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AIList Digest Volume 1 Issue 099
AIList Digest Thursday, 17 Nov 1983 Volume 1 : Issue 99
Today's Topics:
AI Literature - Comtex,
Review - Abacus,
Artificial Humanity,
Conference - SPIE Call for Papers,
Seminar - CRITTER for Critiquing Circuit Designs,
Military AI - DARPA Plans (long message)
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Date: Wed 16 Nov 83 10:14:02-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Comtex
The Comtex microfiche series seems to be alive and well, contrary
to a rumor printed in an early AIList issue. The ad they sent me
offers the Stanford and MIT AI memoranda (over $2,000 each set), and
says that the Purdue PRIP [pattern recognition and image processing]
technical reports will be next. Also forthcoming are the SRI and
Carnegie-Mellon AI reports.
-- Ken Laws
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Date: Wed 16 Nov 83 10:31:26-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Abacus
I have the first issue of Abacus, the new "soft" computer science
magazine edited by Anthony Ralston. It contains a very nice survey or
introduction to computer graphics for digital filmmaking and an
interesting exploration of how the first electronic digital computer
came to be. There is also a superficial article about computer vision
which fails to answer its title question, "Why Computers Can't See
(Yet)". [It is possibly that I'm being overly harsh since this is my
own area of expertise. My feeling, however, is that the question
cannot be answered by just pointing out that vision is difficult and
that we have dozens of different approaches, none of which works in
more than specialized cases. An adequate answer requires a guess at
how it is that the human vision system can work in all cases, and why
we have not been able to duplicate it.]
The magazine also offers various computer-related departments,
notably those covering book reviews, the law, personal computing,
puzzles, and politics. Humorous anecdotes are solicited for
filler material, a la Reader's Digest. There is no AI-related
column at present.
The magazine has a "padded" feel, particularly since every ad save
one is by Springer-Verlag, the publisher. They even ran out of
things to advertise and so repeated several full-page ads. No doubt
this is a new-issue problem and will quickly disappear. I wish
them well.
-- Ken Laws
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Date: 16 Nov 1983 10:21:32 EST (Wednesday)
From: Mark S. Day <mday@bbnccj>
Subject: Artificial Humanity
From: ihnp4!ihuxv!portegys @ Ucb-Vax
Subject: Behavioristic definition of intelligence
What is the purpose of knowing whether something is
intelligent? Or has a soul? Or has consciousness?
I think one of the reasons is that it makes it easier to
deal with it. If a creature is understood to be a human
being, we all know something about how to behave toward it.
And if a machine exhibits intelligence, the quintessential
quality of human beings, we also will know what to do.
Without wishing to flame or start a pointless philosophical
discussion, I do not consider intelligence to be the quintessential
quality of human beings. Nor do I expect to behave in the same way
towards an artificially intelligent program as I would towards a
person. Turing tests etc. notwithstanding, I think there is a
distinction between "artificial intelligence" and "artificial
humanity," and that by and large people are not striving to create
"artificial humanity."
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Date: Wed 16 Nov 83 09:30:18-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Artificial Humanity
I attended a Stanford lecture by Doug Lenat on Tuesday. He mentioned
three interesting bugs that developed in EURISKO, a self-monitoring
and self-modifying program.
One turned up when EURISKO erroneously claimed to have discovered a
new type of flip-flop. The problem was traced to an array indexing
error. EURISKO, realizing that it had never in its entire history
had a bounds error, had deleted the bounds-checking code. The first
bounds error occurred soon after.
Another bug cropped up in the "credit assignment" rule base. EURISKO
was claiming that a particular rule had been responsible for discovering
a great many other interesting rules. It turned out that the gist of
the rule was "If the system discovers something interesting, attach my
name as the discoverer."
The third bug became evident when EURISKO halted at 4:00 one morning
waiting for an answer to a question. The system was supposed to know
that questions were OK when a person was around, but not at night with
no people at hand. People are represented in its knowledge base in the
same manner as any other object. EURISKO wanted (i.e., had as a goal)
to ask a question. It realized that the reason it could not was that
no object in its current environment had the "person" attribute. It
therefore declared itself to be a "person", and proceeded to ask the
question.
Doug says that it was rather difficult to explain to the system why
these were not reasonable things to do.
-- Ken Laws
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Date: Wed 16 Nov 83 10:09:24-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: SPIE Call for Papers
SPIE has put out a call for papers for its Technical Symposium
East '84 in Arlington, April 29 - May 4. One of the 10 subtopics
is Applications of AI, particularly image understanding, expert
systems, autonomous navigation, intelligent systems, computer
vision, knowledge-based systems, contextual scene analysis, and
robotics.
