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AIList Digest Volume 1 Issue 021
AIList Digest Sunday, 10 Jul 1983 Volume 1 : Issue 21
Today's Topics:
Prolog Programs [Request]
Computer Security [Request]
Re: AI, Perception, and the Media
AI and Legal Reasoning
A Statistician's Assistant
Rovers
NMODE [LISP-Based Editor] and PSL
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Date: Thu 7 Jul 83 19:37:44-EDT
From: STEVE@COLUMBIA-20.ARPA
Subject: Prolog Programs
I would like to do some statistical analysis on large PROLOG programs.
I am particularly interested in AI programs in the following areas:
1) Expert Systems,
2) Data Bases,
3) Planning or Robotics,
4) NLP
Can anyone provide sample programs that I can use? They should be
large programs that run on Edinburgh Prolog 3.47 (Dec-20) or C-Prolog
1.2 (Unix 4.1/Vax). I would like to collect a good variety, so any
programs will be useful. I would also appreciate a sample journal of
a session with the program so that it can be exercised quickly and
effectively.
Many Thanks... Stephen Taylor
------------------------------
Date: 7 Jul 1983 17:48:15-EDT
From: Ron.Cole at CMU-CS-SPEECH
Subject: Computer Security
[Reprinted from the CMUC BBoard.]
ABC Nitely news is doing a feature in response to the movie War Games
to investigate whether the premise of the movie is legitimate: That
there is no totally secure computer. They want to interview someone
who has broken into a supposedly secure system. If you want to get
infamous, please call Shelly Diamond or Jean McCormick at 212 887
4995.
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Date: Fri 8 Jul 83 15:33:11-PDT
From: Slava Prazdny <Prazdny at SRI-KL>
Subject: Re: AI, Perception, and the Media
It is ridiculous to assume that the "naive theories", in this case of
perception, will get you somewhere. In fact, it is easy to see that
they are wrong. Nobody knows, for example, what the "Mexican hat"
operators, the simple cells, etc. in the cortex are for.
It is common, especially within the AI comunity not to report the
limitations of the achieved success. No wonder one hears about robots
nearly walking around, and cleaning a house, or walking a dog, etc.
Or "english interfaces" which are user friendly. I think it is about
the time we realize, and frankly say, that such interpolations are
very far in the future indeed.
------------------------------
Date: Thu 7 Jul 83 09:01:53-PDT
From: Sharon Bergman <SHARON@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
Subject: AI and Legal Reasoning
PH.D. ORAL
JULY 15, 1983
ROOM 252, MARGARET JACKS HALL
2:15 P.M.
AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE APPROACH TO LEGAL REASONING
Anne v.d.L. Gardner
The analysis of legal problems is a relatively new domain for
artificial intelligence. This thesis describes an AI model of legal
reasoning, giving special attention to the distinctive characteristics
of the domain, and reports on a program based on the model. Major
features include (1) distinguishing between questions the program has
enough information to resolve and questions that competent
professionals could argue either way; (2) using incompletely defined
("open-textured") technical concepts; (3) combining the use of
knowledge expressed as rules and knowledge expressed as examples; and
(4) combining the use of professional knowledge and commonsense
knowledge. All these features are likely to prove important in other
domains besides law. Previous AI research has left them largely
unexplored.
------------------------------
Date: Tue 5 Jul 83 13:20:42-PDT
From: Sharon Bergman <SHARON@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
Subject: A Statistician's Assistant
[This talk has already been given at SRI and at Stanford. Printing
seminar notices seem to be a reasonable way to keep the AIList
community informed about current work in AI, even when readers cannot
be expected to attend. Anyone with strong feelings about this
practice should contact AIList-Request. -- KIL]
BUILDING AN EXPERT INTERFACE
William A. Gale
Bell Telephone Laboratories
Murray Hill, NJ 07974
We are building an expert system for the domain of statistical data
analysis, initially focusing on regression analysis. Two
characteristics of this domain are current availability of massive but
'dumb' software, and a need to repeatedly diagnose problems and apply
a treatment.
REX (Regression EXpert) is a Franz Lisp program which is an
intelligent interface for the S Statistical System. It guides a user
through a regression analysis, interprets intermediate and final
results, and instructs the user in statistical concepts. It is
designed for interactive use, but a non-interactive mode can be used
with lower quality results.
[A particular feature of REX is the ability to suggest data
transformations such as a log or squared term. The BACON system at
CMU can also do this using an entirely different heuristic approach.
Another automated statistical system is the RX medical database
analyzer by Dr. R. Blum at Stanford; it forms and then attempts to
verify sophisticated hypotheses based on knowledge of drug and disease
interactions, lag times of observable effects, and the incomplete
nature of patient histories. -- KIL]
------------------------------
Date: 6 Jul 1983 21:26-PDT
From: Andy Cromarty <andy@aids-unix>
Subject: Rovers
First: Thanks to all who have responded to my initial note about
rovers.
Most people seem to have taken what I would regard as the easy (and
commensurately uninteresting) way out by choosing a lunar environment,
precisely because teleoperation is feasible there, if a nuisance. But
what about systems operating on more distant heavenly bodies or in
deep space? Even robotic vehicles on Mars would suffer rather severe
performance degradation if they had to rely upon an (approximately)
earth-bound intelligence for control. (A friend provides the
following simple gedankenexperiment: decide now to start
scratching-your-leg-until- it-stops-itching twenty minutes from now;
now wait twenty minutes before you can start; then, perhaps, wait at
least twenty minutes before you can consider stopping....)
