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AIList Digest Volume 4 Issue 017
AIList Digest Thursday, 30 Jan 1986 Volume 4 : Issue 17
Today's Topics:
Queries - LISP-Based COBOL Parser or Compiler & AI Koans,
AI Tools - Common Lisp for RT PC,
Fiction - Pseudoscience Jargon in 2010,
Policy - Theoretical CS,
Games & Expert Systems - Hangman,
Reports - MRS Manual & ISSCO Working Papers
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Date: Tue 28 Jan 86 21:06:57-CST
From: John Hartman <CS.HARTMAN@R20.UTEXAS.EDU>
Subject: COBOL parser or compiler needed in Lisp environment
Does anyone know of a Cobol parser or compiler that is written in
LISP? (or PASCAL or will otherwise run on a LISP machine or DEC-20)
[This is not a joke!]
I'm working on a program understanding/program transformation
system. The target language at the moment is Cobol because
there are lots of unstructured Cobol programs and commercial systems
that attempt to restructure them automatically. AI program
understanding can improve the process. To demonstrate this, I need a
Cobol parser, and would rather find one than build one. Does anyone
have any pointers?
Thanks,
John Hartman
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Date: Tue, 28 Jan 86 14:14:03 PST
From: "Douglas J. Trainor" <trainor@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU>
Subject: ai koans
Has anyone heard any good ai koans over the past three years???
[][] Douglas J. Trainor
[][] a pair of size 9 capri pants
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Date: Sat, 25 Jan 1986 11:43 EST
From: "Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>
Subject: Common Lisp for RT PC
In response to Nick Gall's query about Common Lisp for the RT PC:
We at CMU have been working behind the scenes for some time to port our
Spice/Accent operating system from the now-defunct Perq machine to the
new IBM workstation, now dubbed the RT PC. As a part of that effort, we
have ported the Spice Lisp implementation of Common Lisp, including the
Hemlock editor. This port is mainly the work of Dave McDonald, with
assists from Rob Maclachlan and Skef Wholey. Lisp and Hemlock are now
running pretty well, with only a few finishing touches to be added and a
lot of tuning to be done. There are still some holes in the Accent
operating system for this machine, but we are working feverishly to
patch them up.
We are in the process of taking some benchmarks on the Lisp now. Early
indications show the speed of the pre-tuning RT PC Lisp to be roughly in
the ballpark (give or take a factor of two) of the Symbolics 3600 and
the Sun 3, though you have to be careful with declarations and
give up most of the runtime checking to go that fast. (Also necessary
on other stock hardware like Sun, but not on Symbolics.)
Please do not flood us with request for this system. The Lisp is not
particularly to port over to any flavor of Unix, and Accent is not yet
ready for use outside the friendly confines of CMU. At some point in
the future, we may make the whole package available WITHOUT ANY SUPPORT,
for users elsewhere who can tolerate unsupported university-quality
software, but before we do that we will have to think very hard about
how to minimize the hassles to all concerned. If we do that, I'll see
that people reading this list hear about it.
IBM has not announced any plans for introducing a supported Common Lisp
product on the RT PC's officially sanctioned unix-based operating
system. I believe that there would be great demand for such a product,
but what their plans are I can't say.
-- Scott
------------------------------
Date: Wed 22 Jan 86 18:57:57-PST
From: Bill Poser <POSER@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
Subject: Pseudoscience Jargon
What exactly is a "call-seeking" computer? Anything to do with a
"come-from" statement?
------------------------------
Date: Tue 28 Jan 86 07:26:53-PST
From: Ted Markowitz <G.TJM@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
Subject: 2010 and H-Mobius Loops
I've checked my copy of 2010 and reviewed Dr. Chandra's explanation
of HAL's paranoia. The H-Mobious Loop phenomenon often occurs in
"autonomous GOAL-seeking programs". Not a bad lay-description of
a program that got confused as to what to do next?
--ted
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 86 12:52:16 CST
From: veach%ukans.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA
Subject: Comment on EATCS.
