lee@mungunni.OZ (Lee Naish) (01/07/85)
THE AUSTRALIAN FIFTH DEGENERATION PROJECT News of the Japanese Fifth Generation A.I. project has finally reached the Australian Government and they have given approval for the spending of a ten figure sum on a similar project in Australia. In fact, the government itself is providing a nine figure sum (this includes the cents). A major part of the project is the designing and building of the MU parallel machine. It has a very twisted Klein bottle topology and will be made using Very Large Scale Disintegration technology, fabricated on Uranium chips. Selling points include Feature number 1: No proof trees. Feature number 2: No UNIX. Feature number 3: Multiprocessor Oriented Timesharing Operating System (MOTOS). Feature number 4: No eight Queens. Feature number 5: Automatic debugger. Feature number 6: There is no feature 6. Feature number 7: Bruce declarations [1]. Feature number 8: Dijkstra's On the Garbage Fly Collection Algorithm. The first major application of the system is an attempt to alieviate the so called softwear crisis - the trend of decreasing productivity in the Australian wool industry. The main thrust will be to use A.I. and robotics to automate shearing. Robot shearing has been unsuccessful in the past but using artificial insemination techniques, it is hoped the sheep will become more uniform in size and smart enough not to be cut. [1] Cleese et al., The Philosophers Sketch, Monty Pythons Flying Circus. P.S. The "Machine Intelligence Project" actually exists. We are told the cheque is in the post. Lee Naish ACSNET: lee:mulga UUCP: {decvax,vax135}!mulga!lee ARPANET: decvax!mulga!lee@Berkeley