AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI.ARPA (AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws) (10/09/85)
AIList Digest Wednesday, 9 Oct 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 137 Today's Topics: Queries - AI Machines & Formal Semantics of Object-Oriented Languages & Knowledge Representation, AI Tools - Lisp for Macintosh & TIMM Opinion - Social Responsibility, Expert Systems - Aeronautical Application, Games - Hitech Chess Performance, Bindings - Information Science Program at NSF ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 06 Oct 85 15:20:34 EDT From: "Srinivasan Krishnamurthy" <1438@NJIT-EIES.MAILNET> Subject: Do I really need a AI Machine? Dear readers, I work at COMSAT LABS, Maryland. We are getting into AI in a big way and would like comments, suggestions and answers to the following questions,to justify a big investment on a AI machine. * What are the specific gains of using a AI Machine (like symbolics) over developing AI products/packages on general purpose machines like - VAX-11/750-UNIX(4.2BSD), 68000/UNIX etc. * How will an environment without AI Machines effect a major development effort. * How is the HW Architecture of Symbolics, TI Explorer different from VAX. * What are the limitations/constraints of general purpose HW when used for AI applications. * Survey results of AI HW Machines. (if available) * Pointers to other relevant issues. Please message me at: Mailnet address:Vasu@NJIT-EIES.MAILNET Arpanet address: Vasu%NJIT-EIES.MAILNET@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA My sincere thanks in advance. ..........Vasu. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 7 Oct 85 11:06:40 edt From: "Dennis R. Bahler" <drb%virginia.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA> Subject: request: formal semantics of OOL's Does anyone have pointers to work done on formal specification and/or formal semantic definition of object-oriented languages or systems such as Smalltalk-80? Dennis Bahler Usenet: ...cbosgd!uvacs!drb Dept. of Computer Science CSnet: drb@virginia Thornton Hall ARPA: drb.virginia@csnet-relay University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22903 ------------------------------ Date: Mon 7 Oct 85 17:27:03-PDT From: MOHAN@USC-ECLC.ARPA Subject: knowledge representation Hi, I am looking for a short list of introductory and survey type articles on Knowledge Representation. I am also looking for any work done on representing visual scenes so that a system could reason about them and answers queries etc. Minsky, M.:A Framework for Representing Knowledge, in Winston,P.H. (ed.) "The Psychology of Computer Vision" is a typical paper on the type of work I am interested. Since I have just started reading on this subject, I am presently interested in all related topics (except the CAD/CAM type of reasoning). What I am looking for is an introduction to this big field: papers which have presented the key ideas and some surveys which can give me an idea of the type of work being done in such areas. Thanks, Rakesh Mohan mohan@eclc.arpa [The October 1983 issue of IEEE Computer was a special issue on knowledge representation, as was the February 1980 issue of the SIGART Newsletter. Technical Report TR-1275 of the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science (issued May 1983) is the proceedings of an informal workshop on "Representation and Processing of Spatial Knowledge". There were also several papers on image-to-database matching in the April 9-11, 1985, SPIE Arlington, VA, conference on Applications of AI (SPIE volume 548). Vision researchers generally seem happy with networks of frames, although other representations are in use (e.g., connectionist coarse coding, logic clauses). I have sent a fairly extensive list of vision citations to Rakesh and to Vision-List@AIDS-UNIX. -- KIL ] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 7 Oct 85 12:02 EDT From: Carole D Hafner <HAFNER%northeastern.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA> Subject: Lisp for Macintosh There is a new magazine out called MacUser. The premier issue, which is available at newsstands, contains a review of ExperLisp for the Macintosh. The review says it's good but buggy. There is also a version of Xlisp by David Betz available through the public domain software networks. I got a copy from the Boston Computer Society, and when I tried to open it on my 128K Mac, the computer crashed (i.e., the screen went crazy and strange noises occurred). Perhaps Xlisp only runs on the 512K Mac, or else I got a bad version. Carole Hafner hafner@northeastern ------------------------------ Date: 8 Oct 85 12:22 EDT From: Dave.Touretzky@A.CS.CMU.EDU Subject: TIMM There's been some talk about AI hype in this digest, but not too many folks have stood up and pointed to actual examples. Cowan's inquiry about TIMM affords an excellent opportunity, so here goes. As far as I can tell, TIMM is the most colossal ripoff in the expert systems business. I got a demo last year at AAAI-84 from Dr. Wanda Rappaport, who I believe is one of the developers. Basically, TIMM works by comparing the facts of a situation with a set of stored templates, called training instances. The underlying data structure looks like a frame, i.e. it has named slots. Each training instance consists of a frame with some or all of the slots filled in. After you've given TIMM enough training examples, you tell it to "generalize", which causes it to do some computation on the training set to extract regularities and relationships between slot values. Then, to have TIMM solve a problem, you give it a frame with some of the slots filled in, and it fills in the rest of the slots. TIMM is a mere toy, in my opinion, because it doesn't provide adequate facilities for expressing knowledge either procedurally or declaratively. You can't write explicit IF/THEN rules, as in OPS5 or EMYCIN. You can't build data structures, i.e. it's not a real frame system with inheritance and demons and Lisp data objects that you create and pass around and do computation on. Nor can you write logical axioms and feed them to a general purpose inference engine, like Prolog's resolution algorithm. Many, perhaps most kinds of knowledge can not be conveniently expressed as training instances, but that's all you get with TIMM. At IJCAI-85 I watched a General Research sales person trying to sell TIMM to a couple of AI novices. She was repeating the usual set of General Research outlandish claims, viz. that TIMM is good for ANY expert system application you can