LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (03/15/85)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI.ARPA> AIList Digest Friday, 15 Mar 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 34 Today's Topics: AI Sites - Universities, Linguistics - Hangul, Literature - The Journal for the Integrated Study of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science and Applied Epistemology, Policy - Humor, Humor - AI Joke Contest & Eliza & Political/Mathematical Humor & ))) & Greedy Algorithms, Course - Nonexistent Objects and Fiction (CSLI) Seminars - Knowledge-Based Software Development at Kestrel (SU) & Computational Geometry, Rewrite Rules, etc. (PARC) & Shape from Function (MIT) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thursday, 14 Mar 85 12:55:07 EST From: jaffe (elliot jaffe) @ cmu-psy-a Subject: Universities and AI About 4 months ago on AILIST I remember a discussion about which universities were doing AI work and a general listing was given. 1) Can I get a copy of that set of lists? 2) Does anybody have any new information to enter? Elliot Jaffe Jaffe@CMU-PSY-A.ARPA [I'll send Elliot a copy of the list of sites receiving AIList. See also the November 1983 issue of IEEE Spectrum; it misses some sites -- SRI, for example -- but the chart of academic and nonacademic sites on pp. 59-68 is impressive. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: 14 Mar 85 08:14 PST From: Kay.pa@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Hangul The word "Hangul" (not "Hungal") may refer to a dialect, but that is not its main use. It is the name of the wonderfully ingenious writing system that Korean has, named after the emperor who invented it. The system is interpretable both phonemically and syllabically and is a gem of design. There are the same number of good automated translation systems for this as for every other natural language, namely none. --Martin Kay. [The last IEEE Computer featured oriental text entry systems; I remember seeing Korean discussed, so perhaps there are some appropriate references. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 13 Mar 85 08:31:31 pst From: Vaughan Pratt <pratt@Navajo> Subject: A place for everything [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] I just received volume 1, number 1 of The Journal for the Integrated Study of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science and Applied Epistemology. It is described as "a quarterly journal published by Communication and Cognition-AI at the State University of Ghent, Blandijnberg 2, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium." I imagine they will soon tire of allusions to Browning's "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," if they haven't already. -v ------------------------------ Date: 14 Mar 85 15:30:43 EST From: Tim <WEINRICH@RUTGERS.ARPA> Subject: Policy on Humor [...The policy of this list is to avoid "ethnic" humor or any form of wit at the expense of individuals or sensitive groups. There may have been a few lapses, but I'll try to enforce the policy strictly in the future. -- KIL] Unfortunately, if you really intend to stick strictly to this policy, I'm afraid you will end up posting no humor at all, as it seems there are very few statements and even fewer jokes which no group finds offensive. Do you realize that, according to this policy, you cannot publish any of the various humorous versions of Little Red Riding Hood? I mourn the demise of humor on AIList. Twinerik ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 13 Mar 85 16:31:33 pst From: newton@cit-vax (Mike Newton) Subject: rape and humor Though rape is a barbaric act, censorship is a far worse crime for it affects so many more. Do the people who object so much about the "polly nomial" story complain so loudly w.r.t. jokes about murder, or, worse, war? There is a fundamental difference between an act and writing about an act. If jokes about a subject are banned, how long is it before satire about the same subject is banned? Then there is only a small step fiction is banned. Next comes fact, research... mike ps: I realize that the above is a viewpoint some will find objectionable. Arguments about my first sentence had better be convincing: Though due to my sex it would be hard to rape me, I have been shot, mugged and robbed -- one of these incidents still bothers me noticeably -- yet I do NOT think that jokes about these subjects should be censored. ------------------------------ Date: Thu 14 Mar 85 11:11:57-PST From: Wilkins <WILKINS@SRI-AI.ARPA> Subject: in defense of humor I am all for decent people expressing opinions and running the government, but