Subject: AIList Digest V5 #130

From: [email-masked]@vtcs1
Date: Thu, 28 May 87 13:45:51 edt

Date: Wed 27 May 1987 23:53-PDT
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <[email-masked]>
Subject: AIList Digest   V5 #130
To: [email-masked]
Reply-to: [email-masked]
US-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA  94025
Phone: (415) 859-6467

AIList Digest           Thursday, 28 May 1987     Volume 5 : Issue 130

Today's Topics:
  Queries - Philosophy and Complexity Theory &
    Prolog Interpreter in C Available (Wanted/Offered) &
    Graduate Schools with a Good AI Program,
  Bindings - Les Kitchen & Interactive Fiction Discussion,
  Applications - Knowledge-Based Document Retrieval &
    Knowledge from Databases Summary,
  Humor - Artificial Reasoning,
  Review - Spang Robinson Report 3/5, May 1987

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

Date: 25 May 87 14:14:46 GMT
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence and Complexity Theory

Lately I've been chating informally to a philosopher/friend about
common interests in our work.  He was unfamiliar with the concept of the
TIME TO COMPUTE consequences of facts.  Furthermore, the ramifactions of
intractability (ie. if P != NP is, as we all suspect, true) seemed to
be new to my friend.  The absolute consequences are hard to get across
to a non-computer scientist; They always say "but computers are getting
faster all the time...".

I'm digging around for references in AI on these ideas. This isn't my area.
Can anyone suggest some?

I've dug up a couple of relevant papers:

"Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence",
McCarthy and Hayes, 1969.  I think this is the most obvious starting point,
with its description of the frame problem.  However, the authors seem to
discuss the issue from the standpoint of what a formalism must contain so
that the system is CAPABLE of computing what it needs rather than the TIME
to compute these things (please correct me if I'm wrong).  This is  hardly
suprising, as it predates the seminal P=NP? work.

"The Tractability of Subsumption in Frame-Based Description Languages",
Brachman and Levesque, AAAI-84.  This paper is relevant, but too
implementation specific for what I want.  I want something more general
and preferably philosophically oriented.

*NOTE*: I'm certainly NOT implying that AI is impossible! But the notion
of intractability is one that must be addressed.  I'm sure it has been
addressed.  I'm just chasing a few references, more for the benefit of my
colleague than myself.

Raymond Lister
Basser Department of Computer Science
University of Sydney
NSW  2006
AUSTRALIA

ACSnet:  ray@basser
ARPANET: [email-masked]

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

Date: 22 May 87 19:49:57 GMT
From: [email-masked]  (Dave Mack)
Subject: Prolog Interpreter in C Available (Wanted/Offered)

        I am looking for a public domain Prolog interpreter. I am also
        offering to post one to the USENET, depending on the response
        I get to this posting.

        The reason for the strange form of this request is that I no
        longer have time to hack at my version of Prolog. My implementation
        is an incomplete Clocksin-Mellish syntax interpreter. Many of
        the built-in functions are not yet implemented and it has several
        major bugs ("cut" doesn't work quite right, for example.) It
        does correctly parse CM prolog and performs resolution (mostly)
        correctly. It is written in C for BSD4.2, but should be easily
        portable System V, since about the only OS dependent feature is
        "index".

        If I get a reasonable number of positive responses to this posting,
        I will finish documenting the beast and ship a couple of shar
        files to comp.sources.unix.

        If you want a copy, let me know. If you manage to fix any of
        the bugs, mail me the diffs. I'll test them and post them to
        the net.

        Happy Hacking!

  Dave Mack
  McDonnell Douglas-Inco, Inc. (home of the laser-guided hamburger)
  8201 Greensboro Drive                  DISCLAIMER: Until they pay me for
  McLean, VA 22101                       them, my opinions are my own. Call
  (703)883-3911                          for prices.
  ...!seismo!sundc!hadron!inco!mack

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

Date: 26 May 87 15:58:22 GMT
From: [email-masked]  (Nick Flor)
Subject: Need info on grad schools with a good AI program

Could someone e-mail me a list of graduate schools with a good
AI program.  (Like the top 25 or top 10)

If not, a pointer to where I could find this information in a concise form
would also be helpful.

Sorry to ask this question.  I know it gets asked alot,  I just never
payed attention before.

Thanks in advance.

