LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (05/08/85)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI> AIList Digest Wednesday, 8 May 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 61 Today's Topics: Machine Translation - Survey, Games & Learning - NIM References, Opinion - Research Literature, Seminar - Mechanized Hypothesis Formation (SMU), Description - CS at Linkopings University, Sweden ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 6 MAY 85 14:48-N From: PETITP%CGEUGE51.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA Subject: more on machine translation Here is a summary of the information I sent to Barbara Stafford concerning Machine Translation. (cf her request in AIList V3 #54 and my note in V3 # 50) To know what is beeing done on MT in Provo,Utah, contact Alan K. Melby at Brigham Young University. Mr Melby works in the field of user interface for MT and gave a paper at the ISSCO tutorial on MT: "Recipe for a translator's workstation". Here are ALPS and WEIDNER's address: Alps Systems 190 West 800 North Provo, Utah 84601 Tel: (801) 3750090 Another commercial system I didn't mentionned was developped in Germany: LOGOS (also quite primitive). Here is their address: LOGOS Computer Systems Deutschland Gmbh Lyoner Strasse 26 6000 Frankfurt am Main 71 Tel: (0611) 666 69 50 Telex 4 189808 And also in Germany, Siemens just entered the market with METAL (that I mentionned in AIList v3 #50). It was presented at the Hannover fair this april. In the ISSCO MT tutorial, the presentation by E.Ananiadou & S.Warwick ("An overview of post ALPAC developments") might interest you: In that paper there is a part on TITUS a french MT system for abstracts with a restricted syntax. This might be close to your work. Here is their address: Institut Textile de France 35 rue des Abondances F-92100 Boulogne-sur-Seine (France) Tel: 825.18.90 Telex: 250940 And some more reference to introductory readings in Machine Translation: Kilby K.J., Whitelock P.J. "Linguistic and computational techniques in Machine Translation system design. - Final report", December 83 CCL/UMIST report 84/2 with description of the systems SYSTRAN, TAUM METEO, TAUM AVIATION, GETA ARIANE-78, LRC METAL, Wilks' PS. Centre for Computational Linguistics University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology PO BOX 88 Manchester, England (Pete Whitelock's network address is pjw%minim%umpa@UCL-CS.ARPA) Veronica Lawson (Editor) Practical Experience of Machine Translation North Holland, 1982 (Papers from a conference given by the ASLIB) ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 5 May 85 13:53:17 edt From: gross@dcn9.arpa (Phill Gross) Subject: NIM references With a partner, I developed a learning Nim game as part of a project for a AI course at George Washington University. It was implemented as a Collective Learning Automaton, a concept advanced by the instructor, Peter Bock. The CLA concept is rather simple. It only works for small state-space games where the current state representation contains all information necessary to make the next move. It also works best with games like Nim that have a perfect playing strategy. The automaton knows the rules and begins by guessing moves. An independent process watches the action and rewards or punishes the automaton based on the result. In the next game, the automaton chooses moves based on what it 'learned' from its previous experiences. After a series of games, it homes in on the correct strategy. We matched our automaton against 4 levels of opponents- an expert, another learner, a dummy (made legal but totally random moves) and a 'novice' (smart enough not to make random moves but hasn't really gotten the hang of it yet). Our interest was learning speed under various reward/punishment regimes. Despite the simplicity of the CLA model, some interesting, 'intuitively obvious' anthropomorhisms were 'verified'. For example, it always learned quickly and perfectly against an expert. Against the dummy, it exhibited very confused behavior, characterized by slow, imperfect learning, since it may be alternately rewarded and punished for the same move. (The moral, I suppose, is if you want to learn a game, don't play against schlubs). It seemed that heavier punishment was more important when playing against the novice or the dummy. (ie, if a move loses against a dummy, it must really be bad), whereas light punishment/heavier reward produced better results against the expert (don't crucify the kid if he loses when he's clearly out of his league). Interestingly enough, learning was slowed against the expert without at least a small amount of punishment (constructive criticism?). AI is by no means my main interest but I feel compelled to open myself to flames by adding a couple comments. The two AI courses I took (the other at Penn State) were (charitably) the weakest courses I had in grad school. While any good curriculum should include courses on topics like compilers and operating systems, perhaps the state of AI today is such that it should not be casually included just to broaden the course offerings. It seems that the AI frontier is pushing forward on two fronts- a rather esoteric 'high end' exploring things like vision, natural language understanding and cognitive processes; and