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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 177
AIList Digest Friday, 14 Dec 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 177
Today's Topics:
AI in Engineering - SIGART Special Issue,
Expert Systems - Micro Survey & Poker & Personal Assistants,
Planning - Constraint Propagation and Planning,
Report - Reflection and Semantics in LISP
Humor - Scientific Method,
Seminars - Three-valued Hintikkian Epistemic Logic (CSLI) &
The Sequential Nature of Unification (IBM-SJ)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thursday, 13 December 1984 00:28:33 EST
From: Duvvuru.Sriram@cmu-ri-cive.arpa
Subject: SIGART special issue on AI in Engineering
The deadline for submissions of abstracts for the special issue is extened
to January 15th for all Arpanet mailers. For more information on this
issue see SIGART newsletter dated July 1984. All submissions should be sent
to rj@cmu-cs-h.arpa.
Sriram
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 84 16:05:23 mst
From: "Arthur I. Karshmer" <arthur%nmsu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Expert systems
I am interested in obtaining information about expert systems that
run on micro computers and software to develop expert system on
micro processors. We are currently using a variety of micro's including
IBM PC'c and IBM-AT's.
Arthur I. Karshmer
arthur.nmsu@csnet-relay
------------------------------
Date: 12 Dec 84 10:35:28 EST
From: Jeffrey Shulman <SHULMAN@RUTGERS.ARPA>
Subject: ORAC's Poker Game
This past weekend (Sunday 12/9) "Ripley's Believe It or Not" had a
segment on ORAC's poker game. You should try to catch it in rerun.
Jeff
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 84 17:28:04 EST
From: David_West%UMich-MTS.Mailnet@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA
Subject: McGuire's Speculations on Personal Assistants (v2 #174)
-Of course, the biodisks of a future Walt Whitman would be
exhaustively analyzed not by a future Louis Untermeyer, but
by the latter's automated personal assistant, and the resulting
voluminously definitive biography would be read and enjoyed by the public's
personal assistants. Thus we would all be freed from untold
drudgery, to fulfil the vision of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1890):
"Living? Our servants will do that for us." :-)
------------------------------
Date: 12 Dec 84 13:30:24 EST
From: Louis Steinberg <STEINBERG@RUTGERS.ARPA>
Subject: Constraint Propagation and Planning
A recent message from chandra@uiucuxc@uiucdcs@RAND-RELAY.ARPA asked
about people working on Constraint Propagation and Planning ala
Stefik's MOLGEN.
The AI/VLSI Project at Rutgers is using this approach in building a
system to do design. Our thesis is that:
Design = Top Down Refinement + Constraint Propagation
Our current system aids in the design of digital VLSI circuits, but we
believe the ideas apply to the design of other kinds of things as
well. Design and the sort of planning chandra was talking about are
essentially the same problem, although there are some peculiar things
about blocks-world style domains that make planning/design issues a
bit different than they are in design of circuits or, to some extent,
programs.
The only paper I can point you to on our design stuff is:
Mitchell, Steinberg, and Shulman, "A Knowledge Based Approach to
Redesign", Proceedings of IEEE workshop on Principles of Knowledge
Based Systems, Denver, December 3-4, 1984
Also, many of our ideas flow from previous work on REdesign and on
constraint propagation in circuits - see, for instance:
Steinberg, L. and Mitchell, T., "A Knowledge Based Approach to
VLSI CAD", Proceedings of 21st Design Automation
Conference, June, 1984.
Kelly, V. "The CRITTER System: Automated Critiquing of Digital
Circuit Designs", Proceedings of 21st Design Automation
Conference, June, 1984.
Mitchell, T., Steinberg, L., Kedar-Cabelli, S., Kelly, V., Shulman,
J., Weinrich, T., "An Intelligent Aid for Circuit Redesign",
Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, 1983, pp. 274-278.
Kelly, V., and Steinberg, L., "The CRITTER System: Analyzing Digital
Circuits by Propagating Behaviors and Constraints",
Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, 1982, pp. 284-289. Also Report LCSR-TR-30,
Dept. of Computer Science, Rutgers University.
Mitchell, T., Steinberg, L., Smith, R. G., Schooley, P., Kelly, V.,
and Jacobs, H., "Representations for Reasoning about
Digital Circuits," Proceedings of the Seventh International
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1981, pp. 343-344.
