LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (02/19/85)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI.ARPA>
AIList Digest Sunday, 17 Feb 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 22
Today's Topics:
AI Tools - Lisp Workstation & Expert System Development Tools &
XLISP 1.4 Source,
Humor - Origin of "Impure Mathematics",
Linguistics - Y'all and Youse,
Seminars - Parallel Natural Language Processing (BBN) &
Modeling Intuition in Problem Solving (UCB) &
Partially Compiled Prolog Interpreters (CSLI) &
Learning in Modal Logic (CMU) &
Beyond Bacon (CMU)
Conference - Decision Support Systems
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri 15 Feb 85 13:58:45-PST
From: Rene Bach <BACH@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
Subject: Lisp workstation, request for info
We are looking into buying a CHEAP computer to run LISP in a reasonably
friendly environment. The constraints are that the machine should be
accessible remotely (through modems) and support networking.
We would also like the machine to support more than one user (but
certainly less than five). It should run a LISP close to Franz, Zeta
or Common Lisp (with hooks for remote file access !), EMACS should
be available for it.
We are looking into micro-vax and tektronix (I still have to check
on some of the constraints satisfaction of those). Price
range <~ 20,000 $.
We are aware of the NIL+micro-vax combination.
Is there anything else worth knowing about ???
Thank you for any suggestion
Reply to BACH@score.
Rene
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 85 18:27:56 est
From: gross@dcn9.arpa (Phill Gross)
Subject: Expert System Dev. Tools Info Request
Several months ago, there was some discussion in the list about expert
system development packages. There were also some information requests
(eg, ehrler%cod@nosc) but I don't recall any follow-ups posted. I'm
now at the point of wanting to purchase one of these packages and have
been compiling a survey list of candidate packages. I would like to
solicit information/comments about the packages listed below. I will
summarize and post the results of any information I get. I'll fertilize
the discussion with an initial list of information I've found so far.
What I'm really interested in is user comments on ease of use, capabilities,
how fast to get "up the curve", etc. Again, I will summarize all information
I receive.
Phill Gross
Note: All comments in quotes below were taken from promotional material,
all comments within square brackets represent incomplete info.
Large or Special Purpose Machines
Vendor Machines/
Package (Contact Info) HW Environment Price Comments
ART Inference Corp. [runs on
5300 W.Century Blvd. Symbolics]
Los Angeles, CA 90045
213-417-7997
DUCK Smart Systems Tech. "works within Runs under Zetalisp
6870 Elm Street Lisp environ- on Symbolics,Franz on
McLean, VA 22101 ment" Vaxen (Unix or VMS),
703-448-8562 T lisp on Appollo,
soon Common Lisp
K:Base Gold Hill Computers "Symbolics 3600 [Provides networking]
163 Harvard Street family"
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-492-2071
KEE IntelliCorp Need AI machine $60K
707 Laurel St. (eg, Symbolics)
Menlo Park, CA
94025
415-853-5540 or
415-323-8300
LOOPS [Xerox] [Xerox machines] [unsupported but
provided by Xerox
for the cost of
distribution]
OPS5 DEC Vaxen "can call or be called
by routines .. in any
VAX language"
SRL [Carnegie Group] [Symbolics] $70K
S1 Teknowledge, Inc. Xerox 1100/1108, $50K Includes 2 week course
525 University Ave. soon VAX/VMS
Palo Alto, CA 94301
415-327-6600
TIMM General Research Corp. "Most computers
7655 Old and AI machines"
Springhouse Road
McLean, VA 22102
703-893-5915
=============================================================================
Personal Computers
Vendor Machines/
Package (Contact Info) HW Environment Price Comments
Expert- J. Perrone & IBM PC or XT, $2K 2 disks advisable
Ease Associates, Inc. some
3685 17th Street "compatibles"
San Francisco, CA
94114
415-431-9562
K:Base Gold Hill Computers IBM PC's [<$5K] [Provides networking]
163 Harvard Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-492-2071
M1 Teknowledge, Inc. IBM PC $12.5 Includes 4 day course,
525 University Ave. Color recomended,
Palo Alto, CA 94301 PC-DOS or MS-DOS
415-327-6600
Personal Texas Instruments "Widespread Includes 3 day course,
Consultant P.O. Box 809063 personal runs under MS-DOS,
Dallas, TX 75380 computers", allows 400 rules
1-800-527-3500 TI Professional
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 85 15:10:33 EST
From: winkler@harvard.ARPA (Dan Winkler)
Subject: XLISP 1.4 Source Available
Source, documentation and compiled Macintosh versions of XLISP 1.4 are
available by anonymous ftp login at Harvard. It's all in a subdirectory
named pub. The author of xlisp, David Betz, logs in here as betz@harvard.