Note that I'm not taking issue with the desirability of teleoperated
lunar vehicles. (In fact, there's good reason to believe that a
planetary or lunar rover is politically unrealistic if NASA has
anything to say about it, given what I understand to be the prevailing
NASA attitude towards *unmanned* space exploration, but that fact
doesn't motivate my comments here.) Rather, I'm suggesting we tackle
a problem domain sufficiently rich in AI problems to (a) keep things
interesting and (b) allow us to explore what contribution, if any, we
might be able to make as computer scientists, AI researchers, and
engineers.
Do we know enough to solve, or even identify, the difficult issues in
situation assessment, planning, and resource allocation faced by such
a system? For example, reinterpreting Professor Minsky's desire that
"anyone with such budgets should aim them at AI education and research
fellowships", let us then assume that these fellowships are provided
by NASA and have a problem domain specified: perhaps, for example, we
might choose a space station orbiting Mars as our testing grounds,
with robot assembly prior to arrival of humans on-site as the problem.
What problems can we already solve, and where is the research needed?
asc
------------------------------
Date: 5 Jul 1983 0731-MDT
From: William Galway <Galway@UTAH-20>
Subject: NMODE [LISP-Based Editor] and PSL
[Reprinted from the Editor-People Discussion.]
I thought I'd add a bit more to what JQJ has said about NMODE, and add
a sales pitch, since I'm pretty close to its development. NMODE was
written by Alan Snyder (and others) at Hewlett Packard Computer
Research Labs in Palo Alto, with some additional work done by folks
here at the University of Utah. NMODE is written in PSL (Portable
Standard Lisp), a Lisp dialect developed at the University of Utah
under the direction of Martin Griss. NMODE is distantly related to
EMODE (my not-quite-finished-thesis-project) in that it shares some of
the ideas and algorithms, but it's carried them much further (and more
cleanly). (In fact, I hope to steal quite a bit from NMODE for my
final version of EMODE.)
We've tried to make PSL and NMODE quite portable, and we currently
have NMODE running on at least 4 different systems--TWENEX, Vax Unix,
and two different flavors of the Motorola 68000, one of them being the
Apollo. (The Apollo version was just brought up last week.)
NMODE is quite TWENEX EMACS compatible. Of course it doesn't have
nearly as many "libraries" developed for it yet. It has quite a nice
Lisp Mode (of course), including the ability to directly execute code
from a buffer, but is weaker in other modes. It's quite strong on
handling multiple windows (and multiple simultaneous terminals).
NMODE also supports a generalized browser mechanism (similar to Dired,
RMAIL, and the Smalltalk browser) which provides a common user
interface to file directories, source code, electronic mail,
documentation, etc.
There's a library available for the TWENEX version of NMODE that
provides a hook to processes similar to what's available in Gosling's
EMACS for Unix. (Unfortunately, nobody's gotten around to porting
that to the other machines--it's fairly easy to write machine specific
code in PSL, as well as machine independent code.) We also have a
fairly nice "dynamic abbreviation" option (expands an abbreviation by
scanning the buffer for a word with the same prefix), although we
don't yet have the "standard" EMACS abbreviation mode.
Of course, one of the nicest features of NMODE is the fact that its
implementation language is Lisp. New extensions can be added simply
by editing code in a buffer, testing it interactively, and then
compiling it. (Of course, this gets tricky sometimes--it is possible
to break the editor while adding a new feature.)
NMODE does tend to be a bit slow--it seems to perform quite acceptably
on the DEC-20 and on single-user M68000's with lots of real memory.
It tends to be somewhat painful on loaded Vaxen and Apollo 400s with
only 1 megabyte of real memory. This could probably be improved by
spending more time on tuning the code (or, preferably, by tuning the
PSL compiler or its machine specific tables).
I'd like to take exception to the claim that "PSL is not a very
powerful lisp", although it is true that "it is not clear it will
catch on widely". I don't have extensive experience with any other
Lisp systems, so I'm not really in a good position to compare them.
There are over 700 functions documented in the current PSL manual.
Perhaps the major feature of "bare" PSL is its ability to let you
write Lisp that compiles to "raw" machine code. This is VERY
important for getting NMODE to run acceptably fast. Perhaps the idea
that PSL isn't powerful comes from the belief that there are few big
systems built on top of it. But that's changed quite a lot over last
couple of years. In addition to NMODE, here's a list of some other
applications built on top of PSL:
- Hearn's REDUCE computer algebra system.
- Expert systems developed at HP (using a successor to FRL).
- Ager's VALID logic teaching program.
- Riesenfeld's ALPHA-1 Computer Aided Geometric Design
System.
- Novak's GLISP, an object oriented dialect of LISP.
NMODE is currently available "for internal use" as part of the PSL
distribution. Future plans for distribution and maintenance of NMODE
are unclear. (Nobody's very anxious to get tied up with maintaining
it.)
PSL systems are available from Utah for the following systems:
VAX, Unix (4.1, 4.1a) 1600 BPI tar format
DEC-20, Tops-20 V4 & V5 1600 BPI Dumper format
Apollo, Aegis 5.0 6 floppy disks, RBAK format
Extended DEC-20, 1600 BPI Dumper format
Tops-20 V5
We are currently charging a $200 tape or floppy distribution fee for
each system. To obtain a copy of the license and order form, please
send a NET message or letter with your US MAIL address to:
Utah Symbolic Computation Group Secretary
University of Utah - Dept. of Computer Science
3160 Merrill Engineering Building
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112
ARPANET: CRUSE@UTAH-20
USENET: utah-cs!cruse
Send a note to me if you're interested in more information on NMODE.
--Will Galway [ GALWAY@UTAH-20 ]
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End of AIList Digest
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