hamscher@HT.AI.MIT.EDU (Walter Hamscher) (02/27/86)
From: Walter Hamscher <hamscher@MIT-HTVAX.ARPA> Date: 24 Feb 86 22:59:07 GMT One of the biggest problems AI'ers seem to be having with their machines is one of data access. Now, a human [or other sentient life-form :-)] has a large pool of experience (commonly refered to as a swamp) that he/she/it has access to. It is linked together in many obscure ways (as shown by word-association games) so that for any given thought (or problem) there are a vast number (ususally) of (not-necessarily) connected replies. Thinking of that swamp as a form of data-base, does the problem then boil down to one of finding a path-key that would let you access all of the cross-referances quickly? It's not invalid but unfortunately it isn't new either. See any paper on Frames. The power of a frame-organized database isn't that there happen to be these defstructs called frames, it's in the fact that the frames are all connected together -- it's indexing by relatedness (how dense the connections have to be before you start to win is an open question, but see Lenat's recent stuff on CYC in the recent issue of AI Magazine). For background see Minsky (A Framework For Representing Knowledge, 1975). See NETL (e.g. Fahlman, Representing Real-world Knowledge, circa 1979, MIT Press). See Connection Machine literature (e.g. The Connection Machine, Hillis, 1985, MIT press). If you want to see the connection between AI KB's and traditional DBMS's covered extensively, see `Proceedings of the Islamorada Workshop on Large Scale Knowledge Base and Reasoning Systems' (Feb 85) chaired by Michael Brodie, available (I think) from Computer Corporation of America, Cambridge MA (617) 492-8860.