Feel free to send him mail if you have questions or comments.
Dan. (winkler@harvard)
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 85 11:22:57 EST
From: Paul Broome <broome@BRL-TGR.ARPA>
Subject: Origin of "Impure Mathematics"
In answer to your query in AIList V3 #21 I'm sending you a note I found
on net.jokes.d on USENET.
-paul
From seismo!harvard!talcott!panda!genrad!decvax!decwrl!sun!idi!pesnta!lsuc!msb
From: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader)
Subject: Re: "The Adventures of Poly Nomial"
Date: 5 Feb 85 07:02:25 GMT
Summary: Credit and correct title
This little gem previously appeared in the Journal of Irreproducible
Results. I don't know what issue; I have it in a Best of the JIR
collection. The real title is "Impure Mathematics". No author is given
in the normal style, but it is marked as "submitted by" Richard A. Gibbs.
Subscriptions to the JIR are now $4.50, $6.50 outside
the USA, for 4 issues = 4/5 year, from Box 234, Chicago Heights, IL 60411.
{ allegra | decvax | duke | ihnp4 | linus | watmath | ... } !utzoo!lsuc!msb
Mark Brader also via amd!pesnta!lsuc!msb, uw-beaver!utcsrgv!lsuc!msb
(From February 14, utcsrgv will be utcsri)
------------------------------
Date: Tuesday, 12-Feb-85 12:03:01-GMT
From: GORDON JOLY (on ERCC DEC-10) <GCJ%edxa@ucl-cs.arpa>
Subject: Y'all and Youse
In a recent discussion on the plural of `you', I believe that someone
said that `youse' was not part of the English language. Yesterday on
the bus, I heard a 12-year-old say to her friend ` I'll see youse later'.
Nuff said.
Gordon Joly
gcj@edxa
[Edxa is at Edinburgh. -- KIL]
------------------------------
Date: 8 Feb 1985 14:58-EST
From: Brad Goodman <BGOODMAN at BBNG>
Subject: Seminar - Parallel Natural Language Processing (BBN)
[Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.]
BBN Laboratories SDP AI Seminar Series
Massively Parallel Natural Language Processing
Professor David L. Waltz
Thinking Machines
and
Brandeis University
Date: Tuesday, February 19, 1985
Time: 10:00 a.m.
Place: Newman Auditorium
BBN Laboratories Inc.
70 Fawcett Street
Cambridge, Ma.
This talk will describe research in developing a natural language
processing system with modular knowledge sources but strongly
interactive processing. The system offers insights into a variety of
linguistic phenomena and allows easy testing of a variety of hypotheses.
Language interpretation takes place on an activation network which is
dynamically created from input, recent context, and long-term knowledge.
Initially ambiguous and unstable, the network settles on a single
interpretation, using a parallel, analog relaxation process. The talk
will also describe a parallel model for the representation of context
and of the priming of concepts. Examples illustrating contextual
influence on meaning interpretation and "semantic garden path" sentence
processing, along with a discussion of the building and implementation
of a large scale system for new generation parallel computers are
included.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 85 15:53:16 pst
From: hardyck%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Curtis Hardyck)
Subject: Seminar - Modeling Intuition in Problem Solving (UCB)
Speaker: Paul Smolensky, Institute for Cognitive Science
University of California, San Diego
Title: A FORMAL FRAMEWORK FOR MODELLING INTITUTION IN
PROBLEM SOLVING
Thursday, Feb 21 at 1 pm, room 2515 Tolman Hall, Berkeley
The following hypotheses will be elaborated and analyzed:
Experts' intuitions derive from their specially developed perceptions
of the problem domain;
The perceptual processor solves the problem's simultaneous constraints
literally in parallel;
The level at which processing is governed by formal laws involves
small units of knowledge, not elaborate "rules" or symbolic structure;
These formal laws involve numerical, not symbolic, variables and
operations.
I will discuss the motivation for these hypotheses, the presumed roles of
intutition and rule interpretation in problem solving, and implications for
instruction.
