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AIList Digest Volume 1 Issue 112
AIList Digest Wednesday, 14 Dec 1983 Volume 1 : Issue 112
Today's Topics:
Memorial Fund - Carl Engelman,
Programming Languages - Lisp Productivity,
Expert Systems - System Size,
Scientific Method - Information Sciences,
Jargon - Mental States,
Perception - Culture and Vision,
Natural Language - Flame
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Date: Fri 9 Dec 83 12:58:53-PST
From: Don Walker <WALKER@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Carl Engelman Memorial Fund
CARL ENGELMAN MEMORIAL FUND
Carl Engelman, one of the pioneers in artificial intelligence
research, died of a heart attack at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
on November 26, 1983. He was the creator of MATHLAB, a program developed
in the 1960s for the symbolic manipulation of mathematical expressions.
His objective there was to supply the scientist with an interactive
computational aid of a "more intimate and liberating nature" than anything
available before. Many of the ideas generated in the development of MATHLAB
have influenced the architecture of other systems for symbolic and algebraic
manipulation.
Carl graduated from the City College of New York and then earned
an MS Degree in Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During most of his professional career, he worked at The MITRE Corporation
in Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1973 he was on leave as a visiting professor
at the Institute of Information Science of the University of Turin, under a
grant from the Italian National Research Council.
At the time of his death Carl was an Associate Department Head
at MITRE, responsible for a number of research projects in artificial
intelligence. His best known recent work was KNOBS, a knowledge-based
system for interactive planning that was one of the first expert systems
applied productively to military problems. Originally developed for the
Air Force, KNOBS was then adapted for a Navy system and is currently being
used in two NASA applications. Other activities under his direction
included research on natural language understanding and automatic
programming.
Carl published a number of papers in journals and books and gave
presentations at many conferences. But he also illuminated every meeting
he attended with his incisive analysis and his keen wit. While he will
be remembered for his contributions to artificial intelligence, those
who knew him personally will deeply miss his warmth and humor, which he
generously shared with so many of us. Carl was particularly helpful to
people who had professional problems or faced career choices; his paternal
support, personal sponsorship, and private intervention made significant
differences for many of his colleagues.
Carl was a member of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the
American Mathematical Society, the Association for Computational
Linguistics, and the Association for Computing Machinery and its Special
Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence.
Contributions to the "Carl Engelman Memorial Fund" should be
sent to Judy Clapp at The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, Massachusetts 01730.
A decision will be made later on how those funds will be used.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 83 09:49 PST
From: Kandt.pasa@PARC-MAXC.ARPA
Subject: re: lisp productivity question
Jonathan Slocum (University of Texas at Austin) has a large natural
language translation program (thousands of lines of Interlisp) that was
originally in Fortran. The compression that he got was 16.7:1. Also, I
once wrote a primitive production rule system in both Pascal and
Maclisp. The Pascal version was over 2000 lines of code and the Lisp
version was about 200 or so. The Pascal version also was not as
powerful as the Lisp version because of Pascal's strong data typing and
dynamic allocation scheme.
-- Kirk
------------------------------
Date: 9 Dec 83 19:30:46-PST (Fri)
From: decvax!cca!ima!inmet!bhyde @ Ucb-Vax
Subject: Re: RE: Expert Systems - (nf)
Article-I.D.: inmet.578
I would like to add to Gary's comments. There are also issues of
scale to be considered. Many of the systems built outside of AI
are orders of magnitude larger. I was amazed to read that at one
point the largest OPS production system, a computer game called Haunt,
had so very few rules in it. A compiler written using a rule based
approach would have 100 times as many rules. How big are the
AI systems that folks actually build?
The engineering component of large systems obscures the architectural
issues involved in their construction. I have heard it said that
AI isn't a field, it is a stage of the problem solving process.
It seems telling that the ARPA 5-year speech recognition project
was successful not with Hearsay ( I gather that after it was too late
it did manage to met the performance requirements ), but by Harpy. Now,
Harpy as very much like a signal processing program. The "beam search"
mechanisms it used are very different than the popular approachs of
the AI comunity. In the end it seems that it was an act of engineering,
little insight into the nature of knowledge gained.
The issues that caused AI and the rest of computing to split a few
decades ago seem almost quaint now. Allan Newell has a pleasing paper
about these. Only the importance of an interpreter based program
development enviroment seem to continue. Can you buy a work station
capable of sharing files with your 360 yet?
