Date: Wed 20 Apr 1988 22:38-PDT From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws Reply-To: AIList@KL.SRI.COM Us-Mail: SRI Int., 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: (415) 859-6467 Subject: AIList V6 #75 - Functions, Modal Logic, Explorer, MACSYMA To: AIList@KL.SRI.COM Status: R AIList Digest Thursday, 21 Apr 1988 Volume 6 : Issue 75 Today's Topics: Expert Systems - Functions in Expert Systems, References - Introductory Text & AM Follow-on & Modal Logic & Railroad Application, AI Tools - Explorer (vs. Sun) Experience & Realtime Knowledge Daemon Project & MACSYMA Information ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 10:36:03 EDT From: aboulang@WILMA.BBN.COM Reply-to: aboulanger@bbn.com Subject: functions in expert systems I am interested in understanding the importance of the function in expert systems. From an analysis point of view functions complicate expert systems quite a bit. Check out my masters thesis: "The Expert System PLANT/CD: A Case Study in Applying The General Purpose Inference System Advise to Predicting Black Cutworm Damage in Corn." This has some discussion of the roles of function invocation in expert systems. This is Report # UIUCDCS-R-83-1134 (July 83) which should be no problem for you to get. Albert Boulanger Aboulanger@bbn.com ------------------------------ Date: 14 Apr 88 15:15:35 GMT From: sunybcs!rapaport@boulder.colorado.edu (William J. Rapaport) Subject: Re: References needed In article <1201@tahoe.unr.edu> greg@wheeler (Greg Sharp) writes: > >I am looking for introductory references (books, articles...) concerning ai. I strongly recommend as a reference the following: Shapiro, Stuart C. (ed.) (1987), Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence (New York: John Wiley & Sons). William J. Rapaport Assistant Professor Dept. of Computer Science||internet: rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu SUNY Buffalo ||bitnet: rapaport@sunybcs.bitnet Buffalo, NY 14260 ||uucp: {ames,boulder,decvax,rutgers}!sunybcs!rapaport (716) 636-3193, 3180 || ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 21:31:04 EST From: PJURKAT@VAXC.STEVENS-TECH.EDU Subject: Thanks for the references to AM follow on work! This is to thank all the people who responded to my request for ideas and references on any work that had been done, since the original, on the kind of heuristics that were developed by Lenat in his AM. Several of you not only provided references but also suggested ideas and comments that proved interested to both my student and myself. Thanks again. Several responses, without providing any other thoughts, merely suggested that my student look in "Science Citation Index". My student, of course, had done so but at Stevens the use of the Index is not free. The search, when finally completed, cost over $60. Not all the students who attend Stevens can afford that and neither the school nor the Department is in a position to fund searches for all such queries. Not all of us work at affluent organizations and I was hoping that the AIList members consider themselves enough of a community to provide such help. I was not wrong!!! cheers - peter jurkat ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 13 Apr 88 14:16:04 PDT From: ladkin@kestrel.ARPA (Peter Ladkin) Subject: modal logic references Others have mentioned the books by Hughes and Cresswell (there are two, the Introduction and the Companion), the Handbook of Philosophical Logic volume 2 (articles by many) and Johan van Benthem's monograph on Modal Logic and Correspondence Theory (Bibliopolis, Naples, available through Humanities Press here, i think). There are other important and helpful works. Brian Chellas's book Modal Logic (Cambridge) is widely available and easy to read. Lemmon and Scott's monograph on Modal Logic (Blackwell) is a classic, but may not be in print. Kripke's original articles are well worth reading. Johan van Benthem has another monograph, A Manual of Intensional Logic, in the CSLI lecture note series (U. Chicago), and Goldblatt has a volume on Logics of Time and Computation in the same series. Segerberg's thesis is unfortunately not widely available. Gabbay has a book on his work with modal logics (Reidel), containing a good number of his highly technical results, but is not really an introduction. Since temporal logics are a form of modal logic, I also recommend van Benthem's monograph (yes, he is prolific) on The Logic of Time (Reidel). For the provability logic, Boolos's book was mentioned, and there is another by Craig Smorynski, Self Reference and Modal Logic (Springer), which studies the provability logic in detail. There is also substantial literature on the algebraic approach to modal logics - just as propositional logic and Boolean algebras correspond, so