Then I will describe how the hypotheses lead to a principled formal framework
for modelling intuition. This framework is derived from probability theory
and exploits a formal isomorphism with statistical (thermal) physics. Three
theories will be described that give a formal competence model, a realization
in a parallel processor, and a learning procedure through which the processor
acquires its knowledge. These theorems are part of an effort to develop a
new theory of computation describing massively parallel systems.
An application of the framework to simple quantitative problems in
electricity will be described. Concepts and techniques from
statistical physics guide analysis of the processing.
-- Steve Palmer
------------------------------
Date: Wed 13 Feb 85 17:25:56-PST
From: Emma Pease <Emma@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
Subject: Seminar - Partially Compiled Prolog Interpreters (CSLI)
[Exercpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.]
SUMMARY OF AREA C MEETING
``The Compilation of Prolog Programs
Without the Use of a Prolog Compiler''
Ken Kahn, Xerox PARC
An efficient Prolog interpreter written in Lisp was presented. The
interpreter was then specialized to run different Prolog predicates.
These specializations are generated automatically by a partial
evaluator for Lisp programs called Partial Lisp. It transforms Lisp
programs to other Lisp programs and knows nothing about Prolog. It was
argued that the partial evaluation of interpreters can be a substitute
for compilation. The results of partially evaluating the Prolog
interpreter for simple Prolog predicates were presented. The speed of
the specialized interpreters has been found to be about ten times
faster than ordinary interpretation. These speeds compare favorably
with an optimizing compiler for the same Prolog dialect and computer
system. The advantages of using partial evaluation upon an interpreter
include a much smaller and easily modifiable implementation. The major
difficulty in generating thousands of small specialized interpreters
is that it currently takes about two orders of magnitude more time
than compilation. Different approaches to reducing partial evaluation
time were presented. The possibilities of specializing the interpreter
for different uses of the same Prolog predicate were discussed.
------------------------------
Date: 15 Feb 1985 1044-EST
From: Jon Doyle <DOYLE@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>
Subject: Seminar - Learning in Modal Logic (CMU)
[Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
AI Seminar, Feb. 19, 3:30 PM, WeH 5409
CALM : A Contestative Apprenticeship System in Modal Logic
Jean Sallantin and Joel Quinqueton
Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Montpellier, France
We present a formal approach to Learning as a process in a
non-distributive Modal Logic. We illustrate it by considerations about
the results of our work on SEQUOIA, a Learning Machine for decoding
Genetic Sequences.
Contact Jon Doyle (x3739) for appointments or more information.
------------------------------
Date: 15 February 1985 1215-EST
From: Cathy Hill@CMU-CS-A
Subject: Seminar - Beyond Bacon (CMU)
[Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
Speaker: Professor Herbert Simon
Title: "Beyond Bacon"
Date: February 19, 1985
Time: 12:00 noon - 1:30 p.m.
Place: Adamson Wing, 1st Floor, Baker Hall
Abastract: BACON is a data-driven program for discovering
regularities (laws) in data. It attempts to
simulate one aspect of scientific discovery.
Other aspects include theory-driven discovery,
choosing research problems, and designing
instruments. The seminar will discuss progress
that has been made in characterizing programs to
do these latter kinds of tasks.
------------------------------
Date: Tuesday, 12 Feb 1985 08:22:51-PST
From: turner%when.DEC@decwrl.ARPA
Subject: Conference - Decision Support Systems
C O N F E R E N C E A N N O U N C E M E N T
The Fifth Annual Conference on Decision Support Systems (DSS) will be
held from April 1 through April 4 in San Francisco. The goal of this
conference, like its predecessors, is to provide a forum for researchers
and practitioners to present and discuss their most recent experiences
and ideas about decision support systems and their use in making
organizations and individuals successful.
The conference is sponsored by the Institute for the Advancement of
Decision Support Systems in cooperation with the Institute of Management
Sciences and its College on Information Systems.
The program is a series of six tracks:
. Introduction to DSS and DSS Tools (tutorial)
. DSS Futures
. Expert and Knowledge Based Systems
. DSS Methodologies
. DSS in Practice
. DSS Products and Services
Conference Committee
Chairman Program Chairman Proceedings Editor
Dr. Robert Zmud Dr. Robert Reck Dr. Joyce Elam
University of North Carolina Index Systems University of Texas
For information, please contact: Ms. Julie Eldridge
DSS'85
Third Floor
290 Westminster Street
Providence RI 02903
(401) 274-0801
Mark Turner
Digital Equipment Corporation
------------------------------
End of AIList Digest
********************