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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 097
AIList Digest Saturday, 28 Jul 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 97
Today's Topics:
LISP - Pascal-Based Interpreter,
AI Culture - Geneology and Citation Linkages,
Humor - Naming Names & COME-FROM & Chaostron & Sex,
Jargon - Teleolgy and Teleonomy,
Philosophy - Mind and Body,
Intelligence - Turing Test & Understanding,
Seminar - LISP Debugger,
Workshop - Hardware Design Verification
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Date: 27 Jul 1984 14:49:59 EDT
From: Richard F. Hartung <HARTUNG@USC-ISI.ARPA>
Subject: LISP interpreter
I have a LISP interpreter written in PASCAL by Chris Meyers and myself.
It has about 90 functions and is approximately MACLISP in dialect.
It does its own garbage collection and is written in standard PASCAL.
I currently have it running on an HP-1000 and a VAX under VMS. It has
also been used with a Honeywell 6000. It can easily be cut down in size
to run on small systems and is also easily expandable. If you would like a
copy write to me on the net at: HARTUNG@USC-ISI.ARPA or write to:
Dr. Michael A. Moran
Lockheed Missles and Space Co.
Advanced Software Laboratory
O/92-10 B/255
3170 Porter Drive
Palo Alto, CA 94304
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 1984 12:11:35 EDT
From: Macintosh Devaluation Manager <AXLER%upenn-1100.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Geneology & Naming Names
1. The notion of studying the history of any subject via its intellectual
linkages is hardly a new one. Advisor-advisee connections are important, but
an equally relevant approach is via citation-tracing -- looking at who has
quoted whom, and in what context. The best tool for this type of work is
the Science Citation Index (from ISI). Here, you can look up any given
article and find out who has referenced it during the past 12 months. With
a bit of patience one can do a great deal of tracing by switching back and
forth between the index and various articles.
2. David Throop's name problem was, as I recall, proposed in a more enjoyable
form by Lewis Carroll, in the scene where the White Knight offers to sing a
song to Alice. We learn not only what the song is, but what its name is, and
what both the song and its name are called.
(I think Hofstadter carries this even further in Goedel, Escher, Bach, too...)
------------------------------
Date: Sun 22 Jul 84 23:49:49-PDT
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: CACM Articles
The July CACM has a few items that may be of interest to AIers.
The first is a letter to the editor from Rellim C. Drahcir pointing
out the relevance of Clark's COME-FROM statement to AI. (COME-FROM
is an alternative to the GOTO. Drahcir claims that COME-FROM simplifies
proof procedures: "It can be shown that an arbitrary starting point can
be utilized for any program, given a clear statement of its terminus.
Thus we have a computational analog of the long-sought and very
elusive 'solve problem' computer instruction.")
Another letter, from Vic Vyssotsky, explains the origins of the
famous (phony) BTL TM on the Chaostron learning system. The
Chaostron memo was reprinted in the April CACM.
The journal also contains news notes on a Zurich workshop on AI
in economics and management and a Kansas City symposium on the role
of AI in command and control.
-- Ken Laws
------------------------------
Date: Thu 26 Jul 84 09:38:10-CDT
From: David Throop <LRC.Throop@UTEXAS-20.ARPA>
Subject: infinite sexual partners
[Forwarded from the UTexas-20 bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
"Due to the increase in the number of herpes cases reported, the staff at
the Student Health Center suggests that people limit themselves to a finite
number of sexual partners." -Daily Texan, September '83
We decided at the time that two monuments were in order. One is for the guy
that has had a denumerably infinite number of sexual partners. But the other,
still bigger monument would be for the guy that has had a nondenumerably
infinite number of sexual partners.
But we were curious. Who are these guys? And where do they get off?
The guy that has had a denumerably infinite number of partners is obvious.
He's the guy that slept with everyone now living, who has ever lived or who
ever will live. But the other guy?
Our investigations show that this guy is into group sex. He's the one that
has slept with the power set of everyone now living, who has ever lived or who
ever will live.
But that leaves us with an unanswered question. Consider a woman named
Polly who has slept with both these guys. The first guy has slept with Polly,
while the other guy has, strictly, slept with the singlton set containing only
Polly.
Which should be more satisfying?
------------------------------
Date: 25 Jul 84 8:29:49-PDT (Wed)
From: ihnp4!whuxle!pez @ Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: re: AI-speak ?? (from SAIL's BBOARD)
Article-I.D.: whuxle.539
Please note that not only has biology exiled teleology
but they have replaced it with teleonomy, meaning
purposefulness in name only, that is to help in our
understanding rather than to explain. See Konrad
Lorenz Introduction to Ethology.
Paul Zeldin.
------------------------------
Date: 22 Jul 84 23:24:26-PDT (Sun)
From: ihnp4!houxm!mhuxl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!ncsu!uvacs!edison!jso@Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: Re: more on atheism (+ cross-over to "mind" discussion)
Article-I.D.: edison.314
> I know not what Buddha says, but as for Descartes, cogito ergo sum!
> Yes, Descartes believed the real world could be proved to exist, and
> his famous propostion is but his first step: he proved he existed.
> Please be kinder to Rene next time. He would not rest well if he
> thought his method could be generally perceived to state the opposite
> of what he meant.
