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AIList Digest Volume 1 Issue 048
AIList Digest Thursday, 25 Aug 1983 Volume 1 : Issue 48
Today's Topics:
AI Literature - Journals & COMTEX & Online Reports,
AI Architecture - The Connection Machine,
Programming Languages - Scheme and Lisp Availability,
Artificial Intelligence - Turing Test & Hofstadter Article
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Date: 20 Aug 1983 0011-MDT
From: Jed Krohnfeldt <KROHNFELDT@UTAH-20>
Subject: Re: AI Journals
I would add one more journal to the list:
Cognition and Brain Theory
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
365 Broadway,
Hillsdale, New Jersey 07642
$18 Individual $50 Instititional
Quarterly
Basic cognition, proposed models and discussion of
consciousness and mental process, epistemology - from frames to
neurons, as related to human cognitive processes. A "fringe"
publication for AI topics, and a good forum for issues in cognitive
science/psychology.
Also, I notice that the institutional rate was quoted for several of
the journals cited. Many of these journals can be had for less if you
convince them that you are a lone reader (individual) and/or a
student.
[Noninstitutional members of AAAI can get the Artificial Intelligence
Journal for $50. See the last page of the fall AI Magazine.
Another journal for which I have an ad is
New Generation Computing
Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
Journal Fulfillment Dept.
44 Hartz Way
Secaucus, NJ 07094
A quarterly English-language journal devoted to international
research on the fifth generation computer. [It seems to be
very strong on hardware and logic programming.]
1983 - 2 issues - $52. (Sample copy free.)
1984 - 4 issues - $104.
-- KIL]
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Date: Sun 21 Aug 83 18:06:52-PDT
From: Robert Amsler <AMSLER@SRI-AI>
Subject: Journal listings
Computing Reviews, Nov. 1982, lists all the periodicals they receive
and their addresses. Handy list of a lot of CS journals.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 83 11:05 EDT
From: Tim Finin <Tim%UPenn@UDel-Relay>
Subject: COMTEX and getting AI technical reports
There WAS a company which offered a service in which subscribers would
get copies of recent technical reports on all areas of AI research -
COMTEX. The reports were to be drawn from universities and
institutions doing AI research. The initial offering in the series
contained old Stanford and MIT memos. The series was intended to
provide very timely access to current reaseach in the participating
institution. COMTEX has decided to discontinue the AI series, however.
Perhaps if they perceive an increased demand for this series they will
reactivate it.
Tim
[There is a half-page Comtex ad for the MIT and Stanford memoranda in
the Fall issue of AI Magazine, p. 79. -- KIL]
------------------------------
Date: 19 Aug 83 19:21:34 PDT (Friday)
From: Hamilton.ES@PARC-MAXC.ARPA
Subject: On-line tech reports?
I raised this issue on Human-nets nearly two years ago and didn't seem
to get more than a big yawn for a response.
Here's an example of what I had to go through recently: I saw an
interesting-looking CMU tech report (Newell, "Intellectual Issues in
the History of AI") listed in SIGART News. It looked like I could
order it from CMU. No ARPANET address was listed, so I wrote -- I
even gave them my ARPANET address. They sent me back a form letter
via US Snail referring me to NTIS. So then I phoned NTIS. I talked
to an answering machine and left my US Snail address and the order
number of the tech report. They sent me back a postcard giving the
price, something like $7. I sent them back their order form,
including my credit card#. A week or so later I got back a moderately
legible document, probably reproduced from microfiche, that looks
suspiciously like a Bravo document that's probably on line somewhere,
if I only knew where. I'm not picking on CMU -- this is a general
problem.
There's GOT to be a better way. How about: (1) Have a standard
directory at each major ARPA host, containing at least a catalog with
abstracts of all recent tech reports, and info on how to order, and
hopefully full text of at least the most recent and/or popular ones,
available for FTP, perhaps at off-peak hours only. (2) Hook NTIS into
ARPANET, so that folks could browse their catalogs and submit orders
electronically.
RUTGERS used to have an electronic mailing list to which they
periodically sent updated tech report catalogs, but that's about the
only activity of this sort that I've seen.
We've got this terrific electronic highway. Let's make it useful for
more than mailing around collections of flames, like this one!
--Bruce
------------------------------
Date: 23 August 1983 00:22 EDT
From: Alan Bawden <ALAN @ MIT-MC>
Subject: The Connection Machine
Date: Thu 18 Aug 83 13:46:13-PDT
From: David Rogers <DRogers at SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
The closest hardware I am aware of is called the Connection
Machine, and is begin developed at MIT by Alan Bawden, Dave
Christman, and Danny Hillis ...
also Tom Knight, David Chapman, Brewster Kahle, Carl Feynman, Cliff
Lasser, and Jon Taft. Danny Hillis provided the original ideas, his
is the name to remember.