Abstracts are due Nov. 21, manuscripts by April 2. For more info,
contact
SPIE Technical Program Committee
P.O. Box 10
Bellingham, Washington 98227-0010
(206) 676-3290, Technical Program Dept.
Telex 46-7053
-- Ken Laws
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Date: 15 Nov 83 14:19:54 EST
From: Smadar <KEDAR-CABELLI@RUTGERS.ARPA>
Subject: An III talk this Thursday...
[Reprinted from the RUTGERS bboard.]
Title: CRITTER - A System for 'Critiquing' Circuits
Speaker: Van Kelly
Date: Thursday, November 17,1983, 1:30-2:30 PM
Location: Hill Center, Seventh floor lounge
Van kelly, a Ph.D. student in our department, will describe a
computer system, CRITTER, for 'critiquing' digital circuit designs.
This informal talk based on his current thesis research. Here is an
abstract of the talk:
CRITTER is an exploratory prototype design aid for comprehensive
"critiquing" of digital circuit designs. While originally intended for
verifying a circuit's functional correctness and timing safety, it can
also be used to estimate design robustness, sensitivity to device
parameters, and (to some extent) testability. CRITTER has been built
using Artificial Intelligence ("Expert Systems") technology and its
reasoning is guided by an extensible collection of electronic knowledge
derived from human experts. Also, a new non-procedural representation
for both the real-time behavior of circuits and circuit specifications
has led to a streamlined circuit modeling formalism based on ordinary
mathematical function composition. A version of CRITTER has been
tested on circuits with complexities of up to a dozen TTL SSI/MSI
packages. A more powerful version is being adapted for use in an
automated VLSI design environment.
------------------------------
Date: 16 Nov 83 12:58:07 PST (Wednesday)
From: John Larson <JLarson.PA@PARC.ARPA>
Subject: AI and the military (long message)
Received over the network . . .
STRATEGIC COMPUTING PLAN ANNOUNCED; REVOLUTIONARY ADVANCES
IN MACHINE INTELLIGENCE TECHNOLOGY TO MEET CRITICAL DEFENSE NEEDS
Washington, D.C. (7 Nov. 1983) - - Revolutionary advances in the way
computers will be applied to tomorrow's national defense needs were
described in a comprehensive "Strategic Computing" plan announced
today by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
DARPA's plan encompasses the development and application of machine
intelligence technology to critical defense problems. The program
calls for transcending today's computer capabilities by a "quantum
jump." The powerful computers to be developed under the plan will be
driven by "expert systems" that mimic the thinking and reasoning
processes of humans. The machines will be equipped with sensory and
communication modules enabling them to hear, talk, see and act on
information and data they develop or receive. This new technology as
it emerges during the coming decade will have unprecedented
capabilities and promises to greatly increase our national security.
Computers are already widely employed in defense, and are relied on
to help hold the field against larger forces. But current computers
have inflexible program logic, and are limited in their ability to
adapt to unanticipated enemy actions in the field. This problem is
heightened by the increasing pace and complexity of modern warfare.
The new DARPA program will confront this challenge by producing
adaptive, intelligent computers specifically aimed at critical
military applications.
Three initial applications are identified in the DARPA plan. These
include autonomous vehicles (unmanned aircraft, submersibles, and land
vehicles), expert associates, and large-scale battle management
systems.
In contrast with current guided missiles and munitions, the new
autonomous vehicles will be capable of complex, far-ranging
reconnaissance and attack missions, and will exhibit highly adaptive
forms of terminal homing.
A land vehicle described in the plan will be able to navigate
cross-country from one location to another, planning its route from
digital terrain data, and updating its plan as its vision and image
understanding systems sense and resolve ambiguities between observed
and stored terrain data. Its expert local-navigation system will
devise schemes to insure concealment and avoid obstacles as the
vehicle pursues its mission objectives.
A pilot's expert associate will be developed that can interact via
speech communications and function as a "mechanized co-pilot". This
system will enable a pilot to off-load lower-level instrument
monitoring, control, and diagnostic functions, freeing him to focus on
high-priority decisions and actions. The associate will be trainable
and personalizable to the requirements of specific missions and the
methods of an individual pilot. It will heighten pilots' capabilities
to act effectively and decisively in high stress combat situations.
The machine intelligence technology will also be applied in a
carrier battle-group battle management system. This system will aid in
the information fusion, option generation, decision making, and event
monitoring by the teams of people responsible for managing such
large-scale, fast-moving combat situations.