> David Rubin
> {allegra|astrovax|princeton}!fisher!david
He *believed* that the real world could be proved to exist,
but he certainly didn't prove it logically. It's been a while since
I read his "proof", but I seem to remember something like this:
He proves he exists, as a thinking entity, because the one thing
he can't deny is that he thinks. He also experiences the external
world through his senses; this can either be real, he decides, or
the action of a "deceiving demon" (maya, illusion). Fine so far.
How does he then "prove" that the outside world is real as opposed to
some "deception"? Because God is Good. He proves this quite logically,
he simply has some very questionable axioms...
This is similar to his thoughts on mind-body dualism. He reached the
conclusion that the mind (soul?) and body were of separate substances,
and therefore could not interact. But of course they did, and faced
with a nice, rational conclusion, and "facts" that disagreed with it,
he of course retained his conclusion, giving as explanation that
the mind and body couldn't interact, except in the pineal gland. [Huh?]
Kind of suggests that there's something wrong with mind-body dualism.
[Interesting how these netnews discussions cross-fertilize.
To net.ai'ers: Note that this says nothing against the existence
of the mind, but indicates that maybe there is no real duality,
(the universe is one...), or maybe no real body (hmm...)]
John Owens
...!{ {duke mcnc}!ncsu!uvacs houxm brl-bmd scgvaxd }!edison!jso
------------------------------
Date: 31 Jul 84 2:44:54-EDT (Tue)
From: hplabs!tektronix!uw-beaver!cornell!vax135!ukc!west44!gurr@Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: Re: Should The Turing test be modified with the times?
Article-I.D.: west44.276
I think that we're all missing something here - the Turing test was not
designed to test how like a human a machine could be, but to test whether
or not a machine could appear to think. Adding such facilities to the test
such as a video link merely makes the test into an imitation game. This
is not what the test was designed for.
Personally, I think the test is totally inconclusive and irrelevant. It gives
merely a subjective qualitative answer to a question which we cannot answer
satisfactorily about other people, or even about ourselves (from some of the
items on USENET, I'm sure some people don't think :-) !!!).
mcvax
"Hello shoes. I'm sorry \
but I'm going to have to ukc!west44!gurr
stand in you again!" /
vax135
Dave Gurr, Westfield College, Univ. of London, England.
------------------------------
Date: 27 Jul 84 08:42:24 PDT (Friday)
From: Hoffman.es@XEROX.ARPA
Subject: Re: Ph.D. and 'understanding'
From H. E. Booker in a piece in "Science" magazine (maybe around summer 1973):
"At the conclusion of an ideal undergraduate education, a man's brain
works well. He is convinced, not that he knows everything or even that
he knows everything in a particular field, but that he stands a
reasonable chance of understanding anything that someone else has
already understood. Any subject that he can look up in a book he feels
that he too can probably understand. On the other hand, if he cannot
look it up in a book, he is uncertain what to do next. This is where
graduate education comes in. Unlike the recipient of a Bachelor's Degree,
the recipient of a Doctor's Degree should have a reasonable confidence in
his ability to face what is novel and to continue doing so throughout life."
--Rodney Hoffman
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 1984 17:34 EDT
From: HENRY%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
Subject: Seminar - LISP Debugger
[Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.]
Steps Toward Better Debugging Tools For Lisp
Henry Lieberman
Thursday, 2 August 1984, 3 PM
7th floor playroom, 545 Technology Square
Although contemporary Lisp systems are renown for their excellent debugging
facilities, better debugging tools are still urgently needed. A basic flaw
with the tools found in most implementations is that they are oriented
towards inspection of specific pieces of program or data, and they offer
little help in the process of localizing bugs within a large body of code.
Among conventional tools, a stepper is the best aid for visualizing the
operation of a procedure in such a way that a bug can be found without prior
knowledge of its location. But steppers have not been popular, largely
because they are often too verbose and difficult to control.
We present a new stepper for Lisp, Zstep, which integrates a stepper with a
real-time full-screen text editor to display programs and data. Zstep
presents evaluation of a Lisp expression by visually replacing the expression
by its value, conforming to an intuitive model of evaluation as a
substitution process. The control structure of Zstep allows a user to "zoom
in" on a bug, examining the program first at a very coarse level of detail,
then at increasingly finer levels until the bug is located. Zstep keeps a
history of evaluations, and can be run either forward or backward. Zstep
borrows several techniques from the author's example-oriented programming
environment, Tinker, including a novel approach to handling error conditions.
A videotaped demonstration of Zstep will be shown.
------------------------------
Date: Wed 25 Jul 84 18:38:01-PDT
From: Dikran Karagueuzian <DIKRAN@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
Subject: Workshop - Hardware Design Verification
[Forwarded from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.]
WORKSHOP ON HARDWARE DESIGN VERIFICATION
The IFIP Working Groups 10.2 and 10.5. Program have issued a call for papers
to be delivered at a workshop to be held on November 26 and 27, 1984, in
Technical University of Darmstadt, F.R. Germany. The workshop is on hardware
design verification and will cover all aspects of verification methods for
hardware systems, including temporal logic, language issues, and application
of AI techniques, as well as other areas.
The workshop committee is chaired by Hans Eveking, Institut fuer
Datentechnik, Technical University of Darmstadt, D-6100 Darmstadt, Fed. Rep.
Germany, (49) (6151) 162075, and includes Stephen Crocker, Aerospace
Corporation, P.O. Box 92957, Los Angeles, California 90009.
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End of AIList Digest
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