being oversensitive can take the fun out of life. Any reasonable definition of rape should include the fact that the raper and rapee are human or at least members of the animal kingdom. I find it hard to be offended when polynomials are raped, however. We all know mathematical/computer language is colorful, but using a verb that would be in poor taste when applied to humans does not mean its in poor taste when applied to abstract data structures. For example, killing a line in your editor is not considered murder. While the story in question did say Polly Nomial was a "paragon of womanly virtue", it never said she was a woman or was human, so one can easily assume she is a polynomial. The story implies that Curly Pi is a "common fraction" which is consistent with these characters being abstract mathematical being. This story was good humor, though admittedly non-mathematicians might not appreciate it and transfer it into a human domain and be offended. I personally enjoyed getting the chance to read it. Striking a blow for more humor and fun in life, David ------------------------------ Date: Tue 12 Mar 85 13:26:45-EST From: Bob Hall <RJH%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA> Subject: AI Jokes RESULTS [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Q. "What do you get when you cross an expert system with an orangutan?" A. "Another Harry Reasoner." Yes folks, that's it, the winner of the first annual AI Jokes Contest. The winner has been awarded his lovely blue and gold Cal T-shirt. We got many entries (single digits, though), which were much appreciated. Highlights follow. The names have been withheld just in case the authors are sensitive about being associated with their entries. (Anyone who wants explicit credit should send me mail.) Consensus honorable mentions: Q. "What did the Apple 5e say when a human fell on it?" A. "Ureka! (sic) I've discovered gravity!" Q. "How many expert systems does it take to screw in a light bulb?" A. "If they're so smart, why don't they know?" ******************************************************************* Now that you've got a feel for the competition, ANNOUNCING AI JOKES II: THE WRATH OF CONS Send your entry for the next, bigger, better AI Jokes Contest to either me (rjh%mit-oz@mit-mc) or US mail directly to AI JOKES II: THE WRATH OF CONS 1717 Allston Way Berkeley, CA 94703 Terms are the same: if yours is the funniest, as judged by an impartial panel of natural intelligences, you win your choice of a T-shirt from one of the following schools: U.C. Berkeley Cal State, Hayward Chabot College, Hayward MIT Harvard Leland Stanford Junior College Doug Flutie's alma mater Enter Now!! (Include shirt size and school preference) ******************************************************************* ------------------------------ Date: 14 March 1985 0512-EST From: Jeff Shrager@CMU-CS-A Subject: Security the MIT way [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] If you have access to MIT-OZ, try sending a message to their operator from a not-logged-in task. In order to handle dial-in randoms who tend to do operator sends (and used to get no reply) they've now piped the operator's message buffer through an Eliza system, which proceeds to "analyze" the luser's problems. Hack Hack. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 6 Mar 85 08:57:18-PST From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA> Subject: Political/Mathematical Humor From a WORKS message by Greg Kuperberg (harvard!talcott!gjk or talcott!gjk@topaz): "2*x^5-10*x+5=0 is not solvable by radicals." -Evariste Galois. ------------------------------ Date: Sun 24 Feb 85 14:13:34-PST From: Steven Tepper <greep@SU-CSLI.ARPA> Subject: Found: right parens [Forwarded from the Stanford AI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] I found a sequence of right parentheses lying around on the Ethernet. They look like they might have fallen off the end of somebody's Lisp program. If you lost some and think these might be yours, send me a message identifying them. Also, has anyone seen a matched pair of asterisks in Gacha 10? I can get new ones, but this particular pair had sentimental value. ------------------------------ Date: Sun 24 Feb 85 15:31:58-PST From: Gustavo Fernandez <FERNANDEZ@SU-SCORE.ARPA> Subject: RE: Found: right parens [Forwarded from the Stanford AI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Sorry, I have not seen your asterisks, but please! Does anyone know where the daily bit buckets are stored? I lost some data Thusday night by doing one too many left shift on a program I was writing on SCORE and I was wondering whether I might be in some way able to recover the bit strings. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Gus Fernandez FERNANDEZ@SCORE ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 Mar 85 17:57:17 est From: Walter Hamscher <hamscher at mit-htvax> Subject: Graduate Student Lunch *SEMINAR* [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] Place: *THIRD FLOOR THEORY PLAYROOM* Date: Friday, March 8 Time: 12 Noon Hosts: Isaac Kohane and Mike Wellman COMPUTER AIDED CONCEPTUAL ART REVOLTING SEMINAR SERIES presents GREEDY ALGORITHMS FOR REALLY HARD PROBLEMS Mike Generous Penny Weise Dahlia Fulisch Perhaps the best known greedy algorithm is Kruskal's Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm. The concept of "greedy algorithm" is here generalized to provide a framework in which any problem can be solved with bounded error in constant time. The simplest such algorithm is a stupefyingly straightforward algorithm for finding the maximum of a list of numbers: take the maximum of the first two elements of the list. The bounded error arises from the provability of the correctness criterion "We could have done worse!". The Satisfiability problem for the predicate calculus is solved trivially, because we have shown conclusively elsewhere that we are Satisfied with predicate calculus. The framework applies also to meta-problem solving (i.e. "What problem should we sic the greedy algorithm on next"), as we will demonstrate by applying it to the problem of generating grant proposals. If there is time, we will give other examples involving Single-State Automata (Moronotrons) and Extremist Graph Theory. ------------------------------ Date: Thu 14 Mar 85 16:42:26-PST From: Emma Pease <Emma@SU-CSLI.ARPA> Subject: Course - Nonexistent Objects and Fiction (CSLI) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT Graduate Seminar - Philosophy ``Nonexistent Objects and the Semantics of Fiction'' Edward N. Zalta, CSLI The problem of how it is we can think about and tell stories about what does not exist is one of the foremost problems in the study of intentionality. We'll begin by asking what an analysis of fiction, and stories in general, ought to do, and then quickly review the problems facing the semantic analysis of sentences about nonexistent objects developed by Meinong, Russell, Quine, and the free logicians. We then turn to a careful presentation of both Terence Parsons' neo-Meinongian views (developed in his book: Nonexistent Objects) and my own, which has a Meinongian flavor. There will be a comparison of how the language and logic of these theories represent the meaning of English sentences about nonexistents. Then we shall ask whether these theories provide a better representation, and do a better job of analyzing fiction in general, than some current alternatives, some of which do without nonexistents (Plantinga, Searle, Fine, Lewis) and some of which appeal to some sort of abstract objects (Kripke, van Inwagen, Wolterstorff). We'll conclude the course with a brief examination of how these axiomatized theories fit into a larger picture of the semantics of language and intensionality. The first meeting of this seminar will be held in the Venture Hall trailers conference room, Tuesday April 2, at 1:15. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 11 Mar 85 17:04:08-PST From: Paula Edmisten <Edmisten@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA> Subject: Seminar - Knowledge-Based Software Development at Kestrel (SU) [Forwarded from the Stanford SIGLUNCH distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.] DATE: Friday, March 15, 1985 LOCATION: Chemistry Gazebo, between Physical and Organic Chemistry TIME: 12:05 SPEAKER: Douglas R. Smith, Kestrel Institute, Palo Alto, CA. ABSTRACT: KNOWLEDGE-BASED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AT KESTREL INSTITUTE Kestrel Institute is a non-profit organization with a two-fold purpose: Research and graduate education in computer science. Its main research goal is the formalization and incremental automation of software development. Towards this goal, we carry out research in such areas as machine intelligence, very-high-level languages, algorithm design, transformation and synthesis, software project management, and knowledge-base programming environments. I'll present an overview of current and planned research at Kestrel Institute and describe our experience with the DSE system, a knowledge-base programming environment in routine use. The bulk of the talk will examine two research themes at Kestrel: Knowledge compilation and, The use of schemes in program synthesis. Knowledge compilation involves transforming declarative