steve@lpi3230.UUCP (Steve Burbeck) (04/10/85)
<bug food> One of the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) that has received serious attention in the last decade or so is symbolic math. That is, AI programs that duplicate what mathematicians, engineers, physicists, astronomers, etc. do when they manipulate complex algebraic or calculus problems. The two most popular results of this work are MACSYMA and REDUCE, both written in LISP. MACSYMA is available from Symbolics for multi thousands of bucks for some machines. REDUCE, developed at RAND Corp., is public domain and is available for Franz LISP systems (with full source) for $300 from Dr. Kamal Abdali at Tektronix (I have his address and phone number if you are interested). To give you an idea of the scope and complexity of such systems, REDUCE involves more than a megabyte of LISP *source* code. We just got REDUCE running here on our P-E 3230 under Franz LISP. If you or anyone at your site doesn't do much math, stop reading now. But if you do, you may understand our excitement at it's first test. Some engineers had a problem that had stumped a PhD mathematician and the engineers themselves for days. REDUCE ran it and got the answer they had hoped for in 17 seconds! Incidentally, one of the test suites (reduce.tst) takes 106 seconds on the 3230 versus 90 seconds on a Vax 780. That is, the 3230 is about 85% the speed of a Vax 780. Note, this does not involve numerical methods, approximations or anything of the sort. REDUCE's input is the equations themselves (it's interactive, you type in the equations or read them in from a file you built with vi) and its output is the new equations you want that result from differentiation, integration, matrix operations (i.e., inverse, determinant, trace, ....), solution of simultaneous equations, etc. Among its many tricks is a FORTRAN output mode (switch selectable) in which the resulting equations are output as legal FORTRAN code to calculate the equations, complete with continuation cards, temp variables and all! I could go on and on, but the reality is that you can't believe the power of this system until you see it for yourself. Steve Burbeck Linus Pauling Institute 440 Page Mill Road Palo Alto, CA 94206 (415)327-4064