think of, that it doesn't require any expertise in knowledge engineering to create "expert systems" with TIMM, that domain experts can sit down and create their own non-trivial systems without assistance, and so on. (See their ad on page 38 of the Fall '85 issue of AI Magazine: "Experts in virtually any field can build systems with TIMM, and do it without assistance from computer or AI specialsts.") I find General Research Corp.'s arrogance simply galling. How would they use TIMM to do VLSI circuit design, as TALIB does, to configure a Vax, like R1 does, or to generate and sift through a large set of plausible analyses of mass spectrogram data, as Dendral does? All of these tasks require significant amounts of computation, yet all TIMM can represent is training instances. Finally I asked the sales person how TIMM would represent the following simple piece of domain knowledge: "A certain disease has twenty manifestations. If a patient has at least four of these, we should conclude that he has the disease." This knowledge can be expressed by a single rule in OPS5, but can't be represented at all in TIMM. First the sales person was going to put in one training instance for every possible case, but C(20,4) is greater than 5000, so that's impractical. Finally she decided she'd write a Fortran program to ask the user if the patient had each of the 20 manifestations, sum up the "yes" answers, and return the conclusion to TIMM. (TIMM is written in Fortran and has the ability to call external Fortran routines.) The point she seemed to miss is that any nontrivial expert reasoner is going to need data structures and computations that can't be expressed as a small set of training instances. TIMM costs roughly $47K for the Vax version, and roughly $9K for the IBM PC version. General Research boasts that TIMM is in use in several Fortune 500 companies, but I haven't heard any claims about successful, up and running, NONTRIVIAL applications. Not surprising. -- Dave Touretzky PS: Due to the nature of the above comments, I feel compelled to include the usual disclaimer that the above opinions are solely my own, and may not reflect the official opinions of Carnegie-Mellon University or AAAI. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Oct 85 09:32:15 GMT From: gcj%qmc-ori.uucp@ucl-cs.arpa Subject: An Application of Expert Systems An application of expert systems that came to mind would be to auto-pilot systems for commercial aircraft. The recent crash at Manchester airport might not have been so serious if the reverse thrust had not been applied. It had been suggested that this resulted in a spray of aviation fuel over the fuselage of the aircraft. Whether this can be avoided in future by a change in design or if a real-time expert-system would have been any better than the pilot's decision, which of course was ``correct'', is a matter for the deeper examination. It seems to me that information about possible outcomes of such an action could be made available to the pilot. Gordon Joly gcj%qmc-ori@ucl-cs.arpa ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Oct 85 11:03:53 cdt From: ihnp4!gargoyle!toby@UCB-VAX.Berkeley.EDU (Toby Harness) Subject: Social Responsibility Re: AIList Digest V3 #132 Something I saved off usenet, about a year ago: It's sad that computers, which have so much potential, have so much of it invested in the purposes of the authorities. I wonder if some day we'll be looking back at what we did in the 1980's the way many atomic physicists ended up remembering the 1930's. Jim Aspnes (asp%mit-oz@mit-mc) Toby Harness Ogburn/Stouffer Center, University of Chicago ...ihnp4!gargoyle!toby ------------------------------ Date: 6 October 1985 2023-EDT From: Hans Berliner@A.CS.CMU.EDU Subject: Computer chess: hitech [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Hitech won its first tournament, and one with 4 masters in it. It scored 3 1/2 - 1/2 to tie for first in the Gateway Open held at the Pittsburgh Chess Club this week-end. However, on tie break we were awarded first place. En route to this triumph, Hitech beat two masters and tied with a third. It also despatched a lesser player in a brilliancy worthy of any collection of games. One of the games that it won from a master was an absolute beauty of positional and tactical skill. It just outplayed him from a to z. The other two games were nothing to write home about, but it managed to score the necessary points. I believe this is the first time a computer has won a tournament with more than one master in it. We will have a show and tell early this week. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 1 Oct 85 13:50:21-CDT From: ICS.DEKEN@R20.UTEXAS.EDU Subject: Information Science Program at NSF - Staffing Changes Beth Adelson has been appointed to the position of Associate Program Director, Information Science Program, effective August 15, 1985. Dr Adelson has been at Yale University since 1983, as a Research Associate in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Dr. Adelson has published numerous articles in the areas of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Recent works include papers on software design <<IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering>> and the acquisition of categories for problem solving <<Cognitive Science>>. Joseph Deken has been appointed to the position of Program Director, Information Science Program, effective September 3, 1985. Dr. Deken was most recently Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, with a joint appointment in the Department of Business and the Department of Computer Sciences, and taught from 1976 to 1980 at Princeton University. His Ph.D. in mathematical statistics is from Stanford University. Dr. Deken is the author of several books on computing, the most recent of which is <<Silico Sapiens: The Fundamentals and Future of Robotics>>, which will be Published by Bantam books in January 1986. His other writing includes <<Computer Images: State of the Art>> (Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1983), <<The Electronic Cottage>> (William Morrow, 1981), and numerous articles on statistics and statistical computing. Program announcements and other information about the Information Science and Technology programs at NSF are available from: Division of Information Science and Technology National Science Foundation 1800 G St. NW Washington, D.C. 20550 Correspondence may be addressed to the attention of Dr. Adelson or Dr. Deken as appropriate. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************