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AIList Digest Volume 1 Issue 088
AIList Digest Thursday, 3 Nov 1983 Volume 1 : Issue 88
Today's Topics:
Molecular Computers - Comment,
Sequential Systems - Theoretical Sufficiency,
Humanness - Definition,
Writing Analysis - Reference,
Lab Report - Prolog and SYLLOG at IBM,
Seminars - Translating LISP & Knowledge and Reasoning
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Date: 1 Nov 83 1844 EST
From: Dave.Touretzky@CMU-CS-A
Subject: Comment on Molecular Computers
- - - - Begin forwarded message - - - -
Date: Tue, 1 Nov 1983 12:19 EST
From: DANNY%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
To: Daniel S. Weld <WELD%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA>
Subject: Molecular Computers
I was at the Molecular Computer conference. Unfortunately, there has
very lttle progress since the Molecular Electronics conference a year
ago. The field is too full of people who think analog computation is
"more powerful" and who think that Goedel's proof shows that people
can always think better than machine. Sigh.
--danny
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Date: Thursday, 3 November 1983 13:27:10 EST
From: Robert.Frederking@CMU-CS-CAD
Subject: Parallel vs. Sequential
Re: Phillip Kahn's claim that "not ALL parallel computations can be made
sequential": I don't believe it, unless you are talking about infinitely
many processing elements. The Turing Machine is the most powerful model of
computation known, and it is inherently serial (and equivalent to a
Tesselation Automaton, which is totally parallel). Any computation that
requires all the values at an "instant" can simply run at N times the
sampling rate of your sensors: it locks them, reads each one, and makes its
decisions after looking at all of them, and then unlocks them to examine the
next time slice. If one is talking practically, this might not be possible
due to speed considerations, but theoretically it is possible. So while at
a theoretical level ALL parallel computations can be simulated sequentially,
in practice one often requires parallelism to cope with real-world speeds.
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Date: 2 Nov 83 10:52:22 PST (Wednesday)
From: Hoffman.es@PARC-MAXC.ARPA
Subject: Awareness, Human-ness
Sorry it took me a while to track this down. It's something I recalled
when reading the discussion of awareness in V1 #80. It's been lightly
edited.
--Rodney Hoffman
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****
From Richard Rorty's book, "Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature":
Personhood is a matter of decision rather than knowledge, an acceptance
of another being into fellowship rather than a recognition of a common
essence.
Knowledge of what pain is like or what red is like is attributed to
beings on the basis of their potential membership in the community.
Thus babies and the more attractive sorts of animal are credited with
"having feelings" rather than (like machines or spiders) "merely
responding to stimuli." To say that babies know what heat is like, but
not what the motion of molecules is like is just to say that we can
fairly readily imagine them opening their mouths and remarking on the
former, but not the latter. To say that a gadget that says "red"
appropriately *doesn't* know what red is like is to say that we cannot
readily imagine continuing a conversation with the gadget.
Attribution of pre-linguistic awareness is merely a courtesy extended to
potential or imagined fellow-speakers of our language. Moral
prohibitions against hurting babies and the better looking sorts of
animals are not based on their possessions of feeling. It is, if
anything, the other way around. Rationality about denying civil rights
to morons or fetuses or robots or aliens or blacks or gays or trees is a
myth. The emotions we have toward borderline cases depend on the
liveliness of our imagination, and conversely.
------------------------------
Date: 1 November 1983 18:55 EDT
From: Herb Lin <LIN @ MIT-ML>
Subject: writing analysis
You might want to take a look at some of the stuff by R. Flesch
who is the primary exponent of a system that takes word and sentence
and paragraph lengths and turns it into grade-equivalent reading
scores. It's somewhat controversial.
[E.g., The Art of Readable Writing. Or, "A New Readability Index",
J. of Applied Psychology, 1948, 32, 221-233. References to other
authors are also given in Cherry and Vesterman's writeup of the
STYLE and DICTION systems included in Berkeley Unix. -- KIL]
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Date: Monday, 31-Oct-83 11:49:55-GMT
From: Bundy HPS (on ERCC DEC-10) <Bundy@EDXA>
Subject: Prolog and SYLLOG at IBM
[Reprinted from the Prolog Digest.]
Date: 9 Oct 1983 11:43:51-PDT (Sunday)
From: Adrian Walker <ADRIAN.IBM@Rand-Relay>
Subject: Prolog question
IBM Research Laboratory K51
5600 Cottle Road
San Jose
CA 95193 USA
Telephone: 408-256-6999
ARPANet: Adrian.IBM@Rand-Relay
10th October 83
Alan,
In answer to your question about Prolog implementations, we
do most of our work using the Waterloo Prolog 1.3 interpreter
on an IBM mainframe (3081). Although not a traditional AI
environment, this turns out to be pretty good. For instance,
the speed of the Interpreter turns out to be about the same
as that of compiled DEC-10 Prolog (running on a DEC-10).
