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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 005
AIList Digest Tuesday, 10 Jan 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 5
Today's Topics:
AI and Weather Forecasting - Request,
Expert Systems - Request,
Pattern Recognition & Cognition,
Courses - Reaction to PSU's AI Course,
Programming Lanuages - LISP Advantages
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Date: Mon 9 Jan 84 14:15:13-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: AI and Weather Forecasting
I have been talking with people interested in AI techniques for
weather prediction and meteorological analysis. I would appreciate
pointers to any literature or current work on this subject, especially
* knowledge representations for spatial/temporal reasoning;
* symbolic description of weather patterns;
* capture of forecasting expertise;
* inference methods for estimating meteorological variables
from (spatially and temporally) sparse data;
* methods of interfacing symbolic knowledge and heuristic
reasoning with numerical simulation models;
* any weather-related expert systems.
I am aware of some recent work by Gaffney and Racer (NBS Trends and
Applications, 1983) and by Taniguchi et al. (6th Pat. Rec., 1982),
but I have not been following this field. A bibliography or guide
to relevant literature would be welcome.
-- Ken Laws
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Date: 5 January 1984 13:47 est
From: RTaylor.5581i27TK at RADC-MULTICS
Subject: Expert Systems Info Request
Hi, y'all...I have the names (hopefully, correct) of four expert
systems/tools/environments (?). I am interested in the "usual": that
is, general info, who to contact, feedback from users, how to acquire
(if we want it), etc. The four names I have are: RUS, ALX, FRL, and
FRED.
Thanks. Also, thanks to those who provided info previously...I have
info (similar to that requested above) on about 15 other
systems/tools/environments...some of the info is a little sketchy!
Roz (aka: rtaylor at radc-multics)
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Date: 3 Jan 84 20:38:52-PST (Tue)
From: decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!rh @ Ucb-Vax
Subject: Re: Loop detection and classical psychology
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.1114
One of the truly amazing things about the human brain is that its pattern
recognition capabilities seem limitless (in extreme cases). We don't even
have a satisfactory way to describe pattern recognition as it occurs in
our brains. (Well, maybe we have something acceptable at a minimum level.
I'm always impressed by how well dollar-bill changers seem to work.) As
a friend of mine put it, "the brain immediately rejects an infinite number
of wrong answers," when working on a problem.
Randwulf (Randy Haskins); Path= genrad!mit-eddie!rh
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Date: Fri 6 Jan 84 10:11:01-PST
From: Ron Brachman <Brachman at SRI-KL>
Subject: PSU's First AI Course
Wow! I actually think it's kind of neat (but, of course, very wacko). I
particularly like making people think about the ethical and philosphical
considerations at the same time as their thinking about minimax, etc.
------------------------------
Date: Wed 4 Jan 84 17:23:38-PST
From: Richard Treitel <TREITEL@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: Re: AIList Digest V2 #1
[in response to Herb Lin's questions]
Well, 2 more or less answers 1. One of the main reasons why Lisp and not C
is the language of many people's choice for AI work is that you can easily cons
up at run time a piece of data which "is" the next action you are going to
take. In most languages you are restricted to choosing from pre-written
actions, unless you include some kind of interpreter right there in your AI
program. Another reason is that Lisp has all sorts of extensibility.
As for 3, the obvious response is that in Pascal control has to be routed to an
IF statement before it can do any good, whereas in a production system, control
automatically "goes" to any production that is applicable. This is highly
over-simplified and may not be the answer you were looking for.
- Richard
------------------------------
Date: Friday, 6 Jan 1984 13:10-PST
From: narain@rand-unix
Subject: Reply to Herb Lin: Why is Lisp good for AI?
A central issue in AI is knowledge representation. Experimentation with a
new KR scheme often involves defining a new language. Often, definitions
and meanings of new languages are conceived of naturally in terms of
recursive (hierarchical) structures. For instance, many grammars of English-
like frontends are recursive, so are production system definitions, so
are theorem provers.
The abstract machinery underlying Lisp, the Lambda Calculus, is also
inherently recursive, yet very simple and powerful. It involves the notion
of function application to symbolic expressions. Functions can themselves
be symbolic expressions. Symbolic expressions provide a basis for SIMPLE
implementation and manipulation of complex data/knowledge/program
structures.
It is therefore possible to easily interpret new language primitives in
terms of Lisp's already very high level primitives. Thus, Lisp is a great
"machine language" for AI.
The usefulness of a well understood, powerful, abstract machinery of the
implementation language is probably more obvious when we consider Prolog.
The logical interpretation of Prolog programs helps considerably in their
development and verification. Logic is a convenient specification language
for a lot of AI, and it is far easier to 'compile' those specifications
into a logic language like Prolog than into Pascal. For instance, take
natural language front ends implemented in DCGs or database/expert-system
integrity and redundancy constraints.
The fact that programs can be considered as data is not true only of Lisp.
Even in Pascal you can analyze a Pascal program. The nice thing in Lisp,
however, is that because of its few (but very powerful) primitives,
programs tend to be simply structured and concise (cf. claims in recent
issues of this bulletin that Lisp programs were much shorter than Pascal
programs). So naturally it is simpler to analyze Lisp programs in Lisp
than it is to analyze Pascal programs in Pascal.
Of course, Lisp environments have evolved for over two decades and
contribute no less to its desirability for AI. Some of the nice features
include screen-oriented editors, interactiveness, debugging facilities, and
an extremely simple syntax.
I would greatly appreciate any comments on the above.
Sanjai Narain
Rand.
------------------------------
Date: 6 Jan 84 13:20:29-PST (Fri)
From: ihnp4!mit-eddie!rh @ Ucb-Vax
Subject: Re: Herb Lin's questons on LISP etc.
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.1129
One of the problems with LISP, however, is it does not force one
to subscribe the code of good programming practices. I've found
that the things I have written for my bridge-playing program (over
the last 18 months or so) have gotten incredibly crufty, with
some real brain-damaged patches. Yeah, I realize it's my fault;
I'm not complaining about it because I love LISP, I just wanted
to mention some of the pitfalls for people to think about. Right
now, I'm in the process of weeding out the cruft, trying to make
it more clearly modular, decrease the number of similar functions
and so on. Sigh.
Randwulf (Randy Haskins); Path= genrad!mit-eddie!rh
------------------------------
Date: 7 January 1984 15:08 EST
From: Herb Lin <LIN @ MIT-ML>
Subject: my questions of last Digest on differences between PASCAL
and LISP
So many people replied that I send my thanks to all via the list. I
very much appreciate the time and effort people put into their
comments.
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End of AIList Digest
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