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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 171
AIList Digest Thursday, 6 Dec 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 171
Today's Topics:
Applications - MACSYMA,
AI Tools - XLISP Source & Franz Lisp -> Common Lisp,
Humor - Typagrophical Erorrs,
AI News - Recent Articles,
Algorithms - Sorting Malgorithm,
Knowledge Representation - OPS5 Disjunctions,
Seminars - Scheme Overview (Yale) &
Principles of OBJ2 (MIT) &
QUTE Functional Unification Language (IBM-SJ)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 4 Dec 84 13:52 CDT
From: Joyce_Graham <jgraham%ti-eg.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: References to MACSYMA applications
I am putting together a little pitch for the TI Journal on the usefulness
of MACSYMA. What I would like are references to articles about projects
that made use of MACSYMA. I would also welcome any folklore that may be
floating around. Can anyone help me?
Joyce Graham
Texas Instruments Incorporated
Post Box 801
M/S 8007
McKinney, TX 75069
from Arpanet - jgraham%ti-eg@csnet-relay
from Csnet - jgraham@ti-eg
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 84 14:46:02 PST
From: Randy Schulz <lcc.randy@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA>
Subject: Wanted: xlisp source
I'd like to find out how to get the source for version 1.2 of xlisp.
I'll be using it on a Macintosh, and compiling it with the Manx C
compiler. If there are multiple versions of the source, I'd like to
get the one most appropriate to that environment. Thanx in advance.
Randy Schulz
Locus Computing Corp.
lcc!randy@ucla-cs
trwrb!lcc!randy
{trwspp,ucivax}!ucla-va!ucla-cs!lcc!randy
{ihnpr,randvax,sdcrdcf,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!lcc!randy
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 1984 13:22 EST
From: "Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>
Subject: Franz Lisp -> Common Lisp
Since my post appeared on this list (and thus received wider circulation
than I had really intended) I've had a number of requests for the Franz
Lisp to Common Lisp Conversion Guide. When and if this document (or any
other conversion guide) is available, I'll put it in some place easily
accessible via arpanet and will send a pointer to AIList. Don't
hold your breath, however. So far, the response from people who have
done conversions is underwhelming, and while I would like to see this
document come into being, I do not have the time to go re-learn Franz
and gain the relevant conversion experience myself. All I can say at
present is that the people who have done Franz to Common Lisp
conversions have reported very little trouble.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 84 9:42:45 EST
From: Pete Bradford (CSD UK) <bradford@Amsaa.ARPA>
Subject: Typagrophical Erorrs.
Those who, like me, enjoyed the Palm Springs Desert Sun paragraph
which was reprinted in the New Yorker would enjoy an article in the just
published Winter edition of the British periodical, Punch. The article is
entitled 'Wernit'.
I cannot possibly describe it (is this a deficiency of the English
language?!), but Punch is widely available over here, at better bookshops
and in most college libraries. Bear in mind when reading it that the
computer referred to belongs to the British newspaper 'The Guardian', and
that this paper is notorious for its typos.
Good reading,
PJB
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 1 Dec 84 06:03:54 cst
From: leff@smu (Laurence Leff)
Subject: AI News
Electronics Week, November 19, 1984
ICOT Details Its Progress. Reports on work done on prolog
machines, a new logic language called Mandala. page 20
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Sept 1984, Volume SE-10, No 5
Reusability Through Program Transformations - discusses using a
transformation-based system to convert a lisp program to Fortran. page 589
Empirical Studies of Programming Knowledge. - this is a cognitive science
study on the use of plans by experts and novice programmers. Should
be of interest to those following the Plan Calculus work from MIT. page 595
IEEE Computer October 1984, Volume 17 1984
This is their Centennial Issue. The articles here are summaries of
various divisions of computer research and practice.
Relevant articles are "Knowledge-Based Expert Systems" by Frederick
Hayes-Roth, Robotics by John F. Jarivis, Computing in Medicine by
K. Preston Jr. et. al. and Speech Processing by Harold Andrews
IEEE Spectrum December 1984,
A one column article on Do What I Mean facilities. page 29
Electronics Week November 26, 1984, page 50:
Article on venture between Isis Systems Ltd and Imperial Chemical
Industries to market expert systems.
Infoworld November 12, 1984 page 36-41
Article on marketing natural language interfaces for microcomputers.
Datamation, November 1 1984
Page 10, the following sentence was found in their Look Ahead section:
"TRW, the big defense contractor, is looking for some 500 symbolic
processors (Lisp Machines, that is) for use in a global weather
mapping application.
"The Overselling of Expert Ssytems" by Gary R. Martins page 76
Rather scathing attack on AI. If you enjoyed Drew McDermott's Artificial
Intelligence meets Natural Stupidity, you should read this one too.
"The Blossoming of European AI" by Paul Tate page 85
discusses work by Imperial Chemical Industries, Elf Aquitaine,Schlumberger
and Framentec (set up by Teknowledge). Sinclair has announced a Prolog
for one of its home machines and expects to have expert system products
out for it soon. Also Expert System Internationals has announced
ES/P Advisor for $1300.00 (runs on 16 bit micros). Also has discussions
of management reactions to AI and work done on along the lines of R/1.
"AI and software Engineering" by Robert Kowalski page 92
Talks about using AI techniques to handle a program to work with the
British Naturalization Act. Presents AI as a technique like decision
tables, dataflow diagrams to improve productivity in general software
development, e.g. business sytems.
Page 163: review of about 10 books on AI.
Electronic Week, November 5, 1984 page 24
Discusses DARPA automated vehicle effort.
Electronics Week, December 3, 1984.
Cautiously Optimistic Tone Set for Fifth Generation Page 57-63 (Note
that this is a six page article.)