a more down-to-earth 'low end' dealing with knowledge based systems and heuristic programming. While the former mixes a number of disciplines outside computer science and is best pursued as thesis topics, I feel the latter could be taught to a bright class of sophomores or juniors. A manager of KBES projects noted to me that his experience showed that if you give some expensive tools to a smart programmer, send her to a two week course given by one of the vendors and then let'm hack for a while, you've got yourself a 'knowledge engineer'. If only results in true AI could be achieved as readily. All of this is a major digression from my original intent, which was to add a few references to the Nim list. * 'Basic Computer Games', David Ahl, Workman Publishing Co., 1978. * 'Games of the World', Frederick Gruenfeld, Ballentine Books, 1975. * 'The World Book of Math Power', (Adjunct to the good old World Book Encyclopedia), Vol 2, "NIM", pp 667-671, 1983. Anyone interested in CLA's should contact Peter Bock at GWU, since I can't recall him giving references for his articles. Regretfully (and somewhat gratefully, since I really don't feel that we did much to push forward the AI frontiers), neither the code nor our final report is available online, nor do I have the time and resources to make it available by mail. Phill Gross [Phil's approach sounds like the "learning machine" discussed in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column in March 1962. I remember inferring that something was wrong with my own NIM strategy after noticing that 1) my machine quickly learned to beat me whenever I started, and 2) it usually also beat me when it started. That column got me interested in learning algorithms and, eventually, AI. I still have the paper machine I constructed, along with the card-and-hole "logic machine" from the December 1960 column. The NIM reference I gave earlier should have been W. Rouse Ball, not Bell. I think I have his 13th edition packed away somewhere. It also has interesting discussions of mathematical card tricks, string figures, and the Cambridge educational system -- much of which was omitted from later editions. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Tue 7 May 85 18:25:31-EDT From: SRIDHARAN@BBNG.ARPA Subject: Research Literature I read an article in New Scientist (18 April 85) that ... ".. there are 2750 different mathematics research journals. If you conservatively estimate the annual contents of each to be, on average, 700 pages, this means that each year some 1 650 000 pages of mathematical research are published. One estimate puts the number of profesional mathematicians in the world at 100 000." Compared to this AI has I would guess has less than 2 dozen journals now and about 1000 researchers (over-estimate). In my mind, this discipline, concerned with knowledge and reasoning, is just as fundamental as mathematics - and I should like AI to be eventually (in the next century) to be just as large. One consequence of growth should be understood. When someone writes a paper, others may not actually read it, especially not right away. I think the time lapse between the appearance of a paper and its wide appeal may grow QUADRATICALLY with the volume of publications. I know that I now take about 2 years to catch up with papers of interest to me. A decade ago, I used to finish reading relevant papers in about 6 months. For example, six months after the '73 and '75 IJCAIs, I had managed to read or scan relevant papers from those proceedings. Now, I am behind even with AAAI-83 and -84. All this says, we need to cultivate patience as the discipline grows! The process of knowledge diffusion will take longer. Our respective distractions engendered by commercial/business hoop-la, only aggravates this. To do anything state-of-the-art, and to push the frontiers will take more effort as time goes on. People who write papers, now have an increased responsibility to do more thorough checks of existing literature. Given that we have the use of very advanced computational tools, we ought to be able to do this more thoroughly than most other disciplines. ------------------------------ Date: 7 May 1985 19:50-EST From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa Subject: Seminar - Mechanized Hypothesis Formation (SMU) Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern Methodist University TOPIC: Progress in Automated Research SPEAKER: Dr. Fred N. Springsteel, Visitng Professor University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri WHERE, WHEN INFO: Thursday May 9, 1985 1:30-2:30 PM Thursday May 9, 1985 315 SIC, Southern Methodist University Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is a lesser-known field that outgrew the bounds of statistics. Originated by J. W. Tukey in 1962, EDA works toward an open-ended meta-goal: to discover "all interesting" (nontrivial, normal form, valid) hypotheses about a domain that is represented by a large scientific sample of data, e. g. a suburban census matrix. One very active brand of EDA is being purused by a 20-year-old Czech research circle that I visited in 1976. Their EDA is called Mechanized Hypothesis Formation (MHF); it can heuristically generate-and-test many types of logical/statistical forms. MHF algorithmic