normal modal propositional logics correspond to Boolean algebras with an extra unary operator. But that is another story. peter ladkin ladkin@kestrel.arpa ------------------------------ Date: 18 Apr 88 17:22:55 GMT From: mtunx!mtuxo!mtgzy!jaw@rutgers.edu (XMRN60000[bsm]-j.a.welsh) Subject: Re: Expert Systems in the Railroad Industry. > What sort of expert systems have developed for the railroad > industry? Strangely enough, the one that I know of is a General Electric locomotive maintenance expert system. It was mentioned in a computer magazine and one of the railfanning mags. last year. ------------------------------ Date: 14 Apr 88 17:20:03 GMT From: frabjous!nau@mimsy.umd.edu (Dana Nau) Subject: Re: Explorer (vs. Sun) Experience ? In article <3470003@wdl1.UUCP> mikeb@wdl1.UUCP (Michael H. Bender) writes: >PLEASE - if you have any experience with the TI Explorer environment, >or have made any comparisons between it and the SUN environment, >please help us by lettin us know .... I've had extensive experience with Suns, Symbolics machines, and Explorers. Currently, my research group has two Explorers and three Suns. We use the Explorers for Lisp programming, and the Suns for other stuff. I haven't had any experience with a Mac-II, so I can't comment on that. >An associate of mine is debating between the purchase of a Mac-II with >the TI Explorer board, or a Sun workstation. Currently, he has a Sun, >and he wants to buy 2 Mac's and link them togehter (NFS? IP/TCP?). He >will be running Knowledge Craft Primarily. > >QUESTION 1) >How hard is it to learn to use the Lisp environment on the Explorer? >Is it as difficult as the Symbolics used to be? > >In the past - people have told me that it takes close to a year to >become expert on the Symbolics (much less on the Sun) ... is this true >for the Explorer also? The operating systems for both the Explorer and the Symbolics are based on some code which was originally developed at MIT. Thus, at one time, the operating systems for the Explorer and Symbolics were nearly the same. Lately, TI and Symbolics have diverged a bit in the enhancements and modifications they've made to the operating systems, but there are still a lot of similarities. The operating system is complex, and when I was first trying to learn it, I got pretty frustrated. However, it certainly didn't take me as long as you indicate above; I was pretty proficient after using the machines for only a few months. Furthermore, it was well worth the effort, because once I became proficient, I found Lisp programming on the Lisp machine to be much easier than it had ever been on a Sun. >QUESTION 2) >How hard is it to maintain the software and environment? He is afraid >that if he gets a Sun he will need to hire a Unix guru.... Will he >have to hire an Explorer/Zeta-Lisp expert if he gets a MacII with the >TI board? I don't know anything about the Mac, but we're doing pretty well with the Explorers on our own. We do have a maintenance staff for the Suns, but that's because my department has several dozen Suns and has made a commitment to maintaining them for everyone in the department. Our staff has made a lot of modifications and enhancements to the Sun operating system--and what it would be to use a Sun without our maintenance staff, I don't know. >QUESTION 3) >Does the TI environment (which I assume will completely run on the >Mac-II) provide a large number of libraries that would otherwise have >to be developed on the SUN workstations? For Lisp programming, I much prefer an Explorer or Symbolics rather than a Sun; for text processing and such, I use the Sun. On the Lisp machines, Lisp is thoroughly integrated with the operating system, and as a result, you can quite easily do things with windows, menus, editing, debugging, etc., that would be pretty painful to do in Lisp on the Sun. For example, if I want a pop-up a menu on the explorer, I simply call a built-in Lisp function, giving it the menu title and menu entries, and telling what should be done for each menu entry. That kind of thing is substantially more difficult on the Sun. If the Mac II has the same kind of Lisp/Operating System integration that the Explorer has, then there might be some advantages to it since it can do other general-purpose programming too. However, I'd want to check it out carefully first. The Mac operating system and window environment are substantially different from those on the Explorer and Symbolics, and I have no idea how they've integrated Lisp with all this. Dana S. Nau ARPA & CSNet: nau@mimsy.umd.edu Computer Sci. Dept., U. of Maryland UUCP: ...!