The DARPA program will achieve its technical objectives and produce
machine intelligence technology by jointly exploiting a wide range of
recent scientific advances in artificial intelligence, computer
architecture, and microelectronics.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence enable the codification
in sets of computer "rules" of the thinking processes that people use
to reason, plan, and make decisions. For example, a detailed
codification of the thought processes and heuristics by which a person
finds his way through an unfamiliar city using a map and visual
landmarks might be employed as the basis of an experimental expert
system for local navigation (for the autonomous land vehicle). Such
expert systems are already being successfully employed in medical
diagnosis, experiment planning in genetics, mineral exploration, and
other areas of complex human expertise.
Expert systems can often be decomposed into separate segments that
can be processed concurrently. For example, one might search for a
result along many paths in parallel, taking the first satisfactory
solution and then proceeding on to other tasks. In many expert
systems rules simply "lay in wait" - firing only if a specific
situation arises. Different parts of such a system could be operated
concurrently to watch for the individual contexts in which their rules
are to fire.
DARPA plans to develop special computers that will exploit
opportunities for concurrent processing of expert systems. This
approach promises a large increase in the power and intelligence of
such systems. Using "coarse-mesh" machines consisting of multiple
microprocessors, an increase in power of a factor of one hundred over
current systems will be achievable within a few years. By creating
special VLSI chip designs containing multiple "fine-mesh" processors,
by populating entire silicon wafers with hundreds of such chips, and
by using high-bandwidth optoelectronic cables to interconnect groups
of wafers, increases of three or four orders of magnitude in symbol
processing and rule-firing rates will be achieved as the research
program matures. While the program will rely heavily on silicon
microelectronics for high-density processing structures, extensive use
will also be made of gallium arsenide technology for high-rate signal
processing, optoelectronics, and for military applications requiring
low-power dissipation and high-immunity to radiation.
The expert system technology will enable the DARPA computers to
"think smarter." The special architectures for concurrency and the
faster, denser VLSI microelectronics will enable them to "think harder
and faster." The combination of these approaches promises to be
potent indeed.
But machines that mimic thinking are not enough by themselves. They
must be provided with sensory devices that mimic the functions of eyes
and ears. They must have the ability to see their environment, to hear
and understand human language, and to respond in kind.
Huge computer processing rates will be required to provide effective
machine vision and machine understanding of natural language. Recent
advances in the architecture of special processor arrays promise to
provide the required rates. By patterning many small special
processors together on a silicon chip, computer scientists can now
produce simple forms of machine vision in a manner analogous to that
used in the retina of the eye. Instead of each image pixel being
sequentially processed as when using a standard von Neumann computer,
the new processor arrays allow thousands of pixels to be processed
simultaneously. Each image pixel is processed by just a few transistor
switches located close together in a processor cell that communicates
over short distances with neighboring cells. The number of
transistors required to process each pixel can be perhaps one
one-thousandth of that employed in a von Neumann machine, and the
short communications distances lead to much faster processing rates
per pixel. All these effects multiply the factor of thousands gained
by concurrency. The DARPA program plans to provide special vision
subsystems that have rates as high as one trillion von Neumann
equivalent operations per second as the program matures in the late
1980's.
The DARPA Strategic Computing plan calls for the rapid evolution of
a set of prototype intelligent computers, and their experimental
application in military test-bed environments. The planned activities
will lead to a series of demonstrations of increasingly sophisticated
machine intelligence technology in the selected applications as the
program progresses.
DARPA will utilize an extensive infrastructure of computers,
computer networks, rapid system prototyping services, and silicon
foundries to support these technology explorations. This same
infrastructure will also enable the sharing and propagation of
successful results among program participants. As experimental
intelligent machines are created in the program, some will be added to
the computer network resources - further enhancing the capabilities of
the research infrastructure.
The Strategic Computing program will be coordinated closely with
Under Secretary of Defense Research and Engineering, the Military
Services, and other Defense Agencies. A number of advisory panels and
working groups will also be constituted to assure inter-agency
coordination and maintain a dialogue within the scientific community.
The program calls for a cooperative effort among American industry,
universities, other research institutions, and government.
Communication is critical in the management of the program since many
of the contibutors will be widely dispersed throughout the U.S. Heavy
use will be made of the Defense Department's ARPANET computer network
to link participants and to establish a productive research
environment.
Ms. Lynn Conway, Assistant Director for Strategic Computing in
DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office, will manage the new
program. Initial program funding is set at $50M in fiscal 1984. It is
proposed at $95M in FY85, and estimated at $600M over the first five
years of the program.
The successful achievement of the objectives of the Strategic
Computing program will lead to the deployment of a new generation of
military systems containing machine intelligence technology. These
systems promise to provide the United States with important new
methods of defense against both massed forces and unconventional
threats in the future - methods that can raise the threshold and
decrease the likelihood of major conflict.
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End of AIList Digest
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