knowledge plus directions for its useage into efficient procedural form. The uses of program schemes and strategies for instantiating them include knowledge compilation and the design of algorithms from specifications. Paula ------------------------------ Date: 12 Mar 85 15:53:13 PST From: yao.pa@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Seminars - Computational Geometry, Rewrite Rules, Etc. (PARC) [Excerpted from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The next BATS [Bay Area Theory Seminar] will take place on Friday, March 15 at Xerox PARC (in the auditorium). [...] -- Frances SCHEDULE 10 a.m. Ronald Graham (AT&T Bell Lab): Remarks on The Finite Radon Transform 11 a.m. Frances Yao (Xerox PARC): A General Approach to d-Dimensional Geometric Queries 1 p.m. Andrew Yao (Stanford): Separating the Polynomial-Time Hierarchy by Oracles 2 p.m. Joe Halpern (IBM): What Does It Mean for Rewrite Rules to be "Correct"? 3 p.m. Andrei Broder (DEC): Vote Early and Vote Often; The Distributed Lottery Problem [...] A General Approach to d-Dimensional Geometric Queries Frances Yao Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ABSTRACT Research results in the area of computational geometry have been largely limited to problems concerning simple relations between objects in the plane. In this talk, we shall define what we call a "generic query" in d-space, and present a uniform solution to it. As examples of application, the nearest-neighbor query in d-space can be solved in linear space and sublinear time; the pairwise intersection problem for polytopes and the construction of minimum spanning trees in d-space can be solved in linear space and subquadratic time. What does it mean for rewrite rules to be "correct"? Joe Halpern IBM San Jose Research Center ABSTRACT We consider an operational definition for FP via rewrite rules. What would it mean for such a definition to be correct? We certainly want the rewrite rules to capture correctly our intuitions regarding the meaning of the primitive functions. We also want there to be enough rewrite rules to compute the correct meaning of all expressions, but not too many, thus making equivalent two expressions that should be different. And what does it mean for there to be "enough" rules? We give a formal criterion for deciding whether there are enough rewrite rules and show that our rewrite rules meet that criterion. We develop powerful techniques to prove these results, that involve imposing a notion of types on the untyped language FP, and then using techniques of typed lambda-calculus theory. (Note: This talk is completely self-contained. No previous knowledge of FP or lambda calcuclus will be assumed.) ------------------------------ Date: 12 Mar 1985 22:11 EST (Tue) From: "Daniel S. Weld" <WELD%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA> Subject: Seminar - Shape from Function (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.] AI Revolving Seminar Tues 3/19/85 4:00pm 8th floor playroom SHAPE FROM FUNCTION VIA MOTION ANALYSIS with Application to the Automatic Design of Orienting Devices for Vibratory Part Feeders TOMAS LOZANO-PEREZ This talk explores the premise that a device's function can be characterized by how it interacts with other objects. I focus on devices for which some aspect of their function can be characterized in terms of constraints they place on the motions of objects. Commonplace examples of this class of device abound; any office is full of them: chairs, cups, rulers, telephones, cabinets, bookends, etc. In fact, the shape of most objects is constrained by the legal motions of that object and of objects it must interact with. I suggest a representation for the function of this class of objects in terms of motion contraints. These possible--motion constraints are expressed as an abstract diagram. Combinations of these diagrams serve both in describing a device's function and in designing devices with specified behavior. The design problem for these devices is a kind of inverse of the motion planning problem in robotics. In both cases we know the shape of the moving part. In motion planning, we are given the obstacles and we must find a legal path between the specified origin and destination. In our view of design, however, we are given the desired motion (actually a range of possible motions) and are asked to find a legal shape of the obstacle, that is, the device. We illustrate our approach to design with a detailed case study of mechanical part feeders, a class of real devices with an interesting and direct relationship between shape and function. ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************