[...]
ben hyde
------------------------------
Date: 10 Dec 83 16:33:59-PST (Sat)
From: decvax!ittvax!dcdwest!sdcsvax!davidson @ Ucb-Vax
Subject: Information sciences vs. physical sciences
Article-I.D.: sdcsvax.84
I am responding to an article claiming that psychology and computer
science aren't sciences. I think that the author is seriously confused
by his prefered usage of the term ``science''. The sciences based on
mathematics, information processing, etc., which I will here call
information sciences, e.g., linguistics, computer science, information
science, cognitive science, psychology, operations research, etc., have
very different methods of operation from sciences based upon, for
example, physics. Since people often view physics as the prototypical
science, they become confused when they look at information sciences.
This is analogous to the confusion of the early grammarians who tried
to understand English from a background in Latin: They decided that
English was primitive and in need of fixing, and proceeded to create
Grammar schools in which we were all supposed to learn how to speak
our native language properly (i.e., with intrusions of latin grammar).
If someone wants to have a private definition of the word science to
include only some methods of operation, that's their privilege, as
long as they don't want to try to use words to communicate with other
human beings. But we shouldn't waste too much time definining terms,
when we could be exploring the nature and utility of the methodologies
used in the various disciplines. In that light, let me say something
about the methodologies of two of the disciplines as I understand and
practice them, respectively.
Physics: There is here the assumption of a simple underlying reality,
which we want to discover through elegant theorizing and experimenting.
Compared to other disciplines, e.g., experimental psychology, many of
the experimental tools are crude, e.g., the statistics used. A theoretical
psychologist would probably find the distance that often separates physical
theory from experiment to be enormous. This is perfectly alright, given
the (assumed) simple nature of underlying reality.
Computer Science: Although in any mathematically based science one
might say that one is discovering knowledge; in many ways, it makes
better sense in computer science to say that one is creating as much
as discovering. Someone will invent a new language, a new architecture,
or a new algorithm, and people will abandon older languages, architectures
and algorithms. A physicist would find this strange, because these objects
are no less valid for having been surpassed (the way an outdated physical
theory would be), but are simply no longer interesting.
Let me stop here, and solicit some input from people involved in other
disciplines. What are your methods of investigation? Are you interested
in creating theories about reality, or creating artificial or abstract
realities? What is your basis for calling your discipline a science,
or do you? Please do not waste any time saying that some other discipline
is not a science because it doesn't do things the way yours does!
-Greg
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 83 20:43 EST
From: Steven Gutfreund <gutfreund%umass-cs@CSNet-Relay>
Subject: re: mental states
Ken Laws in his little editorializing comment on my last note seems to
have completely missed the point. Whether FSA's can display mental
states is an argument I leave to others on this list. However, John
McCarthy's definition allows ant hills and colloidal suspensions to
have mental states.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1983 15:04:10 EST
From: AXLER.Upenn-1100@Rand-Relay (David M. Axler - MSCF Applications
Mgr.)
Subject: Culture and Vision
Several people have recently been bringing up the question of the
effects of culture on visual perception. This problem has been around
in anthropology, folkloristics, and (to some extent) in sociolinguistics
for a number of years. I've personally taken a number of graduate courses
that focussed on this very topic.
Individuals interested in this problem (or, more precisely, group of
problems) should look into the Society for the Anthropology of Visual
Communication (SAVICOM) and its journal. You'll find that the terminology
is often unfamiliar, but the concerns are similar. The society is based
at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications,
and is formally linked with such relevant groups as the American Anthro-
pological Assn.
Folks who want more info, citations, etc. on this can also contact
me personally by netmail, as I'm not sure that this is sufficiently
relevant to take up too much of AI's space.
Dave Axler
(Axler.Upenn-1100@Rand-Relay)
[Extract from further correspondence with Dave:]
There is a thing called "Visual Anthropology", on the
other hand, which deals with the ways that visual tools such as film, video,
still photography, etc., can be used by the anthropologist. The SAVICOM
journal occasionally has articles dealing with the "meta" aspects of visual
anthropology, causing it, at such times, to be dealing with the anthropology
of visual anthropology (or, at least, the epistemology thereof...)
--Dave Axler
------------------------------
Date: Mon 12 Dec 83 21:16:43-PST
From: Martin Giles <MADAGIL@SU-SIERRA.ARPA>
Subject: A humanities view of computers and natural language
The following is a copy of an article on the Stanford Campus report,
7th December, 1983, in response to an article describing research at
Stanford. The University has just received a $21 million grant for
research in the fields of natural and computer languages.
Martin
[I have extracted a few relevant paragraphs from the following 13K-char
flame. Anyone wanting the full text can contact AIList-Request or FTP
it from <AILIST>COHN.TXT on SRI-AI. I will deleted it after a few weeks.