------------------------------
Date: Wed 12 Dec 84 17:54:25-PST
From: Dikran Karagueuzian <DIKRAN@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
Subject: Report - Reflection and Semantics in LISP
[Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.]
NEW EDITION OF CSLI REPORT NO. 8
The final edition of Report No. CSLI--84--8, entitled ``Reflection and
Semantics in LISP'' by Brian Smith, has now been published. Copies
of this report may be obtained by writing to Dikran Karagueuzian at CSLI.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 6-Dec-84 00:42:44 PST
From: reid@Glacier.ARPA
Subject: Scientific Method
[Forwarded to the Xerox bikers' bboard by Trow.PA@XEROX.]
[Forwarded to the Xerox bboard by Ayers.PA@XEROX.]
[Forwarded from the Xerox bboard by PolleZ.PA@XEROX.]
[Forwarded to the Stanford bboard by Jock@SU-SCORE.]
[Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
Subject: net.bicycle.freewheel.cleaning: a reprise
As avid readers of this group may remember, we had a big row about cleaning
freewheels this summer, which was sort of ended when Fred at Varian, who is an
analytical chemist, and me, Brian at Stanford, who is a professor of CS, got
into a disagreement about something having to do with chemistry and Brian at
Stanford had the rare sense to keep his mouth shut.
However, despite being merely a computer scientist, and being quite willing to
work out of doors where the fumes won't kill him as fast, Brian remained
slightly unconvinced that the chemicals suggested by Fred at Varian were in
fact better at cleaning freewheels than the junk currently used by Brian at
Stanford. Brian had this vague suspicion that Fred the Chemist from Varian had
been exposed to lectures telling him to stay away from the kind of toxic
chemicals that Brian liked to use to clean freewheels, in much the same way
that Brian the CS professor lectures his students to stay away from Fortran
and IBM PC's.
So Brian went out in the rain and did some experiments. Actually, he had
another attack of good sense and stayed on his back porch, where the rain did
not fall directly on his head or on his freewheels or into his chemicals.
Now here a problem developed. Computer Scientists do not customarily do
experiments. Computer Scientists normally just say things because it makes
them feel good, and if they say them loudly and brashly enough then the things
become true. The current U.S. 5th generation computer project is a good
example of this.
But Brian at Stanford was once a physics major at the University of Maryland,
and he remembered how to run experiments after some consultation with his old
Physics 171 lab notebooks. The gist of it seemed to be that you were supposed
to do something twice, and the second would be identical to the first in every
way except for one controlled variable, and then if there were any differences
you could chalk them up to that variable. I think you're supposed to do a Chi
Square test in there too, or maybe draw some graphs, but this was just an
amateur experiment.
As the light dawned, Brian realized that he could do this experiment using
some hardware that was near and dear to his hacker's heart. Brian's wife had
given him a birthday present consisting of a real mother of a power saw, a
Milwaukee worm drive power saw, with a finetooth carbide blade. That saw is
just the cat's meow--you put the carbide blade on it, put on the requisite eye
and lung protectors, and wow, you can rip up anything you can reach. Joe-Bob
Briggs would be thrilled. The same feeling that you get when you first run
some code on a Cray, that feeling of almost limitless power, can be had much
more cheaply with a Milwaukee worm drive saw with a good carbide blade.
In particular, a Milwaukee worm drive saw with a carbide blade will saw a
freewheel clean in half. Lots of wild sparks shooting everywhere, but since
it's raining they probably won't set very much on fire. Ball bearings getting
caught in the carbide teeth and being whipped around at 200 mph and shot
across the yard, scaring the squirrels. Oh, this was great fun.
After counting his fingers and finding them all still intact, Brian took these
two demi-freewheels and stuck them in two old margarine tubs, which are one of
the principal tools of the serious amateur freewheel cleaner. Brian got out a
beaker (after all, this was an experiment, right? Experiments use beakers)
and measured out a beakerful of Berryman's Carburetor Cleaner [brian's
favorite toxic chemical for cleaning freewheels]. This beakerful didn't cover
the freewheel much, because it was a 60ml beaker, so then Brian poured a bunch
of glugs of Berryman's on top of the freewheel, until it was immersed. Brian
figured he would face the issue of how to clean the beaker and return it to
his kitchen at a later time. The label on the Berryman's can says it contains
Methylene Chloride, Cresylic acid, and Perchloroethylene.
