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AIList Digest Volume 3 Issue 037
AIList Digest Tuesday, 19 Mar 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 37
Today's Topics:
Expert Systems - RULEMASTER Language,
Humor - ))) & Sesame Street FA,
Policy - Censorship & Rape,
Seminars - Social Effects of Computing (SU) &
Expert Systems in China & TUILI (SU)
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Date: 18 Mar 85 10:42:55 EST
From: Mary.Lou.Maher@CMU-RI-CIVE
Subject: RULEMASTER Language
Has anyone heard of the RULEMASTER language for building expert systems?
It is an inductive system; i.e it learns rules from examples, can
interface with lisp, pascal, c, or fortran, and can access databases.
It was developed under the direction of Donald Michie and sold by
Radian Corp. I am considering going to take their tutorial course
and would like to know if anyone has heard of or used this language.
------------------------------
Date: Sat 16 Mar 85 04:47:58-CST
From: Werner Uhrig <CMP.WERNER@UTEXAS-20.ARPA>
Subject: RE: Found: right parens
RE:
Sorry, I have not seen your asterisks, but please! Does anyone know where
the daily bit buckets are stored? I lost some data Thusday night by
doing one too many left shift on a program I was writing on SCORE and
I was wondering whether I might be in some way able to recover the bit
strings. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Formerly, the NSA sent all dropped bits to the shredder, but these
days they are transported nightly via Federal Express to MCC where
they are trying to solve the problems that escaped the rest of y'all.
Earlier this week a comment was overheard between two members of
a visiting Russian delegation to Texas' high-tech city: "Dammit,
comrade, they look all alike." I no longer wonder what they were
refering to.
[Hey, if you think this is lousy humour, watch David Letterman sometimes.
I figure Johnny Carson supports him to justify his own whopper of a salary]
------------------------------
Date: 15 Mar 85 19:01:21 EST
From: Carl.Ebeling@CMU-CS-UNH
Subject: Sesame Street FA
[Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
I was watching Sesame Street today (getting the kid started early) and it
appears that they are teaching some beginning theory. They had a box that
accepted only the letter 'A'. Next week they're going to cover regular
expressions and the Pumping Lemma.
------------------------------
Date: Friday, 15-Mar-85 11:05:43-GMT
From: DIANA HPS (on ERCC DEC-10) <"[140,153]%edxa"@ucl-cs.arpa>
Subject: Censoring jokes about rape
[Though rape is a barbaric act, censorship is a far worse crime for it
affects so many more.......]
I'm not going to answer your first point because, like you, I have
never been the victim of rape and hence cannot compare the effects of
rape with those of censorship. But I will just say that FEAR of rape
has profoundly affected the lives of at least as many people as
censorship; indeed, it even acts as a kind of censorship - a
censorship of behaviour, of being afraid to say certain things, go to
certain places, enter into certain kinds of relationship, even to be
out of doors at certain times of the day. And to imply
i) that rape is a normal part of human(male) behaviour, or
ii) that the victim enjoyed it
(the Poly Nomial joke does both) is to encourage an acceptance of attitudes
that lead both to rape and to that fear.
[There is a fundamental difference between an act and writing about an act.
If jokes about a subject are banned, how long is it before satire about
the same subject is banned? Then there is only a small step fiction is
banned. Next comes fact, research...]
There is actually a very big leap between banning jokes which casually
make assumptions that are damaging to a group of people, and
banning satire which questions people's assumptions. For example, you would
probably not want to encourage the circulation of a joke that took it for
granted that the victims of shooting, mugging or theft enjoyed the experience?
In a sense, such jokes have already been censored - no-one even writes or
tells them!
[..Any reasonable definition of rape should include the fact that
the raper and rapee are human or at least members of the
animal kingdom. I find it hard to be offended when polynomials
are raped, however.......]
I'm very surprised that David enjoyed the joke, since he seems to have missed
its main point. The point of the joke is that the language used to describe
mathematical functions can be neatly turned into a description of a piece
of human behaviour. It certainly would have been very funny, if it had not
required the acceptance of the two appalling assumptions regarding rape
that I noted above.
Apropos, I should like to know how AIlist readers would have reacted if
the joke had referred to 'Paul E Nomial', the 'epitome of masculine qualities',
instead of a clearly female character? Would the joke still be funny?
Would it still be less offensive than censorship?
