LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (07/07/85)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI>
AIList Digest Sunday, 7 Jul 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 88
Today's Topics:
Queries - Generators in Lisp & Expert Systems for Configuration &
Natural Language Processing Software,
Robotics - Spatial Reasoning,
Games - Learning in Chess Programs,
Publications - New IEEE AI Journal,
Review - AI Report Vol 2 No 5 & AI Report Vol 2 No 7
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Date: 3 Jul 1985 14:17-EDT
From: Conal.Elliott@CMU-CS-CAD.ARPA
Subject: Generators in Lisp query
I'd like to implement a simple generator-language (i.e. functions with
backtracking and able to return more than once) on top of Common Lisp. It
doesn't need to be anything fancy, as it will be for my own use. I would
appreciate any hints or pointers.
Conal Elliott
conal@cmu-cs-cad.arpa
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Date: Tue 2 Jul 85 22:29:55-PDT
From: Marty Tenenbaum <Tenenbaum@SRI-KL>
Subject: Expert Systems for Configuration
Does anyone know where I might acquire an expert system for solving
configuration problems (ala R1/XCON) on a PC. I am interested in such
a system, more as a tutorial aid than as a serious application.
Jay M. Tenenbaum, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research.
Please respond to Tenenbaum@SRI-KL, or call me at 415-496-4699.
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Date: Wed, 3 Jul 85 12:24:15 cdt
From: Mark Turner <mark%gargoyle.uchicago.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: natural language processing
TIRA at U Chicago is looking for a robust Natural Language
Processing system - actual code - it can obtain and install
on a 4.2BSD Unix system.
To elaborate: Many faculty members from Departments of
Library Science, English, Linguistics, Classics, Romance
Languages, etc. at U Chicago who currently work in searching and
processing natural language text data bases have now formed the
Textual Information Retrieval and Analysis (TIRA) research
center. The Department of Computer Science at U Chicago is
only a few years old, and although I understand that it would
be interested in hiring an Assistant Professor in AI/NLP,
it has not yet done so. Consequently, we lack a faculty
member who might focus his energies on installing and tuning
a Natural Language Processing System. Several of us are familiar
with NLP, though, and we have some programmers on staff.
So I am beginning to wonder how we might obtain, for academic
research purposes, the code and documentation for someone
else's NLP system, and install it here with relative ease,
to help us with semantic, grammatical, thematic, and morphological
parsing, in various Indo-European languages, principally
English, French, Greek, Latin, Italian, German, and Spanish.
I would appreciate your responses.
Mark Turner
Department of English
U Chicago 60637
>ihnp4!gargoyle!puck!mark
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Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1985 14:14 EDT
From: Juliana Kraft <ROBOT.JULIE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA>
Subject: Spatial Reasoning Query
From: " CUGINI, JOHN" <cugini at nbs-vms>
Can anyone suggest a good survey article or textbook that covers
AI for spatial reasoning, especially for 3-D? I have in mind
things like, "will this refrigerator fit thru that door", etc.
Thanks for any help.
For 3D you must consider 6 degrees of freedom (3 translational and 3
rotational). I recommend "Motion Planning with Six Degrees of
Freedom," by Bruce Donald, (261 pp), MIT AI-TR 791, available from
Publications Office
MIT AI Laboratory
Room NE43-818
545 Tech Square
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 253-6773.
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Date: Wed, 3 Jul 85 17:08 pst
From: "furth john%d.mfenet"@LLL-MFE.ARPA
Subject: The Best Chess Program
I would like to add something to Richard Jennings' words on the
responsibility of the author of a chess program for its performance.
The most rigid chess program will play chess only as its author
would at his/her best. The program that learns has the possibility of
doing better. Suppose the author wrote his/her program without any
instructions for playing chess but only for learning how to play
chess. Then the program could learn and execute maneuvers that
the author was unaware of. Now this program learns only as
its author learns at his/her best. We may continue this iterative
procedure to some arbitrary degree and declare the author's taint
to be negligible. In the process, however, we will probably have
accumulated some large overhead. The time spent passing information
up and down this ladder of learners and the storage required at each
rung of the ladder will make the program unusable.
To attain an independent and useful intelligence, the learner
must be able to discard signifigant portions of the means by which
it has arrived at its present level of ability. The original hub
of its actions must fall away and a new one be generated.
So the adult forgets the involvements of childhood and the state
the cares of its early days. With whatever vestiges remain, the
organism must take on a whole new orientation to meet new
needs with a closer approach to the optimum. It is better to
forget the past than to live there. The best chess program
will forget most everything its author ever told it to do.
John Furth
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Date: Sun 7 Jul 1985 11:11-PDT
From: Laws@SRI-AI
Subject: New IEEE AI Journal
From IEEE Computer, July 1985, p. 101:
IEEE Expert is the newest addition to the Computer Society's list
of publications, which already includes five magazines. The Computer
Society Board of Governors gave its approval to the new quarterly at
its May 10 meeting ...
David Pessel of Standard Oil of Ohio will serve as acting editor-in-
chief and will have the responsibility of preparing for the initial
publication in the first quarter of 1986. The magazine is expected
to treat such AI areas as knowledge engineering, natural language
processing, expert systems, and conceptual modeling. ...
