Laws@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA.UUCP (02/02/87)
OK, I give up. I've only received about ten comments, and the negative ones are balanced by ones like this: By the way, discussions of consciousness, code, lengthy rebuttals, bibliographies, etc.: I love it all. but the volume of the code messages has started to offend even my sensibilities. I'll halt distribution through the Arpanet mail channels unless I get too many requests for copies of the full text. Arpanetters who still want the code can FTP the files <AILIST>AIE*.TXT from SRI-STRIPE (using ANONYMOUS login) where * ranges from 1 through 22. (1 through 8 have been sent.) Others who want the original nine 50K-char mesage files can send a request to AIList-Request@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA. Try not to make multiple requests from one site, although I realize that there's no good coordination mechanism. The lesson here seems to be that the AIList is a discussion list rather than a distribution list. The code met my previous criteria for inclusion -- it was a noncommercial submission, relevant to AI, and of interest to a reasonable proportion of the list membership. I had thought that the bulk was acceptable for a one-shot event; this seems to have been the case on the Usenet half of AIList, but not on the Arpanet half. There really should be separate Arpanet lists for discussion and for seminar and conference notices, bibliographies, code, and the like. (I'm still waiting for volunteers ...) I apologize for the awkwardness of this resolution. Having started to provide the material, I find myself in the situation of the man with the donkey who learned he couldn't please everyone. There won't be an easy remedy for these situations until someone develops netwide fileservers and FTP, or at least a coordinated list system that allows people to register their interest profiles without human intervention. I should also point out that Usenet has its comp.sources distribution, but that the Arpanet lacks any broadcast channel for sharing code. Perhaps it shouldn't have one, given the current U.S. paranoia about technology export, but there are definite advantages for shared subroutine libraries over having each student, researcher, or engineer reinvent from scratch. This exposure to "real code" may also have had the beneficial effect of popping some illusions about the nature of expert systems code, permitting the advantages of other approaches (C, ADA, software engineering, sharable libraries, etc.) to compete against the AI mystique. -- Ken Laws