Nick
--
+ Disclaimer: The above opinions are my own, not necessarily my employers'.
/ Nick V. Flor / ..hplabs!hp-sdd!nick / Hewlett Packard, San Diego Division
* "What's going down in this world, you got no idea.  Believe me."-The Comedian
- "Less Thunder with the Mouth, More Lightning with the Fists." - The Ripper

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

Date: Mon, 25 May 87 16:28 EDT
From: "Les Kitchen." <[email-masked]>
Subject: Binding (actually setq)

>From 1st of July 1987:

Les Kitchen
Department of Computer Science
University of Western Australia
Nedlands, W.A.  6009
AUSTRALIA

[email-masked]
[email-masked]

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

Date: 27 May 87 15:43:22 GMT
From: [email-masked]  (Adam C. Engst)
Subject: Interactive fiction

Hi,
    I am currently starting a discussion group on misc.misc that deals with
interactive fiction.  Interactive fiction has as its basic concept that of
non-linear text, though there are many other additions that can (and should)
be added for the enhancment of the text.  If you are unsure as to what
interactive fiction is, read misc.misc.  Somewhere in there (among many
other good articles mostly calling for AI-based systems) is my brief
description of interactive fiction.  I would like the opinion of AI workers
in order to determine the level at which AI can be used to help advance
interactive fiction, either now or in the future.  I accept all email, but I
can't guarantee any responses since I have terrible luck with paths.  So,
please check it out, and if you are interested, join the discussion.  I hope
to have it large enough soon to get our own newsgroup to stop bothering
everyone else in misc.misc.
                                         Adam Engst
[email-masked]
[email-masked]

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

Date: Thu, 21-MAY-1987 09:19 EST
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Reply - Knowledge-Based Document Retrieval

      [Forwarded from the IRList Digest by [email-masked].]

  Date: Tue, 19 May 87 13:44:40+0900
  From: Kim Young Whan <[email-masked]>
  Subject: References on Knowledge-based Document Retrieval

  I'm writing a Ph.D Thesis about Knowledge Based System for Document
  Retrieval, especially about rule based system using uncertainty handling
  mechanism (Bayesian, D-S Theory, Fuzzy Set Theory).  [...]

  Young-Whan Kim
  Dept. of CS KAIST
  P.O.Box 150, Cheongryang
  Seoul, 131
  Republic of Korea.
  [email-masked](from cs-net)
  [email-masked](from bitnet)

[Note: there has been quite a lot of work on this.  There will be a
special issue of Information Processing and Management out this summer
on this topic.  Several papers at the ACM SIGIR Conf. on R&D in
Information Retrieval in New Orleans in a few weeks will be about this -
I will announce how to get proceedings from ACM when they become available.
There was a 2 part article in JASIS by Biswas et al. recently.
Notable other systems include I3R by Croft and Thomson, RUBRIC by Tong
et al., CODER by Fox et al, CANSEARCH by Pollitt, ...  Also, there are
abstracts in issues of ACM SIGIR Forum.  If you are not an ACM SIGIR
member, I encourage joining -- it still only costs $6 to ACM members,
but dues will jump to $12 soon. - Ed]

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

Date: 22 May 87 20:50:19 GMT
From: [email-masked]  (Gregory
      Piatetsky-Shapiro)
Subject: Knowledge from Databases? A follow-up

This is a promised follow-up on the subject of extracting knowledge
from databases.  I have received about a dozen replies and my thanks
to all the respondents.  I have also tried to reply individually, but
not always succeeded (all blame is on the mailer).

I have found two recent references in this area.
The Spring, 1987 issue of IEEE Expert contains a good article by Michael Walker
on "How Feasible is Automated Discovery?".  This article also contains
references to other relevant systems, including Meta-Dendral, AM, Bacon, RX,
Prospector and others.   There is also an article by Gio Wiederhold et al, on
"KSYS: An Architecture for Integrating Databases and Knowledge Bases".
It was submitted to IEEE transactions on Software Engineering and it can be
obtained by writing to Prof. Wiederhold at Stanford.

I have found that there is some work on extracting expert system rules
from databases at GM  (contact [email-masked]).  There is also a company
in Hawaii working on automatic analysis of medical databases and there
is a small start-up in Boston area working on extracting data models
from databases.  However, none of the above have published anything.

There are some commercial expert system tools that interface to databases:
        Intellicorp has KEE Connection to interface KEE to SQL databases
        Inference is working on a similar tool for ART
        Arity Prolog has an interface to SQL
        Guru from mdbs combines an ES and DBMS (and other stuff).
        Insight 2+ interfaces to dbase II, III
        VP Expert also has an interface to dbase II, III
        Mad Intelligent Systems from San Jose, CA has produced
          Relational Lisp - Lisp extended by relational operations

Herman Rubin from Purdue expressed doubts that
it is possible to come up with new theories in a mechanical way.
He says
>I do not trust anyone to come up with anything new by that device.  Data
>analysis is necessary, but it should only be done by geniuses, or at least
>very bright people, who are constantly aware of the dangers of incorrect
>analysis, or even accidently incorrect analysis.