Diana Bental
University of Edinburgh
mail: bental%edxa@ucl-cs
------------------------------
Date: Fri 15 Mar 85 13:30:09-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Reply to Diana Bental
This discussion of morality on the network should really be conducted
on Human-Nets, but I'll permit it to continue on AIList for awhile.
(I.e., I can't resist putting in my two-cents worth.)
Diana Bental claims that the Impure Mathematics story depicts
Poly Nomial as enjoying being raped. I have reread the story
and can find no support for this view (aside from a very cryptic
remark about having "satisfied her hypothesis"). The entire
tone of the story is just the opposite.
She also claims that the humor in this piece is in its use of
mathematical terms to describe human behavior. I think it equally
supportable that the humor is in attributing human emotions to
mathematical entities, as David Wilkins said. No doubt both
viewpoints contribute to the mental gymnastics that we call humor.
As for the offensiveness of this or any other text, I believe that
people regard the public distribution of material offensive when
1) the depicted behavior is threatening to them or to their society, and
2) the material is likely to promote such behavior.
(There is also a second category of offensive material, namely anything
that one finds personally disgusting or frightening. In this case,
however, we seldom object to others having access to the material unless
it is forced upon them. My wife, for instance, used to have a very
strong fear of snakes and worms, but she never felt that such subjects
should be banned from the public media.)
In support of this view, I submit that subjects we would find very
offensive on TV would be perfectly acceptable in a scientific treatise
or an X-rated videocassette -- the latter media are less likely to
have an effect on social behavior. We perceive less threat in graphic
portrayals of war attrocities than in Bugs Bunny hitting Elmer Fudd.
Many people have recently found words such as "he" and "chairman"
offensive even in technical texts, precisely because they believe that
such language does affect our society adversely.
I think we all all agree that point one is applicable here: rape is
abhorrent. (The question of whether it is "normal human (male)
behavior", in the absence of strong social sanctions, could be
discussed at great length.) Ms. Bental's comments about the fear
of rape being as harmful as censorship are well taken.
The applicability of the second point is more doubtful.
It may be true that if AIList sanctions such material, the material is
more likely to be distributed through other channels having more
effect on social behavior. This is far fetched, but is essentially
identical to the reasoning behind much of the "sexist language"
controversy. Rape is a sufficiently serious social problem that we
must consider the possibility of such influences.
Let's not get carried away, however. Impure Mathematics >>is<< funny,
or at least witty, regardless of whether it has to be banned for
social reasons. It does not "require the acceptance" of rape, and
might be funny even if it did require a "willing suspension of
disbelief". (Cartoons are often based on unbelievable premises.)
The story is not intrinsically offensive, any more than is the word
"he" or the biblical story of the flood; those of us who enjoyed it
are not perverts or misogynists.
-- Ken Laws
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 85 15:23 IST
From: Henry Nussbacher <VSHANK%WEIZMANN.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA>
Subject: Humor
I too cast my vote for humor. Not to repeat what others have said
(Issue #34), I have found that computers have been filled with violence
and I do not find it intentional. How often do we say 'Let me execute
the program...', and realize what we are saying? In VM, when issuing the
CMS START command, CMS replies with 'EXECUTION BEGINS...'. A non-
computer person looking over your shoulder might be offended if they
recently had a person they know executed. The Wylbur operating system
uses the command KILL to force a user off the system, and VM uses the
command FORCE to do the same. Not very nice language. When a user
complains that their terminal is 'dead', they say that their terminal is
'hung'. Not very nice language, indeed. I have often heard users
complaining that the system just 'died'. There used to be a regression
analysis package that was extended with new functions and was named
RAPE (and forced to change its name to RAPFE a few years later).
I could go on and on. The point is the author of Poly Nomial didn't
intend to glorify rape. No one in their right mind likes rape. But
censoring humor is not going to stop rape.
Henry Nussbacher
Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot, Israel
------------------------------
Date: Monday, 18-Mar-85 14:55:12-GMT
From: GORDON JOLY (on ERCC DEC-10) <GCJ%edxa@ucl-cs.arpa>
Subject: Jokes_P ?
Curtis L. Goodhart's comments (Vol 3 # 33) are very important. AI is a male
dominated domain and that should change. The situation is, of course, moving
forward, but what we really need is a change of attitude.
