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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 076
AIList Digest Friday, 22 Jun 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 76
Today's Topics:
VLSI - Panel on Chips for AI & Trilogy CPU Failure,
Databases - Oxford English Dictionary goes On-Line,
Logic - Common Sense Summer,
Mind & Brain - Artificial People & Neural Connections & Recall,
Seminar - Natural Language Parsing
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Date: 20 June 1984 0512-EDT
From: Dave Touretzky at CMU-CS-A
Subject: panel on chips for AI
[Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
Dana Seccombe is looking for people to participate in a panel discussion
at ISSCC (International Solid State Circuits Conference) to be held in
February '85 in New York City. The topic of the panel is issues in the
realization of AI systems using VLSI technology, e.g. AI inference
engines, 5th generation architectures, or Lisp processors that are or
could be implemented using VLSI.
If you would be interested in participating in this panel, please contact
Mr. Seccombe at (408) 257-7000 x4854. DON'T contact me, because I don't
know any more about it than what you've just read.
------------------------------
Date: 19 Jun 1984 11:07:46-EDT
From: Doug.Jensen at CMU-CS-G
Subject: Trilogy CPU design fails
[Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
After 4 years and $220 million, Gene Amdahl's Trilogy Corp. has declared
their attempt to build a computer from 2.5" diameter whole wafer VLSI a
failure. They never got even one wafer functioning correctly much less ever
powered up a machine. Trilogy thus follows in the path of TI and many other
whole wafer failures before them over the past decade; the others were less
known because they were military projects. Trilogy was one of, and probably
THE, most publicized and heavily funded new startup in the history of the
computer business. They were spending $7 million/month and estimated that
they would need at least another $100 million just to get them to mid-85,
while their first machine was still two years beyond that (more than two
years later than they estimated when they started in 1980). Each 2.5" wafer
was to contain about 60K ECL gates, with four layers of metalization, and
dissipate about 1000 watts. The CPU was to have nine wafers and excute 32
MIPS. Trilogy was even further behind on the other computer subsystems. They
now say they may try a smaller machine, or just subsystems (e.g., memories),
or just wafers and related technology. DEC, Sperry, and CII-HB were among
the investors in Trilogy.
------------------------------
Date: 13-Jun-84 02:30 PDT
From: William Daul Augmentation Systems Division / MDC
Subject: Oxford English Dictionary goes On-Line
[Forwarded from the Human-Nets Digest by Laws@SRI-AI.]
LONDON -- ...the Oxford University Press has announced plans to
publish a computerized version of the venerable Oxford English
Dictionary.
With the help of a $1.4 million donation from IBM United Kingdom Ltd.,
the British publisher will produce the first fully integrated edition
of the 13-volume dictionary since the original work was begun in 1884.
That first edition took 44 years to complete; the publisher said it
will be able to complete the second edition in a fraction of that
time.
...
The New Oxford English Dictionary, as the new version has been named,
will constitute the largest electronic dictionary data base in the
world. The present multi-volume version consists of more than 20,000
printed pages. Computerization of the dictionary is a massive
undertaking that will involve the data entry of about 60 million words
used to record, describe and illustrate 500,000 words and phrases.
The Oxford University Press has hired International Computaprint Corp.
of Fort Washington, Pa., to do the data entry. A staff of 120 people
has been assigned the task of completing the data entry by this
September.
... Additionally, the company (IBM) is providing two data processing
specialists who will work on the dictionary project for two years.
Once the electronic dictionary is finished, it could be made available
on-line, on magnetic tape, on laser/video disk or possible, on a
single integrated circuit...
The publisher estimated the project will cost $10 million. The
British government awarded the company a 3 year grant of roughly
$420,000 -- or 25% of the development cost -- for the dictionary.
The University of Waterloo in Ontario will conduct a survey for the
publisher of the potential users of an electronic dictionary. The
university will also help develop software that would be needed to
take advantage of an electronic dictionary.
------------------------------
Date: Wed 20 Jun 84 22:06:12-PDT
From: Dikran Karagueuzian <DIKRAN@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
Subject: Newsletter, June 21, No. 37
[Forwarded from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.]
COMMON SENSE SUMMER
CSLI is sponsoring a summer-long workshop called "Common Sense Summer."
It has long been agreed that language use and intelligent behavior in
general require a great deal of knowledge about the commonsense world. But
heretofore no one has embarked on a large-scale effort to encode this
knowledge. The aim of Common Sense Summer is to make the first three months
of such an effort. We are attempting to axiomatize in formal logic
significant amounts of commonsense knowledge about the physical,
psychological and social worlds. We are concentrating on eight domains:
shape and texture, spatial relationships, lexical semantics of cause
and possession, properties of materials, certain mental phenomena,
communication, relations between textual entities and entities in the world,
and responsibility. We are attempting to make these axiomatizations mutually
consistent and mutually supportive. We realize, of course, that all that
can be accomplished during the summer is tracing the broad outlines of each
of the domains and, perhaps, discovering several hard problems.
