josh@cs.rutgers.edu (08/09/90)
Minsky Wins Japan Prize This year's Japan Prize (the Nobel Prize might be termed the "Sweden Prize") was awarded to Marvin Minsky of MIT for his pioneering work in artificial intelligence. It includes $318,000 and a meeting with Emperor Akihito. Minsky, now a professor at MIT's Media Lab, founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and serves on the Foresight Institute Board of Advisors. In other foresighted news from Japan, their new International Institute for Novel Computing will have twelve subcommittees to study areas of future computing. Three of these are of particular interest to FI members: --> Molecular computing. Computational systems built from molecular components will be a major payoff of progress toward nanotechnology. --> Social-hyper computing. This presumably refers to social software and open hypertext. For more information on this general area, request "Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge" from FI. In the U.S., include a large stamped, self-addressed envelope with 65 cents postage. --> Evolutional computing. This may include work on agoric systems papers as discussed in The Ecology of Computation, an Elsevier Science Publishers book reviewed previously in Update. A limited number of agoric systems papers have been given to FI by coauthor Mark S. Miller and are available on request. A donation to cover our costs is appreciated: $3.50 in the U.S. For computing news from both the U.S. and Japan, with a strong focus on neural computing, a good source is the newsletter Intelligence, edited by Edward Rosenfeld. While it's on the pricy side ($295 in North America, $350 outside) it has the latest news on neural computing and we find it of great value. The publication has been coming out for six years so it seems likely to last. A typical issue is 8 pages, published monthly. They can be reached at PO Box 20008, New York, NY 10025, or by phone 212-222-1123 or 800-NEURALS.