LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (12/03/84)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI> AIList Digest Saturday, 1 Dec 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 165 Today's Topics: Planning - Bibliography Wanted, Cognition - Amnesia Before Age 5?, Administrivia - Number of Internet Users, News - AI in the News, Humor - Software Productivity, Seminars - User Interface Management System (CMU) & Calculus of Partially-Ordered Type Structures (MIT) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 30 Nov 84 15:07:23 PST (Fri) From: Dan Shapiro <dan@aids-unix> Subject: Planning Bibliography wanted Does anyone know of an annotated biblography in the area of AI planning? My specific context is an autonomous land vehicle project which involves generating a plan for traversing long distances in essentially unrestricted terrain. Issues in route planning, real time planning, planning under uncertainty, planning with multiple goals, goal conflict resolution strategies, etc., are all relevant. I would also be interested in a reference list on the topic of spatial reasoning, in particular the representation and manipulation of symbolic features in maps or processed images. I am going to be compiling/extending annotated bibliographies in these areas; once done, I'd be glad to distribute them to anyone who is interested. Dan Shapiro (dan@aids-unix) ------------------------------ Date: 29 Nov 84 15:22:05 EST (Thursday) From: Chris Heiny <Heiny.henr@XEROX.ARPA> Subject: Amnesia before age 5???? "..no one can remember events before the age of five." What's going on here, anyway??? Does this mean that no one remembers (during any part of their life) any events that occurred prior to age 5; or does it mean that prior to age 5, one can't remember events occuring during ages 0..4.99. I personally can disprove the former: I remember events that occurred when I was 3 & 4. An acquaintance disproves both: at age 3 she remembered an event several weeks after it occurred, and at 18 still remembers both the event and the remembering of the event (is this a meta-memory?). I think someone's confused....I hope it's not me. Chris ------------------------------ Date: Thu 29 Nov 84 14:10:35-PST From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA> Subject: Re: Amnesia before age 5???? Granted, I was rather sweeping in my generalization. Kids certainly do remember events, but after growing up very few can remember more than one or two vague incidents from the early years. Even those few memories are often the ones strengthened by parent's retelling of the events. At any rate, >>I<< have only two or three conscious memories from pre-kindergarten days, and not a great many more from all of grade school. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: 26 Nov 84 15:45 EST From: WILLUT%EDUCOM.BITNET@Berkeley Subject: Estimate on number of Internet users Some belated facts related to estimates of Internet users: BITNET currently has 328 machines at 117 sites (almost exclusively universities), with 52 sites pending. A stats program run recently at a non-peak time determined that 150 nodes were up and 6,000 users logged in. Also, MAILNET includes 24 universities (most single machines, but some multiple-node sites, such as Carnegie-Mellon) that exchange mail with the MAILNET hub (the MIT-MULTICS machine) via dial-up and/or Telenet connections. Using the proposed estimate of 100-200 users per university machine that's 35-70,000 users. Candy Willut EDUCOM Networking Activities ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 15 Nov 84 05:12:53 cst From: Laurence Leff <leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Subject: Recent AI News [The following message from Laurence Leff at SMU was delayed somewhat by mailer troubles. He has offered to provide AIList readers with references to AI articles in the non-AI press. Such reviews and alerts are certainly welcome. -- KIL] ... I currently provide this service to the AI group in the department and it might be useful to others. The journals I scan include Electronic Week Electronic News IEEE PAMI IEEE System Man and Cybernetics IEEE Computer Communications ACM Datamation Infoworld IEEE Spectrum IEEE Potentials [Each notice] includes a citation (so people can find it) and usually a sentence or two about contents. Very short articles (<= 1 paragraph) are usually typed in verbatim. As if we didn't know department: From Wall Street Journal COMPUTERS THAT THINK like people create demand for experts in short supply. Interest in "Artificial Intelligence" systems is booming, say employers and recruiters among firms in financial services, computer hardware and software design, defense and communications. The systems principally duplicate the thought