRI-AI Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Sat, 22 Jun 85 04:03 EST AIList Digest Saturday, 22 Jun 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 81 Today's Topics: Queries - EMYCIN KBs & Expert System Tools, Games - Scrabble Program, News - New BBoard on Application of AI to Education & Symbolic Math Mailing List, Psychology - Common Sense, Seminar Series - Pixels and Predicates (CSLI), Conference - NAFIPS Call for Papers ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed 19 Jun 85 09:25:21-MDT From: Pete Tinker Subject: request: EMYCIN KBs We are implementing an EMYCIN-like system in the functional language FEL and would like to feed it a substantial knowledge base. We would appreciate hearing from anyone who can make one available to us for internal use. Thanks, -Pete ------------------------------ Date: 19 Jun 1985 at 1102-EDT From: jim at TYCHO.ARPA (James B. Houser) Subject: Expert system tools I would like to find out which of the "canned" expert system development systems like KEE or KES are considered reasonable to use on a Lisp machine. An approximate idea of cost and machine resources required, and a POC would also be helpful. Thanx - Jim (jim@tycho) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Jun 85 07:03:33 pdt From: Guy Lapalme Subject: Scrabble Program Dear Dr. Kender: Following your inquiry about programs for playing Scrabble, you might be interested to know that we have built a championship level program called Athena. It plays a version of the game called duplicate Scrabble which is the form used for championships in french. The idea is that everybody is playing the same board at the same time, each person has a 3 minute lapse of time to find the best play, each player gets the points for the word he/she found but the best word is put on everybody's board. That way, luck is eliminated and each player can find out what proportion of the optimal he/she found. In doing so, all strategy is of no use because at each move the best play FOR THAT MOVE is put on the board for everybody. Under those rules, our program consistently plays more than 98% . For the last four years, we had the program play the world championship games, and only last year it would not have been first. A paper describing the program was published in TSI (Techniques and Science of Informatics) vol2, no 4, p249-256, 1983. This is an english translation of a french publication. We also have a report that describe it in english. Honestly, we cannot call the techniques we use AI techniques but more of "Scrabble Hacks", but so are in my opinion the last Chess Programs (ie the ones that win). I hope that you find this information useful. Guy Lapalme Dept IRO Universite de Montreal PS: The programs now plays in french because we had access to a 80000 words dictionnary of acceptable words in french. We hope to get access to a similar list in English, Do you have one???? Should you want to organize a tournament we would be glad to come. ------------------------------ Date: Thu 20 Jun 85 15:28:04-PDT From: Mark Richer Subject: NEW BBOARD on Application of AI to education There seemed to be enough interest to create a bboard on artificial intelligence in education. Here the description: AI-ED@SUMEX-AIM Discussions related to the application of artificial intelligence to education. This includes material on intelligent computer assisted instruction (ICAI) or intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), interactive encyclopedias, intelligent information retrieval for educational purposes, and pychological and cognitive science models of learning, problem solving, and teaching that can be applied to education. Issues related to teaching AI are welcome. Topics may also include evaluation of tutoring systems, commercialization of AI based instructional systems, description of actual use of an ITS in a classroom setting, user-modeling, intelligent user-interfaces, and the use of graphics or videodisk in ICAI. Announcements of books, papers, conferences, new products, public domain software tools, etc. are encouraged. Archives of messages are kept on SUMEX-AIM in: AI-ED.TXT All requests to be added to or deleted from these lists, problems, questions, etc., should be sent to AI-Ed-Request@SUMEX-AIM Coordinator: Mark Richer ------------------------------ Date: 19 Jun 1985 22:42-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: symbolic math mailing list/news group announcement Symbolic math mailing list/news group announcement Mailing list covering symbolic math algorithms, applications and problems relating to the various symbolic math languages. It is primarily the USENET newsgroup net.math.symbolic; items are forwarded to ARPANET, BITNET and CSNET from randvax. Mail to be forwarded to the list should be sent to lseward@RAND-UNIX (ARPANET/MilNet) or net.math.symbolic (USENET). Requests to be included on the list should be sent to lseward@RAND-UNIX. Coordinator: Larry Seward ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 15 Jun 85 20:14:32 pdt From: Eric Berglund Subject: Common Sense [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] For reasons too weird to explain, some friends and I have been trying to come up with a definition or characterization of "common sense". I'd like to throw the question to the bboard community and hope for some help. Though I wouldn't mind getting cute little epigrams and silly jokes, I'm really much more interested in a serious and thorough characterization. As for the progress of our discussion so far, there seem to lots of things that go under the heading of common sense: street sense (don't wave lots of money around in bad neighborhoods), minor mechanical aptitude (the ability and willingness to fix the toilet when it's running), perspective (don't cry if you drop an egg; do if you drop your kid). At this point I want to try to separate those from common sense and let common sense denote things that don't fit under those titles--although perspective and common sense may overlap. (Of course, a good argument could convince me to include them.) We've come up with two main traits that a person with common sense has: the ability to completely learn something once they've been taught it, and the ability to understand others' motives and how their motives will likely affect their behavior. As an example of the first, a person may not know that the quickest way to Formico's Pizza is down Embarcadero. He may instead always go down University to 101 and head south. However, once he's driven down Embarcadero once and seen how much shorter it is, he would seem foolish to go the long way if his motivation is to avoid wasting time. Having learned something, he should internalize the knowledge to the point of being able to use whenever it's applicable. As an example of the second, one should understand that if someone is trying to sell you something, they're more likely to tell you the good things about it than the bad, even if they're honest. This is not just street sense (let the buyer beware) but the ability to imagine yourself in the situation of another person. Any other such traits? Or a neater way of summarizing them? --Eric ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 15 Jun 85 22:24:45 pdt From: Vaughan Pratt Subject: common sense [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Common sense: that which is obvious once it has been pointed out. More precisely, the two criteria for common sense are: common knowledge basis (all facts depended on must be common knowledge) low computational complexity (easy to check the conclusion). ------------------------------ Date: Wed 19 Jun 85 17:02:36-PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: Seminar Series - Pixels and Predicates (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] AREA P1 MEETING ``Pixels and Predicates'' Beginning Wednesday, June 26 we will start a discussion series on visual (graphic) communication: how can we relate predicates to pixels, and vice versa? Topics will include: * What image regularities do we perceive as the primitive elements of form, the ``visual morphemes'' that convey information? * How do people organize images into these parts, gain information about the situation from them, and use them in communication? * How can we use our knowledge of such matters to design graphic interfaces to facilitate visual communication? Those interested in these topics are encouraged to attend, debate vigorously, and perhaps suggest further topics for discussion. The first speaker (tentative) is: ``Visual Morphemes in the 3-D World.'' Alex Pentland, CSLI Wednesday June 26th, 3:00pm, Ventura Hall People have a strong perceptual notion of the ``parts'' of a 3-D form; a good understanding of what constitues ``a part'' is critical to communication about visual data. A theory of parts will be presented and a 3-D graphics modeling tool based on this theory will be discussed. --Alex Pentland ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Jun 85 13:14:47 cdt From: Don Kraft Subject: Call for Papers -- NAFIPS Meeting CALL FOR PAPERS North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS) International Meeting Monteleone Hotel New Orleans, Louisiana (In the Heart of the French Quarter) June 1-4, 1986 Papers on all fuzzy topics are encouraged, and wide international participation is expected. Deadlines Notice of intent with a title and abstract 9/1/85 Completed paper (3 copies) 10/15/85 Notification of acceptance 1/15/86 Camera-ready copy due 3/15/86 Proceedings will be distributed during Conference registration. Send all abstracts and papers to: NAFIPS86 Department of Computer Science Florida State University Tallahassee, FL 32306 Abraham Kandel and Wyllis Bandler, Program Committee Co-Chairs Fred Petry and Donald H. Kraft, General Meeting Co-Chairs ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************