Nine graduate students from several universities are participating in the
workshop full-time. In addition, a number of other active researchers in
the fields of knowledge representation, natural language, and vision are
participating in meetings of various sizes and purposes. There will be two
or three presentations during the summer, giving progress reports for the
general public. The workshop is being coordinated by the writer.
--Jerry Hobbs
[...]
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 84 17:25:03 PDT
From: Charlie Crummer <crummer@AEROSPACE>
Subject: Human Models
The foundation of the reasoning constructed by Jules Greenwall in his note
depends on being able to specify exactly the behavior of atoms in molecules.
The precise description required depends on the molecular physics. Unfor-
tunately study is still going on. The study of the molecule is a many-body
problem for which there is no closed-form solution. Another fly in the
ointment is the fact that the behavior of atoms in molecules depends, albeit
in second order, on the nature of the nucleus. This is another branch of
physics that is very active, i.e. much is not known. What one would get
for a model built on such a fuzzy foundation is of dubious value.
--Charlie
------------------------------
Date: 18 Jun 84 10:07:07-PDT (Mon)
From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rlgvax!cvl!umcp-cs!aplvax!lwt1 @ Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain
Article-I.D.: aplvax.663
The other thing to note is that while each 'memory cell' in a computer
has ~2 connections, each 'memory cell' in the brain has ~100. Since
processing power is relative to (cells * connections), a measure of
relative capacities is not sufficient for comparison between the brain
and the CRAY.
-Lloyd W. Taylor
... seismo!umcp-cs!aplvax!lwt1
---I will have had been there before, soon---
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 84 06:39 EDT
From: dmrussell.pa@XEROX.ARPA
Subject: Objection to Crane: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain -- V2
Sorry, but I must make a serious objection to your claim that
"... a person can be enabled (through
hypnosis or by asking him the right way) to remember
infinite details of any experience of this or prior life
times ... "
I object to the use of the term "infinite" in describing memory. That
simply isn't true. If you just mean "large number", then say so. The
infinite memory capacity problem was addressed once (in either AIDigest
or HumanNets, I've forgotten) and found indefensible.
The phrase "prior life times" assumes reincarnation, a completely
unsupported assumption.
"of any experience" demands that all experiences can be recalled, not
just *recognized*, or *restored* but recalled! Do you really want the
references to show that this isn't true? Memory recall under hypnosis
has been found to be just as reconstructive (perhaps more so) as normal
memory. Hypnotic states buy you some recall, but not that much!
We haven't taken these things into account because they simply aren't
true, or at the very least, can't be supported by anything other than
religious belief.
-- D.M. Russell. --
------------------------------
Date: 18 Jun 84 15:08:10-PDT (Mon)
From: ihnp4!ihldt!stewart @ Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: Re: A Quick Question - Mind and Brain
Article-I.D.: ihldt.2382
> (1) Subconscious memory - a person can be enabled (through
> hypnosis or by asking him the right way) to remember
> infinite details of any experience of this or prior life
> times.
I don't know where the "prior life" part came from, but this claim is
usually an incorrect extrapolation of studies that indicate no such
thing.
What has been established is that people can be induced to remember
things that they considered forgotten. This isn't by a long shot
the same thing as saying that we remember everything that's ever
happened to us.
If you have evidence to support this claim, by all means present it. If
not, please spare us.
Bob Stewart
ihldt!stewart
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 84 08:23 EDT
From: Dehn@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA (Joseph W. Dehn III)
Subject: Turing test - legal implications
...computers someday might act like people... ...legal system is based
on capability for rational conversation... ...what will we do????...
...will we have to reject rational conversation as the test of
membership in society?...
Sorry, I must have forgotten, but why exactly do we WANT to distinguish
between humans and machines?
-jwd3
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 84 14:14 EST
From: Huhns <huhns%scarolina.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Seminar - Natural Language Parsing
CONSTRAINT PROPAGATION SENTENCE PARSING
Somnuek Anakwat
Center for Machine Intelligence
College of Engineering
University of South Carolina
2pm Thursday, June 21, Room 230
An algorithm for parsing English sentences by the method of
constraint propagation is presented. This method can be used to
recognize English sentences and indicate whether those sentences
are syntactically correct or incorrect according to grammar
rules. The central idea of constraint propagation in sentence
analysis is to form all possible combinations of the parts of
speech from adjacent words in the input sentence, and then
compare those combinations with English grammar rules for
allowable combinations. The parts of speech for each word may be
modified, left alone, or eliminated according to these rules.
The analysis of these combinations of the parts of speech
normally proceeds from left to right. The most significant
feature of the algorithm presented is that grammar constraints
propagate backward when it is possible. The algorithm is very
useful when the given sentence contains words which have multiple
properties. The algorithm also has an efficient parallel
implementation.
Results of applying the algorithm to several English
sentences are included. An interpretation of the algorithm's
performance and some topics for future research are discussed as
well.
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End of AIList Digest
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