Gordon Joly
gcj%edxa@uk.ac.ucl.cs
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 85 13:45:24 pst
From: wfi <@csnet-relay.arpa,@ucsc.CSNET (Wayne F. Iba):wfi@ucsc.CSNET>
Subject: rape and censorship
[ Though rape is a barbaric act, censorship is a far worse crime
for it affects so many more. ]
This might have some validity (and I emphasize might) if we were talking
about censorship in the context of some government official dictating
to various publishers what's to be printed and what's not. However,
in the context of the present discussion, we are referring to editorial
decisions. Any printed newspaper will print only what it wants with respect
to anticipated reader reaction. They generally won't print items which
might tend to reduce their readership. For Ken to withold such items
in the future is not the same as censorship. Just as you can choose to
read a newspaper or not, you can choose to read this newsletter.
I am adding my voice to those requesting that such not be printed.
Even if I am in the minority, I submit that if for no other reason, we
refrain from printing such on the basis that computer science and AI
are heavily male dominated to begin with, and that printing
stories about rapes in a context which might be amusing,
is no way to encourage female involvement.
--wayne
------------------------------
Date: Fri 15 Mar 85 12:23:04-PST
From: Gio Wiederhold <WIEDERHOLD@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
Subject: Seminar - Social Effects of Computing (SU)
[Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
CS 300 -- Computer Science Department Colloquium -- Winter 1984-1985.
Our final presentation will be on
Tuesday, March 19, 1985
at 4:15 in Terman Auditorium
Rob Kling
Department of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
THE SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF COMPUTERS, COMPUTING, AND COMPUTERIZATION
Research on the social impacts of computing indicates few
"deterministic" consequences of introducing computer-based systems
into social settings such as organizations. Jobs may become more or
less skilled; decisions may be "better" or more confused; power may
shift to or from central administrators. Much depends upon the kinds
of systems introduced, who controls them, and the particular practices
and procedures that people develop to use the computer systems and the
services that they support. The social consequences of computer use
are often very "context sensitive." Moreover, computer-based systems
which can be perfectable under static laboratory conditions and when
supported by a rich array of resources may be very problematic when
introduced into dynamic social settings, settings rife with social
conflict, or settings where support resources are limited.
This talk will examine some organizing ideas to help understand
the context-sensitive character of computerization. One cluster
of ideas is embodied in web models and these will be explained in
the talk.
------------------------------
Date: Mon 18 Mar 85 12:19:29-PST
From: Paula Edmisten <Edmisten@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: Seminar - Expert Systems in China & TUILI (SU)
[Forwarded from the Stanford SIGLUNCH distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.]
SPEAKER: Dr. Ru-qian Lu, Professor and Head of Department of
Computer Science, Institute of Mathematics, Academy of Science,
Beijing, China
ABSTRACT: This will be a combination of two talks:
1. DEVELOPMENT OF EXPERT SYSTEMS IN CHINA (SELF EXPLANATORY)
2. TUILI - A GENERAL PURPOSE TOOL FOR DESCRIBING
EXPERT SYSTEMS (ABSTRACT BELOW)
DATE: Friday, March 22, 1985
LOCATION: Chemistry Gazebo, between Physical and Organic Chemistry
TIME: 12:05
Since the seventies, more and more people are involved in developing
expert systems. But most of them are special-purpose systems,
containing only knowledge and experiences of a special field, even of
a special person (such as an experienced doctor of traditional Chinese
Medicine). Despite the advances in the field of knowledge
representation, general-purpose tools for describing expert systems
are still rare and in the early stage of their development. In many
cases, they are only new versions of existing special-purpose tools
with minor extensions.
Tuili (Tool for Universal Interactive Logical Inference) takes the
generality as one of its important design goals. The main mechanism
of its knowledge representation are production rules, but other
mechanisms can be simulated as well. Here are the main
characteristics of Tuili:
1. Not only predicates, but also predicate procedures are allowed
in production rules.
2. The parameters of predicates and predicate procedures are
pattern elements of different data types.
3. A new principle of semantic pattern matching is proposed. Users
are allowed to define their own pattern matching rules.
4. Users can define their own probability functions, attribute
functions and their propagation rules during the course of
inference.
5. Rule bases and data bases are modular structured.
6. The control structure is represented as production rules, they
form the meta-structure, which can be organized hirarhically to
form a multi-level control structure.
7. The system provides a rich set of built-in control strategies to
be chosen from by users. They can define their own strategies,
too.
At present, Tuili is being used to write an expert system for brain
diseases and one for teaching traditional Chinese Medicine.
Paula
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End of AIList Digest
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