As for environment, the system delivered by Waterloo is
pretty much stand alone, but there are several good environments
built in Prolog on top of it.
A valuable feature of Waterloo Prolog 1.3 is a 'system' predicate,
which can call anything on the system, E.g. a full screen editor.
The work on extracting explanations of 'yes' and 'no' answers
from Prolog, which I reported at IJCAI, was done in Waterloo
Prolog. We have also implemented a syllogistic system called
SYLLOG, and several expert system types of applications. An
English language question answerer written by Antonio Porto and
me, produces instantaneous answers, even when the 3081 has 250
users.
As far as I know, Waterloo Prolog only runs under the VM operating
system (not yet under MVS, the other major IBM OS for mainframes).
It is available, for a moderate academic licence fee, from Sandra
Ward, Department of Computing Services, University of Waterloo,
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
We use it with IBM 3279 colour terminals, which adds variety to a
long day at the screen, and can also be useful !
Best wishes,
-- Adrian Walker
Walker, A. (1981). 'SYLLOG: A Knowledge Based Data Management
System,' Report No. 034. Computer Science Department, New York
University, New York.
Walker, A. (1982). 'Automatic Generation of Explanations of
Results from Knowledge Bases,' RJ3481. Computer Science
Department, IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, California.
Walker, A. (1983a). 'Data Bases, Expert Systems, and PROLOG,'
RJ3870. Computer Science Department, IBM Research Laboratory,
San Jose, California. (To appear as a book chapter)
Walker, A. (1983b). 'Syllog: An Approach to Prolog for
Non-Programmers.' RJ3950, IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose,
Cal1fornia. (To appear as a book chapter)
Walker, A. (1983c). 'Prolog/EX1: An Inference Engine which
Explains both Yes and No Answers.'
RJ3771, IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, Calofornia.
(Proc. IJCAI 83)
Walker, A. and Porto, A. (1983). 'KBO1, A Knowledge Based
Garden Store Assistant.'
RJ3928, IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, California.
(In Proc Portugal Workshop, 1983.)
------------------------------
Date: Mon 31 Oct 83 22:57:03-CST
From: John Hartman <CS.HARTMAN@UTEXAS-20.ARPA>
Subject: Fri. Grad Lunch - Understanding and Translating LISP
[Reprinted from the UTEXAS-20 bboard.]
GRADUATE BROWN BAG LUNCH - Friday 11/4/83, PAI 5.60 at noon:
I will talk about how programming knowledge contributes to
understanding programs and translating between high level languages.
The problems of translating between LISP and MIRROR (= HLAMBDA) will
be introduced. Then we'll look at the translation of A* (Best First
Search) and see some examples of how recognizing programming cliches
contributes to the result.
I'll try to keep it fairly short with the hope of getting critical
questions and discussion.
Old blurb:
I am investigating how a library of standard programming constructs
may be used to assist understanding and translating LISP programs.
A programmer reads a program differently than a compiler because she
has knowledge about computational concepts such as "fail/succeed loop"
and can recognize them by knowing standard implementations. This
recognition benefits program reasoning by creating useful abstractions and
connections between program syntax and the domain.
The value of cliche recognition is being tested for the problem of
high level translation. Rich and Temin's MIRROR language is designed
to give a very explicit, static expression of program information
useful for automatically answering questions about the program. I am
building an advisor for LISP to MIRROR translation which will exploit
recognition to extract implicit program information and guide
transformation.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 83 09:17 PST
From: Moshe Vardi <vardi@Diablo>
Subject: Knowledge Seminar
[Forwarded by Yoni Malachi <YM@SU-AI>.]
We are planning to start at IBM San Jose a research seminar on
theoretical aspects of reasoning about knowledge, such as reasoning
with incomplete information, reasoning in the presence of
inconsistencies, and reasoning about changes of belief. The first few
meetings are intended to be introductory lectures on various attempts
at formalizing the problem, such as modal logic, nonmonotonic logic,
and relevance logic. There is a lack of good research in this area,
and the hope is that after a few introductory lectures, the format of
the meetings will shift into a more research-oriented style. The
first meeting is tentatively scheduled for Friday, Nov. 18, at 1:30,
with future meetings also to be held on Friday afternoon, but this may
change if there are a lot of conflicts. The first meeting will be
partly organizational in nature, but there will also be a talk by Joe
Halpern on "Applying modal logic to reason about knowledge and
likelihood".
For further details contact:
Joe Halpern [halpern.ibm-sj@rand-relay, (408) 256-4701]
Yoram Moses [yom@sail, (415) 497-1517]
Moshe Vardi [vardi@su-hnv, (408) 256-4936]
03-Nov-83 0016 MYV Knowledge Seminar
We may have a problem with Nov. 18. The response from Stanford to the
announcement is overwhelming, but have a room only for 25 people.
We may have to postpone the seminar.
To be added to the mailing list contact Moshe Vardi (MYV@sail,vardi@su-hnv)
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End of AIList Digest
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