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Date: 4 Jul 1985 10:46-EST
From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
Subject: AI Report Vol 2 No 5 Summary
Report on Stanford University AI efforts including Knowledge Systems
Laboratory (VLSI design, MOLGEN, interpretation of nuclear magnetic
resonance data on proteins, computer-aided teaching of diagnostic
reasoning, ONCOCIN for administration of medical treatment protocols,
lymph node pathology diagnosis system, robotic manufacturing strategy
development, financial resource planning). Basic AI research includes
non-monotonic reasoning, robotics, mechanical construction of computer
programs, design, description and interaction with computer systems,
database retrieval research. RADIX [formerly RX] is a project which will
use computer programs to examine over 50,000 patient years of accumulated
medical data.
Report on ESPRIT and ALVEY, AI efforts of the European Economic
Community and England respectively:
The following are a list of some books mentioned in the report:
Artificial Intelligence Applications for Manufacturing
Artificial Intellgience Applications for Business Management
The 1985 Handbook of Manufacturing Software (all three by SEAI Techical
Publications)
Machine Vision -- A Summary and Forecast (Tech Tran Corporation)
A Practical Guide to Designing Expert Systems by S. Weiss and C.
Culikowski
William Gevarter: Artificial Intelligence, Expert System, Computer
Vision and Natural Language Processing
William Gevarter: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Five Overviews
Mitsubishi Research Institute has inititated a multi-client AI research
project
Report of work done by the Knowledge Information Research Institute of
Computer Services Corporation of Japan
Report on AI at Ohio State: medical systems which infer data from broad
data descriptions and concepts including a red cell antibody
identification system, a system for diagnosing fuel problems in
autombile engines, an air cylinder design system.
Report on Imperial Chemical Industries which has developed an expert
systems shell called Savoir, an agricultural advisor system.
Infologics of Stockholm has announced a PROLOG for IBM-PC costing
295 dollars.
Automata Design Associates has five versions of PROLOG available
for IBM-PC (public domain, educational $29.95, FS Prolog, $49.95,
Virtual memory prolog $99.95 and Large virtual model prolog $300).
TOPSI is selling an OPS-5 for CP/M and MS-DOS for $400.00.
The Automated Reasoning Corporation is selling a fault-diagnosis system.
Odetics (the maker of six legged robots) has announced the
development of an AI center.
Expert Technologies has been developed to sell AI technology to
printers and publishers.
Report on new shareholders of NCC.
Lynn Conway has left Darpa to join University of Michigan
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Date: 4 Jul 1985 10:18-EST
From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
Subject: The AI Report Vol 2 No 7 Summary
The Artificial Intelligence Report July 1985 Volume 2 No 7
Nippon Telephone and Telegraph
Report on Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, the Japanese AT&T, (NTT)
includes general description of company and its computer related R&D
efforts. In AI, they are working on a Japanese-English translation
effort, medical expert systems, systems to recognize handwritten
Japanese and Chinese characters, robotics, speech recognition and
speech synthesis. They have also developed a Lisp machine using the
language Tao, which is a blending of LISP, PROLOG and Smalltalk. It
40 to 50 times faster than ZetaLisp interpreter, 3 times faster than
Smalltalk-80 on the Xerox Dolphin and five times faster than the
DEC-10 Prolog interpreter.
Also Computer Services Corporation (CSK) is completing work on a LISP
machine prototype which will run Prolog, LISP, UNIX and process
Japanese natural language input.
The AI profits
discusses interest by new and old companies in AI. based at a Gartner
group forum. Reports on Lisp machine vendors, Texas Instruments,
Symbolics, Xerox, Lisp Machine Inc (LMI). Symbolics revenues are
expected to top 85 million dollars this year and LMI revenues will top
25 million dollars. They predict that Xerox will introduce a 10,000
dollar low-end AI machine. The Gartner's group of Lisp machine sales in
1990 is over one billion dollars.
Also discusses expert systems. They feel that natural language
understanding will not be as big a seller as expert system tools.
IBM has over 300 researchers pursueing AI objectives.
Reports on new DEC microvax products, management changes at Lisp
Machine Inc, announcement by Radian Corproation of a IBM PC expert
system shell, an apple Macintosh OPS5 interpreter, R&D expenditures
for various companies, a prediction that a billion transistors will
be packed on a single chip.
The Institut fur Entscheidungstheorie und Unternehmesforschung at der
Universitat Karlsruhe in Germany is conducting an international survey
on Expert Systems in business.
They review the following:
The Fourth Technical Conference of the British Computer Society
Speicalist Group on Expert Systems which has been published as
"Research and Development in Expert Systems"
V. Daniel Hunt's "Smart Robots: A Handbook of Intelligent Robotic
Systems"
Eugene Charniak and Drew McDermott's "Introduction to Artificial
Intelligence"
Also report on the Army AI Center which is doing research on systems to
field new equipment to the army.
The following is a list of some government documents on AI that I found
in this report:
An Overview of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, NASA-TM-85836
An Overview of Computer Vision PB83-217554, An Overview of
Computer-Based Natural Language Processing PB83-200832, Overview of
Expert Systems PB83-217562 and Flexible Manufacturing System Handbook
ADA-127927.
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End of AIList Digest
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