True - "extracting knowledge from data" will not come up with
radically new theories.  However this approach can and does come up with
new relationships, the general form of which is known - look at Bacon,
Meta-Dendral, RX, Prospector.

>If Kepler had one more decimal place to work with, his laws would not fit;
>The data analysis problem is to get theories
>which are certainly incorrect, and which fit "more or less."

An excellent observation.  But who says that a computer cannot search
for relations that hold more or less?  In fact, accounting for
approximate relationships is a must prerequisite in analyzing any real
data, and it was done before.

Comments are welcome.

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

Date: 21 May 87 11:35:26 GMT
From: [email-masked] (Gilbert Cockton)
Reply-to: [email-masked] (Gilbert Cockton)
Subject: Re: Humor - Artificial Life

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked]
(Norman Haas) writes:
>(In case this point hasn't already been made, re the "Artificial Life" confer-
>ence announcement a few issues back:)
>
>  Why stop with life?  Let's go all the way:
>
>  1. Artificial Culture and Civilization, including
>          Artificial Natural Languages
>  2. Artificial Science, including
>          Artificial Research in the field of Artificial Intelligence

Nah - that's not all the way. We also need

   3. Artificial reasoning.

This is when people who nothing about epistemology (philosophical and
anthropological/sociologial aspects) or psychology lock themselves away on
an AI project and make things up about how people reason. I may be
oldfashioned, but I do miss empirical substance and conceptual coherence
:-) :-):-) :-) :-):-) :-) :-):-) :-) :-):-) :-) :-):-) :-) :-):-) :-) :-):-)
--
  Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN
  JANET:  [email-masked]    ARPA:   [email-masked]
                UUCP:   ..!{backbone}!aimmi.hw.ac.uk!gilbert

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

Date: Mon, 25 May 1987 13:38 CST
From: Leff (Southern Methodist University)
      <[email-masked]>
Subject: Review - Spang Robinson Report 3/5, May 1987

Spang Robinson Report, May 1987, Volume 3 No. 5 (Summary)

The lead article is on difficulties that LISP machine vendors have
had.

Currently, here is the breakdown of how many of each machine is
installed for AI applications:

DEC        5000
SUN        1800
Apollo      600
Tektronix   100

Lisp Machines

Symbolics  4000
Xerox      2500
TI         1500
LMI         500

Integrated Inference Machines has just entered the market.

DEC reports that 30 percent of DEC's AI sales are MicroVAXEN with
ten per cent being the high end 800 machines.  DEC has put all
AI efforts under Bill Johnson and two buildings will be dedicated
to AI activities with 300 people involved.

They also have  a table of all LISP Machine Vendors as well as general
purpose machine vendors entering the AI market indicating pricing,
number of units sold for AI and AI software available for each machine.

They estimate that the revenue for sales of conventional machines to
do AI is about the same as that for LISP machine with both groups
totalling about $200 million each.

There is also a nice table summarizing the activities and machines
for both LISP Machine companies and conventional machine vendors entering
the AI market.
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

The next article discusses Gold Hill's Gold Works, an expert sytem.  The system
requires 5 MB extended memory, 512K of RAM and 7MB of disk space.  The
system interfaces with Lotus, dBASE, C, and Assembler as well as Mice and
EGA drivers.  The system
supports frames, multiple inheritance, object oriented programming,
forward and backward chaining, the RETE algorithm, an agenda mechanism,
a screen editor for developing the presentation part of the
expert system and a dependency Network which can be used in multiple words
type applicatons.  It costs $5,000 between now and July 31 with
the price at $7500 thereafter.

$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$ SHORTS -$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-$-

The AI Show at Long Beach drew 3438 attendees.

Teknowledge reports third quarter revenues of $4,469,000 and a net loss
of $721,000.

The former head of Sperry's AI center has founded PEAKSolutions in
Minneapolis which provides AI services.

Eloquent Systems is now marketing its in-house developed AI toolkit
optimized for real-time multi-user applications.  This company also
developed systems for the hotel industry.

Teknowledge will be marketing Framatomes's AI tool, K1.

CP international will be selling a natural language interface for their
text retrieval system, STRATUS.

Two banks have licensed Syntelligence's Lending Advisor, an expert system to
assist loan officers.

Larry Geisel who used to be president of Carnegie Group is now president
of Intelligent Technology Group.

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

They also have a list of papers on LISP machines and reviews of
  The T Programming Language: A Dialect of LISP by Stephen Slade
  PROLOG: A Relational Language and Its Applications by John Malpas
  Prolog Programming: Applications for Database Systems, Expert
    Systems, and Natural Language Systems by Claudia Marcus

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

End of AIList Digest
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