decision problems have been shown, by me, to have complexities that swift shiftly from P-time to NP-hard (TCS '79 IJMMS '81). Users of such complex, multilevel software packages need expert advice! Lately, consulting system technics have been applied to make a Test Advisor for users, based on their special needs; it recommends which statistic (of many) to run and how to parametrize the load module. A much larger project (GUHA-80) is planned, which hopes to apply the results of AUTOMATED EDA to the big bottleneck in building expert systems: KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION. ------------------------------ Date: 3 May 1985 2115 From: mcvax!enea!liuida!jbl@seismo.ARPA Subject: Description - CS at Linkopings University, Sweden [Edited by Laws@SRI-AI.] The Department of Computer and Information Science at Linkopings University in Sweden announces the availability of postdoctoral research and sabbatical leave positions. The department provides a wide range of research and educational activities as indicated in the areas of faculty specialization. The university is located in the town of Linkoping, approximately 200 kilometers south of Stockholm. Linkoping has a population of 120000 and is in the heart of the rapidly expanding Ostergotland high technology industrial area. Linkopings University employes approximately 1600 people and has faculties of engineering, science, liberal arts, medicine and education. The department of Computer and Information Science has approximately 80 employees (faculty, staff and graduate students) of whom 15 have attained the doctoral degree. [...] Faculty members (for academic year 1984-1985) Par Emanuelson, functional languages, program verification, program analysis and program manipulation, programming environments, software engineering. Peter Fritzson (on leave to SUN MicroSystems during 1985), tool generation, incremental tools, programming environments. Anders Haraldsson, programming languages and systems, programming methodology, program manipulation. Roland Hjerppe, library science and systems, citation analysis and bibliometrics, fact representation and information retrieval, hypertext, human-computer interaction and personal computing. Sture Hagglund, database technology, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence applications. Harold W. Lawson, Jr. (Professor of Telecommunications and Computer Systems), computer architecture, VLSI, computer-aided design, methodology of computer-related education and training. Bengt Lennartsson, programming environments, real-time applications, distributed systems. Andrzej Lingas, complexity theory, analysis of algorithms, geometric complexity, graph algorithms, logic programming, VLSI theory. Bryan Lyles (guest researcher), computer architecture, VLSI, user interfaces, distributed systems. Jan Maluszynski, logic programming, software specification methods. Erik Sandewall (Professor of Computer Science), representation of knowledge with logic, theory of information management systems, office information systems, autonomous expert systems. Bo Sundgren, database design, conceptual modelling, statistical information systems. Erik Tengvald, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, planning and problem solving, expert systems. Associated Faculty Members Jan-Olaf Bruer (Dept of Electrical Engineering), office automation systems, especially security issues. Ingemar Ingemarsson (Professor of Information Theory), information theory, security and data encryption, error correction codes and data compression. Ove Wigertz (Professor of Medical Informatics), medical information systems, expert systems. During the next academic year (85/86) additional Ph.D. faculty will be joining the department in the areas of computational complexity, computational linguistics, software engineering and computer systems. Department and University Computing Resources The department has as research computers a DEC 2060, a DEC VAX11/780, several SUNs, six Xerox 1108 InterLisp machines, and numerous smaller machines such as PDP-11s and micro-VAXs. Department plans include significant near-term expansion of research computing. Undergraduate computing systems include two DEC 2065s, a DEC 2020, a DEC PDP 11/70 and PDP 11/73 running Unix, a large number of Apple Macintoshes and a variety of small machines such as PDP 11s used for operating system labs. As is the case with research computing, major expansions of undergraduate computing capacity are planned in the near future. Since the total number of undergraduates enrolled in computer related lines of study is less than at some large U.S. universities, each student gets significant computer time. Linkoping is part of the UUCP and SUNET networks. The campus is wired with Ethernet and all major machines are connected via TCP/IP, DECNET or XNS protocols. For further information about Linkoping University and the Department of Computer and Information Science contact: Graduate Division c/o Mrs. Lillemor Wallgren Department of Computer and Information Science Linkopings University S-581 83 Linkoping SWEDEN Telephone (+46) 13-281480 Telex: 50067 LINBIBL S UUCP: {decvax, seismo}!mcvax!enea!liuida!lew ARPA: LEW%LIUIDA.UUCP@SEISMO.ARPA ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************