Discussed progress of Japanese ICOT effort. In the words of Susan Gerhart who
was quoted in the article, "The single thing that impresses me the most did
not really come out clearly at the conference but did at the ICOT open-house
demonstration the next week; it was that so much new stuff was all working
together -- new hardware, basic software, and application demos--all of it
based on logic programming." Note that the *operating system* for the new
system is written in a logic programming language called KL1.
------------------------------
Date: 5 Dec 84 1806 EST (Wednesday)
From: Lee.Brownston@CMU-CS-A.ARPA
Subject: A baaaadalgorithm for sorting
One way to make a sort of n items very expensive is to compute the set of all
n! permutations of the n items and map each permutation onto its Godel number.
(One can find opportunities to dawdle in generating primes, too.) Finding
the sorted permutation is equivalent to finding the minimum or maximum
Godel number if the Godelization preserved order. This can be accomplished
by sorting the Godel numbers. Thus, the problem of sorting n items has been
"reduced" to that of permuting, Godelizing, and sorting n! integers. The
recursion cannot be infinite, of course, but may stop as soon as the use
of resources exceeds that of some turkey who thinks he has come up with a
slower sort.
------------------------------
Date: 4 Dec 1984 0942-PST (Tuesday)
From: ricks%ucbic@Berkeley (Rick L Spickelmier)
Subject: More on OPS5 Disjunctions
The idea of separating the 'sd' field from the 'passtx' element
and creating separate elements for each 'sd' were presented in
two submissions (ricks%ucbic@berkeley and Lee.Brownston@CMU-CS-A).
I would like to point out a difference that looks like it is important
in the original application (of neihart).
Lee's submission distinguished the two 'sd' elements by making sure
they were not connected to the same node (the 'value' attribute).
In this particular example it does not make sense to tie the two 'sd's
together, but in general, you may want to connect two or more of these
type of terminals (from a single element) to the same node (mosfets
used as capacitors have their source and drain connected together,
and in TTL design, nand gates are occassionally used as inverters by
tying their inputs together).
The above argument is why I put unique tags on each 'sd' working memory
element so this could be used to distinguish them, and thus allowing them
to be tied to the same node.
Rick Spickelmier (ricks@berkeley)
Electronics Research Laboratory, UC Berkeley
------------------------------
Date: 3 Dec 1984 16:26 EST (Mon)
From: "Daniel S. Weld" <WELD%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA>
Subject: Seminar - Scheme Overview (Yale)
[Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.]
AI Revolving Seminar
An Overview of Yale Scheme
Jonathan Rees
Wednesday 12/5/84 4:00pm 8th floor playroom
Yale Scheme, also known as T, was developed over the past three years by
the Yale Computer Science Facility. It is being used as a production
Lisp system at Yale, UCLA, and elsewhere. It features a compiler which
generates native VAX and MC68000 code and compiles closure-intensive
code efficiently enough that closures may be used in preference to
record structures for many applications which are space- or
time-critical. I will discuss how the language and implementation work
and how T is different from other Scheme and Lisp systems, and give a
list of what I consider to be unsolved problems in the design of
Scheme-like languages.
------------------------------
Date: 4 Dec 1984 1105-EST
From: ALR at MIT-XX
Subject: Seminar - Principles of OBJ2 (MIT)
[Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.]
"Principles of OBJ2"
Jean Pierre Jouannaud
University of Nancy (France) and SRI
Friday, December 7, 1984
Refreshments at 3:00 pm, talk at 3:15 pm
Room NE43-453
OBJ2 is an object-oriented language with an underlying formal
semantics based on equational logic and an operational semantics
based on rewrite rules. Key OBJ2 principles are:
1. Use of parameterized modules (Objects and Theories). Objects
encapsulate executable code (e.g. rewrite rules), whereas Theories encapsulate
assertions that may be nonexecutable (e.g. first order formulae).
2. Specification of interface requirements for parameters (Views).
3. Use of Module Expressions for creating complex combinations of modules.
4. Use of subsorts to support:
a simple yet powerful form of polymorphism (overloading).
partially defined operations (use of "sort-constraint").
a simple yet powerful and automatic form of error-recovery.
5. Use of user defined "built-ins", e.g. low level data types described in the
implementation language itself, e.g. MACLISP. "Built-ins" are first class
objects, e.g. all other construct apply to them, including subsort definitions.
We will discuss these principles by means of examples of OBJ
specifications and point out the main implementation issues.
HOST: Prof. Guttag
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 84 16:59:47 PST
From: IBM San Jose Research Laboratory Calendar
<calendar%ibm-sj.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Seminar - QUTE Functional Unification Language (IBM-SJ)
[Forwarded from the SRI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
IBM San Jose Research Lab
5600 Cottle Road
San Jose, CA 95193
Mon., Dec. 10 Computer Science Seminar
10:30 A.M. QUTE: A FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE BASED ON UNIFICATION
Aud. B A new programming language called Qute is introduced.
Qute is a functional programming language which
permits parallel evaluation. While most functional
programming languages use pattern matching as basic
variable-value binding mechanism, Qute uses
unification as its binding mechanism. Since
unification is bidirectional, as opposed to pattern
match which is unidirectional, Qute becomes a more
powerful functional programming language than most of
existing functional languages. This approach enables
the natural unification of logic programming language
and functional programming language. In Qute it is
possible to write a program which is very much like
one written in conventional logic programming
language, say, Prolog. At the same time, it is
possible to write a Qute program which looks like an
ML (which is a functional language) program. A Qute
program can be evaluated in parallel
(and-parallelism) and the same result is obtained
irrespective of the particular order of evaluation.
This is guaranteed by the Church-Rosser property
enjoyed by the evaluation algorithm.
M. Sato, Kyoto University
Host: J. Halpern
------------------------------
End of AIList Digest
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