{allegra,uunet}!mimsy!nau College Park, MD 20742 Telephone: (301) 454-7932 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 14:41:22 EDT From: Michael Factor Subject: [gelernter-david: "Another Yale program"] Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 12:49:50 EDT From: David Gelernter To: Paul.Birkel@K.GP.CS.CMU.EDU Subject: "Another Yale program" Cc: factor, leichter Subject: Can you name this project? In a recent exposition on parallel computing in the popular press the following paragraph appeared. Can anyone name this project, its investigators, a contact, a publication, or provide any further information? "Another Yale program - to monitor the equipment in an intensive-care unit - is more flexible still. Each processor in this system runs a different program, which monitors the equipment for signs of a particular problem or ailment. Because each program has its own processor, it is ever-vigilant for signs of its disease." This program is a so-called "Realtime Knowledge Daemon" written by Mike Factor of the Linda group here, in collaboration with some anaesthesiologists. The Economist guy got it wrong: each PROCESS (not processor) runs a different decision procedure. I'm appending abstracts from a couple of recent reports on the system. I'll send you copies of the papers if you want them. (The program is also discussed in a paper forthcoming in the SIGPLAN PPEALS conference this summer.) ------------------------------------------------------- The Parallel Process Lattice as an Organizing Scheme for Realtime Knowledge Daemons Michael Factor and David Gelernter {\it Yale University \\ Department of Computer Science \\ P.O. Box 2158 Yale Station \\ New Haven, Connecticut 06520-2158} \\ {\bf Abstract.} A {\it realtime knowledge daemon} is a program that fastens itself to a collection of data streams and monitors them, generating appropriate comments and responding to queries, in realtime. This type of program is called for whenever data-collection capacity outstrips realtime data {\it monitoring} and {\it understanding} capacity. A {\it parallel process lattice} is an organizing structure for realtime knowledge daemons (and more broadly for expert systems in general). A process lattice is a network of communicating concurrent processes arranged in a series of ranks or layers; data values flow upward through the lattice and queries may flow downward. The intent of the process lattices is to ``waste'' processing power (an ever-cheaper commodity) by constantly monitoring the likelihood of rare events, and eagerly computing the answers to questions rarely asked, so that the system can respond rapidly and gracefully to unusual circumstances. Further, the application's character as a collection of heterogeneous, communicating expert processes means that concurrency leads to a far simpler program than would have been the been the case given a conventional, sequential organization. We explain the process lattice and discuss its suitability by describing a simple but fairly realistic prototype designed for monitoring in an ICU. A Prototype Realtime Knowledge Daemon for ICU Monitoring Michael Factor*, David Gelernter*, Perry Miller\dag and Stanley Rosenbaum\dag {\it *Yale University \\ Department of Computer Science \\ %P.O. Box 2158 Yale Station \\ New Haven, Connecticut} \\ {\it \dag Yale University School of Medicine \\ Department of Anaesthesiology \\ New Haven, Connecticut} \\ A {\it realtime knowledge daemon} is a program that fastens itself to a collection of data streams and monitors them, generating appropriate comments and responding to queries, in realtime. We describe a prototype designed for monitoring patients in a post-operative ICU. The prototype is of interest because ($a$) its performance seems reasonable and correct, and (our experience suggests) should continue to be reasonable as the system grows (the current prototype isn't comprehensive enough for clinical testing, but it continues to expand); ($b$) the program is written using a novel ``process lattice'' organization that holds a number of advantages for building large expert systems. The process lattice structure results in a program with an easily-visualizable logical structure that reflects the structure of the domain; it imposes a regular organization on an arbitrarily-heterogeneous set of decision procedures; it's well suited to a parallel implementation. The prototype we discuss is written in the parallel language Linda and runs on a commercial parallel processor. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 13:00 EDT From: Richard Petti Subject: MACSYMA information Robert, Thank you for your interest in MACSYMA. Here is some information on our new release of MACSYMA for VAX VMS systems. We would be happy to answer any questions you have. In addition to these product features, our software is supported by a staff of 14 people, including seven technical staff. Service, training, installation guides and release notes are available. Dick Petti Director, Computer Aided Mathematics Group Symbolics, Inc. Eleven Cambridge Center Cambridge, MA 02142 tel: (617) 621-7770 (800) MACSYMA email: petti@scrc-stony-brook.arpa petti@symbolics.com March 1988 HIGHLIGHTS OF COMMON LISP MACSYMA 412.61 FOR VAX/VMS USERS Since January 1985, we have poured most of our development effort into a new generation of MACSYMA(R) software based on Common Lisp. Versions of this software are now available on Symbolics(TM) and Apollo(R) workstations, and we plan to deliver it on VAX(TM)/VMS(TM) systems in April or May of this year. Versions of this product for SUN(TM) workstations and VAX UNIX(TM) systems will be available at a later date. The following enhancements are planned for VAX/VMS MACSYMA release 412.61. Some of these are old packages which have not been delivered in recent VAX/VMS releases, some are improvements to existing packages, and some are entirely new. While we expect all of these enhancements to be included in the product, we will not hold up the release if some of them are not ready on schedule. o Symbolic Algebra: - GROBNER: The Grobner algorithm enables MACSYMA to find more solutions to systems of polynomial equations. - JORDAN_FORM, a command for computing the Jordan form of matrices, has been added. o Symbolic Calculus: - Ordinary Differential Equations (O.D.E.'s): . ODEFI finds first integrals of first order O.D.E.'s, using the powerful Prelle-Singer algorithm. . ODE, the main solution package for O.D.E.'s, has been made more reliable. - INTEQN: The integral equation package has been repaired and extended. - Tensor analysis: . CTENSOR, the component tensor package, has been extended to include frame fields, affine torsion and conformal nonmetricity. . ITENSR, the indicial tensor analysis package, has been repaired and is fully functional for VAX users for the first time. . CARTAN, a package for performing exterior calculus, is repaired. - OPTVAR, a package for solving variational problems, is available. o Symbolic Approximation Methods: - Taylor methods: . TAYLOR_SOLVE: Solves algebraic and transcendental equations in Taylor series. Very useful for equations which do not have closed-form solutions, or whose exact solutions are very complicated. . TAYLOR_ODE: finds Taylor series solutions of systems of simultaneous ordinary differential equations which satisfy Lipshitz conditions. Useful for studying local behavior of complicated systems of O.D.E.'s. - Perturbation theory methods for O.D.E.'s: . LINDSTEDT: Finds periodic series solutions for perturbed oscillator equations using Lindstedt's method. . AVERAGE_PERIODIC_ODE: Implements the method of averaging for periodic O.D.E.'s. This is the most popular method for finding qualitative information about the family of solutions of an ordinary differential equation. o Numerical analysis: - Runge-Kutta numerical integration of systems of O.D.E.'s. - Newton-Cotes numerical integration. - Interpolation of numerical roots of equations. - FFT: Fast Fourier transforms. - LSQ: Least squares polynomial fit to scattered data. o Fortran Links: - GENTRAN, a very powerful Fortran generator, has been installed. It can translate mathematical expressions, iteration statements, if-then statements, data type declaration information and much more into Fortran, `C' or Ratfor. In its `template mode', Gentran enables users to write "mixed Fortran-MACSYMA code". o Graphics: VAX/VMS users will have access to full MACSYMA plotting capabilities in two and three dimensions. o Pattern Matching: MACSYMA's capabilities were extended in 1986, and these improvements will be included in the new VAX/VMS version of MACSYMA. o Compilation: Thanks to the VAX LISP runtime version we are shipping under MACSYMA, users can for the first time compile their own MACSYMA code. This results in a 2-10 times speed improvement in execution of large MACSYMA programs. o Documentation: - User's Guide: In July 1987 we made available the MACSYMA User's Guide, which is much more accessible than the MACSYMA Reference Manual. - Reference Manual: In the summer of 1988 we will deliver version 13 of the MACSYMA Reference Manual, which will be reorganized, and much easier to use. o Reliability: Our top priority has been to improve the reliability of Macsyma over the past two years. Many minor improvements have been made. -- MACSYMA(R) is a registered trademark of Symbolics, Inc. Symbolics is a trademark of Symbolics, Inc. Apollo(R) is a registered trademark of Apollo Computer Inc. VAX and VMS are trademarks of the Digital Equipment Corporation. SUN is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a trademark of AT&T Bell Laboratories. (C) Copyright 1988 Symbolics, Inc. All rights reserved. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************