The project involves building a model with about 2^10 processors.
The prototype Connection Machine was designed to have 2^20 processors,
although 2^10 might be a good size to actually build to test the idea.
One way to arrive at a superficial understanding of the Connection
Machine would be to imagine augmenting a NETL machine with the ability
to pass addresses (or "pointers") as well as simple markers. This
permits the Connection Machine to perform even more complex pattern
matching on semantic-network-like databases. The detection of any
kind of cycle (find all people who are employed by their own fathers),
is the canonical example of something this extension allows.
But thats only one way to program a Connection Machine. In fact, the
thing seems to be a rather general parallel processor.
MIT AI Memo #646, "The Connection Machine" by Danny Hillis, is still a
perfectly good reference for the general principles behind the
Connection Machine, despite the fact that the hardware design has
changed a bit since it was written. (The memo is currently being
revised.)
------------------------------
Date: 22 August 1983 18:20 EDT
From: Hal Abelson <HAL @ MIT-MC>
Subject: Lisps on 68000
At MIT we are working on a version of Scheme (a lexically scoped
dialect of Lisp) that runs on the HP 9836 computer, which is a 68000
machine. Starting 3 weeks from now, 350 MIT students will be using
this system on a full-time basis.
The implementation consists of a kernel written in 68000 assembler,
with most of the system written in Scheme and compiled using a quick
and dirty compiler, which is also written in Scheme. The
implementation sits inside of HP's UCSD-Pascal-clone operating system.
For an editor, we use NMODE, which is a version of EMACS written in
Portable Standard Lisp. Thus our machines run, at present, with both
Scheme and PSL resident, and consequently require 4 megabytes of main
memory. This will change when we get another editor, which will be at
least a few months.
The current system gives good performance for coursework, and is
optimized to provide fast interpreted code, as well as a good
debugging environment for student use.
Work will begin on a serious compiler as soon as the start-of-semester
panic is over. There will also be a compatible version for the Vax.
Distribution policy has not yet been decided upon, but most likely we
will give the system away (not the PSL part, which is not ours to
give) to anyone who wants it, provided that people who get it agree to
return all improvements to MIT.
Please no requests for a few months, though, since we are still making
changes in the design and documentation. Availibility will be
annouced on this mailing list..
------------------------------
Date: 23 Aug 83 16:36:26-PDT (Tue)
From: harpo!seismo!rlgvax!cvl!umcp-cs!mark @ Ucb-Vax
Subject: Franz lisp on a Sun Workstation.
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.2096
So what is the true story? What person says it is almost as fast as
a single user 780, another says it is an incredible hog. These can't
both be right, as a Vax-780 IS at least as fast as a Lispmachine (not
counting the bitmapped screen). It sounded to me like the person who
said it was fast had actually used it, but the person who said it was
slow was just working from general knowledge. So maybe it is fast.
Wouldn't that be nice.
--
spoken: mark weiser
UUCP: {seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!mark
CSNet: mark@umcp-cs
ARPA: mark.umcp-cs@UDel-Relay
------------------------------
Date: Tue 23 Aug 83 14:43:50-PDT
From: David Rogers <DRogers@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: in defense of Turing
Scott Turner (AIList V1 #46) has some interesting points about
intelligence, but I felt compelled to defend Turing in his absence.
The Turing article in Mind (must reading for any AIer) makes it clear
that the test is not proposed to *define* an intelligent system, or
even to *recognize* one; the claim is merely that a system which *can*
pass the test has intelligence. Perhaps this is a subtle difference,
but it's as important as the difference between "iff" and "if" in
math.
Scott bemoans the Turing test as testing for "Human Mimicing
Ability", and suggests that ELIZA has shown this to be possible
without intelligence. ELIZA has fooled some people, though I would not
say it has passed anything remotely like the Turing test. Mimicing
language is a far cry from mimicing intelligence.
In any case, it may be even more difficult to detect
intelligence without doing a comparison to human intellect; after all,
we're the only intelligent systems we know of...
Regards,
David
------------------------------
Date: Tue 23 Aug 83 19:23:00-PDT
From: David Rogers <DRogers@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: Hofstadter article
Alas, after reading the article about Hofstadter in the
NYTimes, I realized that AI workers can be at least as closeminded as
other scientists have shown. At its bottom level, it seemed that DH's
basic feeling (that we have a long way to go before creating real
intelligence) is embarrassingly obvious. In the long run, the false
hopes that expectations of quick results give rise to can only hurt
the acceptance of AI in people's minds.
(By the way, I thought the article was very well written, and
would encourage people to look it up. The report is spiced with
opinions from AI workers such as Alan Newell and Marvin Minsky, and it
was enjoyable to hear their candid comments about Hofstadter and AI in
general. Quite a step above the usual articles designed for general
consumption about AI...)
David R.
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End of AIList Digest
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