processes of experts for trouble-shooting and cash management. Demand for systems is "explosive" says Halbrecht Associates, Stamford, Conn. But Halbrecht's recruiter Daryl Furno says "there just aren't enough people to go around" to design the systems. Most prospects have about five job offers when they finish a project. Christian & Timbers, a Cleveland recruiting firm, says qualified experts demand 10%-20% premiums over most computer designers. DM Data, a Scottsdale, Ariz., consulting firm, estimates that there are nearly 5,000 jobs in the industry now, but there may be 50,00 jobs by 1990. CACM 1984 - Vol 27 No. 10 page 1044: Combination of PERT with [heuristic] search. Byte Vol 9 No 11 October 1984 page 39: Announcements of Tektronix AI system and TIMM expert system. Byte Vol 9 No 11 October 1984 page 207: Ad for IBM PC Common Lisp. Electronic News Monday October 1, 1984 pp. 37: Japanese-English translation-software article. Copied from Computer Industry Update September 1984 IBM Company Announcements: Announced a version of the Lisp programming language for the VM operating system. Lisp/VM is an integrated interactive invironment that provides a collection of artificial intelligence programming tools. A structure editor displays the structure of all objects including programs, data and results. A variety of debugging tools are included. The price is $6500. The firm also unveiled five other internal research and development projects in artificial intelligence: the YES/MVS, an expert system which runs on mainframe computers that use the MVS operating system; PRISM, a system shell written in PASCAL for developers who wish to insert their own rules and inferences for expert systems; Scratchpad II which incorporates a system and language to provide facilities for scientists to manipulate algebra directly on the computer screen; PSC Prolog, a version of the Prolog programming language that operates on the 370 and interfaces with the LISP/VM and SQL/VM relational DBMS and the CMS Command Executive language REXX; and HANDY, a user interface to AI systems and a PC-based program that includes elements of windowing, color animation, graphics, speech synthesis and video programs. Electronic Weeks November 12, 1984: Describes efforts of Sperry ($20,000,000 worth) to become leader in AI. pp. 34 Electronics Week October 22, 1984: Work by Kurzweill on solving the speech recognition techniques. (Kurzweill was the developer of the text recognizer used to make a reader for the blind.) pp. 83 Infoworld November 5, 1984: Review of "Into the Height [Heart? --KIL] of the Mind" The review is oriented towards those not knowledgeable in AI. IEEE Transactions on System Man and Cybernetics July/August 1984 Volume SMC-14 Number 4: Linguistic Representation of Default Values in Frames R. R. Yager pp 630 Approximate Reasoning as a Basis for Rule-Based Expert Systems R. R. Yager pp 636 Electronic News, Monday November 12, 1984: Computer Thought ships ADA/ Interpreter Debugger on Symbolics 3600 Machine pp 43 Electronic News, October 29, 1984: Article on Marketing AI systems pp 34 ------------------------------ Date: Thu 29 Nov 84 12:40:33-PST From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA> Subject: Software Productivity The November issue of IEEE Computer contains an Open Channel note fro David Feinberg about the folly of programmer productivity metrics that reward only lines of code and not lines of documentation. This suggests many lines of thought. A lines-of-code metric penalizes those who write APL one-liners -- a good thing, no? We could increase the readability/maintainability of programs if we passed them through a filter that would expand complex expressions into simpler steps. We could then increase our productivity even further by converting these simple steps into more complex operations. The possibilities for bootstrapping are obvious, although important research questions must be solved to eliminate cycles in repeated transformations. Fortunately, we only need to find one example of unlimited software growth (coupled with our supercomputer technology) in order to guarantee our world pre-eminence in software productivity. The same concept can be extended to hardware development to guarantee our lead in computer complexity. Progess in this direction has so far been limited to computer support systems (e.g., F-15 aircraft), but wafer-scale integration offers hope for further optimization. This looks like a fruitful area for artificial intelligence research. (Progress might be measured by published lines of proof or by reams of suggestive hypotheses.) I suggest that DARPA institute a crash project to develop a prototype optimizing preprocessor able to convert x = y = 0; into register t; t = 0; y = t; x = t; if (x != y) abend("Compiler and/or hardware error."); Further breakthroughs will come quickly. For instance, we might substitute Ln (Lim (1+(1/z))^z) + sin^2(x) + cos^2(x) z->INF INF - SUM (cosh(y sqrt(1-tanh^2(y))/(2^N) N=0 for the constant 0 in the above program, providing that we can find numerical methods of evaluating the limit and infinite summation with adequate accuracy. All that we need for rapid progress is a sufficiently complex bureaucracy to support research and manage distribution of the results. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: 29 Nov 84 1404 PST From: Frank Yellin <FY@SU-AI.ARPA> Subject: from the New Yorker [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] The following is from the Palm Springs Desert Sun (and reprinted word for word in the New Yorker). "Controlling a plant," says Theodore J. Williams, a researcher at Purdue University "takes a wider attention span than any one person could possibly have." But with a distributed computer system, Mr. Williams added, "You can increase profitability, increase productivity, reduce raw materials and reduce emissions, because the computer system is flexible, process, rather than an entire plant. The system is flexible, allowess, rather than an entire plant. The system is flexible, allowing anather than an entire plant. The system is flexible, allowing an operator to rearrange a manufacturing process from his seat at the console. "If you change your mind," said Robert E. Otto, a technical consultant at the Monsanto Co., "you don't have to rewire, you can just reprogram." And because the systhe central computer. Then if something goes wrong ing back to the central computer. Then if something goes wrong ing back to the central computer. Then if something goes wrong wit back to the central computer. Then if something goes wrong with the main cocentral computer. Then if something goes wrong with the main control l computer. Then if something goes wrong with the main control room your plant is O.K." ------------------------------ Date: 28 November 1984 1433-EST From: Staci Quackenbush@CMU-CS-A Subject: Seminar - User Interface Management System (CMU) [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Name: Phil Hayes Date: December 3, 1984 Time: 3:30 - 4:30 p.m. Place: WeH 5409 Title: "Design Alternatives for User Interface Management Systems Based on Experience with the COUSIN System" User interface management systems (UIMSs) provide user interfaces to application systems based on an abstract definition of the interface required. This approach can provide higher-quality interfaces with a lower construction cost. This talk examines a UIMS called COUSIN which provides graphical interfaces to a variety of application systems running on a Perq under the Accent operating system. The presentation will include a videotape of a COUSIN interface. The talk will also take a more general look at the design space for UIMSs. Specifically, we will consider three design choices. The choices concern the sharing of control between the UIMS and the applications it provides interfaces to, the level of abstraction in the definition of the information exchanged between user and application, and the level of abstraction in the sequencing of information exchange. For each choice, we argue for a specific alternative. COUSIN's design corresponds to the alternatives we argued for in two out of three cases, and partially satisfies the third. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 26 Nov 84 16:37:16-EST From: Susan Hardy <SH%MIT-XX@MIT-XX.ARPA> Subject: Seminar - Calculus of Partially-Ordered Type Structures (MIT) [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] A LATTICE-THEORETIC APPROACH TO COMPUTATION BASED ON A CALCULUS OF PARTIALLY-ORDERED TYPE STRUCTURES Hassan Ait-Kaci Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation Austin, Texas DATE: Friday, November 30, l984 TIME: 2:00 p.m. - Talk PLACE: NE43-512A This talk will present a syntactic calculus of partially ordered structures and its application to computation. A syntax of record- like terms and a "type subsumption" ordering are defined and shown to form a lattice structure. A simple "type-as-set" interpretation of these term structures extends this lattice to a distributive one, and in the case of finitary terms, to a complete Brouwerian lattice. As a result, a method for solving systems of @i(type equations) by iterated substitution of type symbols is proposed which defines an operational semantics for KBL -- a Knowledge Base Language -- so-named to reflect the original aim of this research; to wit, attempting a proper formalization of the notion of "semantic network". HOST: Professor Rishiyur Nikhil ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************