-- KIL]
Mail-From: J.JACKSON1 created at 10-Dec-83 10:29:54
Date: Sat 10 Dec 83 10:29:54-PST
From: Charlie Jackson <J.JACKSON1@LOTS-A>
Subject: F; (Gunning Fog Index 20.18); Cohn on Computer Language Study
To: bboard@LOTS-A
Following is a letter found in this week's Campus Report that proves
Humanities profs make as good flames as any CS hacker. Charlie
THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE IS ALREADY KNOWN WITHOUT COMPUTERS
Following is a response from Robert Greer Cohn, professor of French, to
the Nov. 30 Campus Report article on the study of computer and natural
language.
The ambitious program to investigate the nature of language in
connection with computers raises some far-reaching questions. If it is
to be a sort of Manhattan project, to outdo the Japanese in developing
machines that "think" and "communicate" in a sophisticated way, that is
one thing, and one may question how far a university should turn itself
towards such practical, essentially engineering, matters. If on the
other hand, they are serious about delving into the nature of languages
for the sake of disinterested truth, that is another pair of shoes.
Concerning the latter direction: no committee ever instituted
has made the kind of breakthrough individual genius alone can
accomplish. [...]
Do they want to know the nature of language? It is already
known.
The great breakthrough cam with Stephane Mallarme, who as Edmund
Wilson (and later Hugh Kenner) observed, was comparable only to Einstein
for revolutionary impact. He is responsible more than anyone, even
Nietzsche, for the 20th-century /episteme/, as most French first-rank
intellectuals agree (for example, Foucault, in "Les mots et les choses";
Sartre, in his preface to the "Poesies"' Roland Barthes who said in his
"Interview with Stephen Hearth," "All we do is repeat Mallarme";
Jakobson; Derrida; countless others).
In his "Notes" Mallarme saw the essence of language as
"fiction," which is to say it is based on paradox. In the terms of
Darwin, who describes it as "half art, half instinct," this means that
language, as related to all other reality (hypothetically nonlinguistic,
experimental) is "metaphorical" -- as we now say after Jakobson -- i.e.
above and below the horizontal line of on-going, spontaneous,
comparatively undammmed, life-flow or experience; later, as the medium
of whatever level of creativity, it bears this relation to the
conventional and rational real, sanity, sobriety, and so on.
In this sense Chomsky's view of language as innate and
determined is a half-truth and not very inspired. He would have been
better off if he had read and pondered, for example, Pascal, who three
centuries ago knew that "nature is itself only a first 'custom'"; or
Shakespeare: "The art itself is nature" (The Winter's Tale).
[...]
But we can't go into all the aspects of language here.
In terms of the project: since, on balance, it is unlikely the
effects will go the way of elite French thought on the subject, there
remains the probability that they will try to recast language, which is
at its best creatively free (as well as determined at its best by
organic totality, which gives it its ultimate meaning, coherence,
harmony), into the narrow mold of the computer, even at /its/ best.
[...]
COMPUTERS AND NEWSPEAK
In other words, there is no way to make a machine speak anything
other than newspeak, the language of /1984/. They may overcome that
flat dead robotic tone that our children enjoy -- by contrast, it gives
them the feeling that they are in command of life -- but the thought and
the style will be sprirtually inert. In that sense, the machines, or
the new language theories, will reflect their makers, who, in harnessing
themselves to a prefabricated goal, a program backed by a mental arms
race, will have been coopted and dehumanized. That flat (inner or
outer) tone is a direct result of cleaving to one-dimensionality, to the
dimension of the linear and "metonymic," the dimension of objectivity,
of technology and science, uninformed and uninspired by the creatively
free and whole-reflecting ("naive") vertical, or vibrant life itself.
That unidimensionality is visible in the immature personalities
of the zealots who push these programs: they are not much beyond
children in their Frankenstein eagerness to command the frightening
forces of the psyche, including sexuality, but more profoundly, life
itself, in its "existential" plenitude involving death.
People like that have their uses and can, with exemplary "tunnel
vision," get certain jobs done (like boring tunnels through miles of
rock). A group of them can come up with /engineering/ breakthroughs in
that sense, as in the case of the Manhattan project. But even that
follows the /creative/ breakthroughs of the Oppenheimers and Tellers and
Robert D. (the shepherd in France) and is rather pedestrian endeavor
under the management of some colonel.
When I tried to engage a leader of the project in discussion
about the nature of language, he refused, saying, "The humanities and
sciences are father apart than ever," clearly welcoming this
development. This is not only deplorable in itself; far worse,
according to the most accomplished mind on /their/ side of the fence in
this area; this man's widely-hailed thinking is doomed to a dead end,
because of its "unidimensionality!"
This is not the place to go into the whole saddening bent of
our times and the connection with totalitarianism, which is "integrated
systems" with a vengeance. But I doubt that this is what our founders
had in mind.
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End of AIList Digest
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