lagache@violet.berkeley.edu (Edouard Lagache) (03/14/88)
MINUTES OF THE PROLOG FORUM MEETING OF 3/10/1988
The PROLOG Forum meeting of March 10, was still an
informal organizational meeting. The members present
reviewed a draft of the first issue of the newsletter. We
hope to begin distributing in a few weeks.
We elected the following officers:
President and Newsletter editor: Mark Epperson
Treasurer: Dave Kuhlman
Staff writer: Edouard Lagache
While not officially honored, Steve Engle has been
serving as Software librarian.
We set the dues for membership at $25 for those within
United States mailing areas, and $35 dollars for
international members. Membership will basically represent a
subscription to the PROLOG forum newsletter. It may also
include privileged access to the group's PROLOG software library,
but those details have not yet been worked out.
The balance of the meeting was devoted to examining two
programs by Edouard Lagache. The first program was a first
attempt at building a "consultant" program for PROLOG
programmers. The program presented was basically a variation
on the "Eliza" program that instead of merely trying to find
any appropriate response would attempt to query the user to
solve the problem by his/herself. This is done by asking the
user questions that encourage reflection on her/his own
problem solving processes.
While the program was a rather crude effort at best, it
may still be quite useful as a "fall back" system for a more
intelligent consultant. Since it will always come up with
some sort of reply, it could be used to help coax the user to
come up with enough information for the intelligent system to
work with. The code will be posted to the net, and comment
and/or suggestions are welcome. It is eventually hoped to make
this consultant system a group project with contributions from
all interested members.
The other program that was demonstrated was the system
that Edouard Lagache has developed for is Master's Thesis
research. The program is called an Educational Apprentice
system and is intended to serve as an assistant to students
in performing some programming assignment. Unfortunately,
there wasn't sufficient time to give a reasonable explanation
of the concept, so a quick review of the system's
implementation details were given along with a sample run.
Next months meeting will be held at Xeno Logic systems
and will feature a demonstration of their accelerator card
for SUN workstations.
Edouard Lagache