meyers@CIP.UCI.EDU.UUCP (03/01/87)
I would like to suggest that the AILIST be more open to hardware topics that are related to WORKING in Artificial Intelligence, for several reasons: This would be a valuable service to people working in AI who are having hardware problems. They can draw upon the solutions of others who have solved the same problems, and upon knowledge of AI facilities with hardware experts. Even though there are bulletin boards for specific hardware, it would be useful to to organize the AI community's hardware and environment problems as a single list. If this is too much for AILIST then perhaps an AI-HARDWARE list is called for. I disagree with the notion that hardware problems have 'nothing to do with AI'. While discussions of LISP and PROLOG dialects are interesting, they appear to me to have no more relevance to 'AI' than do hardware issues. Likewise discussion of the operation and environment provided by LISP machines and other workstations. Likewise philosophical discussions of the mind. My point is that it is not useful to try to define AI too narrowly. There is a theory and practice of AI, and AILIST seems to stress the theory. It would be nice if the 'practice' were taken up somewhere as well. I can certainly understand that the AILIST is already overburdened, and that the moderator already does too much work (and a fine job as well). THOSE should be the reasons for excluding hardware issues, not arbitration about what is and is not relevant to AI. Amnon Meyers meyers@ics.uci.edu P.S. I often wonder where people are writing from, so... Irvine Computational Intelligence Project ICS Department University of California Irvine, California 92717 (714) 856-4840