E1AR0002@SMUVM1.BITNET.UUCP (05/25/87)
Spang Robinson Report, May 1987, Volume 3 No. 5 (Summary)
The lead article is on difficulties that LISP machine vendors have
had.
Currently, here is the breakdown of how many of each machine is
installed for AI applications:
DEC 5000
SUN 1800
Apollo 600
Tektronix 100
Lisp Machines
Symbolics 4000
Xerox 2500
TI 1500
LMI 500
Integrated Inference Machines has just entered the market.
DEC reports that 30 percent of DEC's AI sales are MicroVAXEN with
ten per cent being the high end 800 machines. DEC has put all
AI efforts under Bill Johnson and two buildings will be dedicated
to AI activities with 300 people involved.
They also have a table of all LISP Machine Vendors as well as general
purpose machine vendors entering the AI market indicating pricing,
number of units sold for AI and AI software available for each machine.
They estimate that the revenue for sales of conventional machines to
do AI is about the same as that for LISP machine with both groups
totalling about $200 million each.
There is also a nice table summarizing the activities and machines
for both LISP Machine companies and conventional machine vendors entering
the AI market.
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The next article discusses Gold Hill's Gold Works, an expert sytem. The system
requires 5 MB extended memory, 512K of RAM and 7MB of disk space. The
system interfaces with Lotus, dBASE, C, and Assembler as well as Mice and
EGA drivers. The system
supports frames, multiple inheritance, object oriented programming,
forward and backward chaining, the RETE algorithm, an agenda mechanism,
a screen editor for developing the presentation part of the
expert system and a dependency Network which can be used in multiple words
type applicatons. It costs $5,000 between now and July 31 with
the price at $7500 thereafter.
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The AI Show at Long Beach drew 3438 attendees.
Teknowledge reports third quarter revenues of $4,469,000 and a net loss
of $721,000.
The former head of Sperry's AI center has founded PEAKSolutions in
Minneapolis which provides AI services.
Eloquent Systems is now marketing its in-house developed AI toolkit
optimized for real-time multi-user applications. This company also
developed systems for the hotel industry.
Teknowledge will be marketing Framatomes's AI tool, K1.
CP international will be selling a natural language interface for their
text retrieval system, STRATUS.
Two banks have licensed Syntelligence's Lending Advisor, an expert system to
assist loan officers.
Larry Geisel who used to be president of Carnegie Group is now president
of Intelligent Technology Group.
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They also have a list of papers on LISP machines and reviews of
The T Programming Language: A Dialect of LISP by Stephen Slade
PROLOG: A Relational Language and Its Applications by John Malpas
Prolog Programming: Applications for Database Systems, Expert
Systems, and Natural Language Systems by Claudia Marcus