Into the other margarine tub Brian put the other half of the freewheel, and
then poured out a bunch of glugs of "Gunk" brand degreasing liquid. The label
on the Gunk can says it contains Petroleum Distillates.
Brian is sufficiently afraid of Berryman's Carburetor Cleaner that he didn't
want to go messing with it by stirring it or sticking a brush into it, but it
was quite clear to Brian from the moment this experiment started that the Gunk
was going to need some help, so he took an acid brush and used it to scrub
parts of the surface of the freewheel that was soaking in Gunk.
Brian then went to eat a chicken chimichanga (hold the sour cream) and came
back about 20 minutes later to inspect the results of the experiment.
The result was that there was no grease on either freewheel half, but there
was still a pile of rust and black goop and garbage on the Gunk half, though
not as much in the places where it had been brushed. The Berryman's Carbuetor
Cleaner half was as clean as a new whistle, gleaming metal. A dead insect of
some sort was floating in the Berryman's, busily dissolving.
Brian longed for the skills of a real physical scientist--to weigh these
bisected freewheels on a microbalance, or look at them under high-powered
microscopes, or grind them up and feed them to a mass spectrometer, but none
of these machines were in evidence in the back yard, so instead he just washed
them off with soap and water and looked at them under a bright light.
What he saw is that the Berryman's Carburetor Cleaner gets freewheel halves
(and therefore, presumably, freewheels) really really clean, by dissolving or
decaying or disintegrating the grease and the rust and the insects. And that
the Gunk gets the grease off of freewheels, and if you scrub it will get the
dirt off, but it leaves the rust behind.
The moral of this story seems to be that if you are a responsible freewheel
owner and you clean it as often as it wants to be cleaned and you avoid
letting it get built up with dirt and you keep it out of the rain, all of
which are good things to do to a freewheel, that Gunk degreaser (or other
similar chemicals) works just fine. But if you let your freewheel go too far,
to get to the point where if it were teeth you know your dentist would give
you a long lecture about flossing, that you should clean it with some sort of
toxic waste such as Berryman's Carburetor Cleaner (which has been found "more
effective" in scientific experiments at a major university.....)
Brian Reid Reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA decwrl!glacier!reid
------------------------------
Date: Wed 12 Dec 84 17:54:25-PST
From: Dikran Karagueuzian <DIKRAN@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
Subject: Seminar - Three-valued Hintikkian Epistemic Logic (CSLI)
[Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.]
SUMMARY OF LAST WEEK'S NL1 SEMINAR
``Three-valued Hintikkian Epistemic Logic''
By Lauri Carlson
Hintikka's system of epistemic logic in K&B and Models for Modalities
contains a number of peculiar features (restricted range feature,
treatment of irreducible existential formulae) which skew the natural
interpretation of certain formulae and make it hard to ascertain
completeness of the system(s). For instance the formula (x)(Ey)Kx=y
is valid (and does not mean I "know who everyone is"), while
(Ex)(Ey)(x=y & -Kx=y) is inconsistent (and does not mean "There is
someone who might be two different people as far as I know"). Lauri
Carlson presented a version of epistemic logic which overcomes these
difficulties and can be shown complete with respect to its intended
Kripkean style semantics.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 84 09:35:13 PST
From: IBM San Jose Research Laboratory Calendar
<calendar%ibm-sj.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Reply-to: IBM-SJ Calendar <CALENDAR%ibm-sj.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Seminar - The Sequential Nature of Unification (IBM-SJ)
[Forwarded from the SRI-AI bboard.]
IBM San Jose Research Lab
5600 Cottle Road
San Jose, CA 95193
Mon., Dec. 17 Computer Science Seminar
2:00 P.M. ON THE SEQUENTIAL NATURE OF UNIFICATION
Audit. A Unification of terms is a crucial step in resolution
theorem proving with applications to a variety of
symbolic computation problems. It will be shown that
the general problem is log-space complete for P, even
if infinite substitutions are allowed. Thus, it is
"popularly unlikely" that unification can enjoy
substantial speed-up in a parallel model of
computation. A fast parallel (NC) algorithm for term
matching, an important subcase of unification, will
also be presented. This talk assumes no familiarity
with unification or its applications.
Dr. C. Dwork, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Laboratory for Computer Science
Host: J. Halpern
[...]
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End of AIList Digest
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