EDWARDS@WARBUCKS.AI.SRI.COM (Douglas Edwards) (10/22/87)
The claim that Lenat's work has not been retested should not be allowed to pass without being questioned. Not only should Weimin Shen's work, already cited by Tom Dietterich, be taken into account, but there is apparently another attempt to work with the same approach going on at MIT. *Artificial Intelligence Abstracts* cites the MIT AI Memo AIM-898, "Discovery Systems" by K. W. Haase Jr. (*AI Abstracts*, volume 1 number 1, January 1987). I have not yet read (or even obtained) this memo, but the abstract suggests that Haase has not only reimplemented Lenat's work but also tried to discover a principled explanation for why it works, and that Haase's explanation for AM's success would be quite different from Dietterich's and Shen's. I look forward to learning more about Haase's work. I don't know if Haase reads AILIST; if he does, it would be interesting to hear his own comments on the AM controversy. --- Douglas D. Edwards (edwards@ai.sri.com) -------