fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU (Erik E. &) (10/17/85)
Peter Honeyman and I disagree on various domainism vs. bangism issues, but I must chime in and state: given an address, pathparse uses knowledge of the structure and syntax of the set of all interconnected networks for which it has data, in order to construct an address which will get a letter back the sender. In short, you hand it a horribly mangled address, and it will give you an address which will get a letter back to the person's address. It uses the pathalias tables that are published in mod.map to do this (I have little doubt, however, that Peter augments these with more data for networks such as CSNET, ARPANET, BITNET, etc.). The point is that this ain't AI, guy. It's simple table lookup with some encoded rules for how to interpret the data that results from the look up. Bravo to Peter Honeyman and Pat Parseghian for producing it. The paper that describes it can be found in the Dallas USENIX Winter Conference 1985 Proceedings, starting on page 184. Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU P.S. and before you go screaming that it uses `heuristics', go look up the definition of `heuristic' and `algorithmn'. Peter is always very scrupulous about his choice of words (even when they're profane).