Concerning the posting of the "European Association for
Theoretical Computer Science" announcement in vol 4:6,
I would like to make the following comments:
1) I agree whole-heartedly with the editorial comment
which Ken Laws made at the end of vol 4:15 (except
for his acquiescence to the Stanford professor's request
that similar postings not be made in the future).
2) My reading of this Digest leads me to believe that
the contributers and the readers as a whole, span a
wide range of interests. This disparity of interests
has been with AI since its begining and indeed is what
makes AI what it is. We should recognize that with such
a variety of research in AI (from vision to mathematical
logic; design and fabrication of robotic limbs to analysis
of cognitive processes; etc...) there is and should be a
tremendous pool of resources which we individually draw
from and collectively share. One does not have to look far
to find common ground among researchers who delve into
such distinct subjects (graph theory, predicate calculus,
statistical analysis, etc.).
In conclusion, rather than restrict the flow of information, I hope
that as we see information which could benefit the community, we would
share it.
Glenn Veach (veach@ukans.csnet)
------------------------------
Date: 26 January 1986 1902-PST (Sunday)
From: west@nprdc.arpa (Larry West)
Subject: Theoretical CS vis-a`-vis AI
In AIList V4 #15, Jean-Francois Rit said:
``I don't feel that a major problem for AI researchers is understanding
the nature of computation, I think the AI point of view is much (maybe
too much) broader or at least OPEN toward The "real" universe.''
I agree that those who are doing Expert Systems or similar
kinds of programming need not worry too much about what a
computation is nor how it is achieved. But those in Cognitive
Science -- those interested in how brains do the things
they do so well -- might well be interested in formalisms
to help grasp the underlying processes of computation. On
the other hand, my prejudice is that these are not yet
understood in Theoretical Computer Science, either, and may
not even be of interest to those in the field (TCS).
Still, Parallel Distributed Processing or Connectionism seems
to hold much promise for lower-level information processing,
and perhaps higher-level as well, though that's harder to
see at this point. See, e.g., Hinton & Anderson's *Parallel
Models of Associative Memory* (Erlbaum, 1981), or Hinton's and
Feldman's articles in the April 1985 BYTE magazine, or Minsky
and Papert's *Perceptrons* or ... well, further references
supplied on demand.
My opinion would thus be not to exclude TCS out of hand,
but don't go out of your way (KIL) looking for articles/
messages/seminar announcements relevant to AIList, either.
Larry West (programmer) west@nprdc.ARPA
UCSD Institute for Cognitive Science
La Jolla, CA 92093
[That seems a fair summary of the feedback I've received, and
of the general AIList screening policy. -- KIL]
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 86 22:19:21 EST
From: Moorthy <moorthy%rpics.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA>
Subject: Hangman
We have developed a computer program to play hangman by itself. Here
the computer both guesses a word and tries to find what the guessed
word is. This program is a variation of hangman available under unix
4.2. The program to guess the words is partly rule based (these rules
are obtained by talking to an "expert") and partly searches the
dictionary judiciously. The programs are written in C and uses system
calls to AWK for searching various subsets of dictionary. We have
tested the program fairly exhaustively and it plays reasonably well.
If anyone is interested in knowing more about the program, you could
contact moorthy@rpics. The developers of this program are Patrick
Harubin, a junior in Computer Science at R.P.I and myself.
Krishnamoorthy
Department of Computer Science
R.P.I., Troy NY 12181.
------------------------------
Date: Tue 28 Jan 86 12:28:22-PST
From: Stuart Russell <RUSSELL@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: mrs manual
The Compleat Guide to MRS is now available as a Stanford CS report,
number STAN-CS-85-1080. To obtain a copy send mail to Kathy Berg
(BERG@SCORE.ARPA) or write to her at Comp Sci Dept, Stanford, CA 94305.
Stuart Russell (RUSSELL@SUMEX)
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 86 13:24:44 pst
From: Mike Rosner <rosner%cui.unige.chunet%ubc.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA>
Subject: ISSCO working papers
Fondazione Dalle Molle
Geneva
ISSCO
WORKING PAPERS
No. 46 (1981)
M Rosner
Three Strategic Goals in Conversational Openings
This paper tries to explain a short transcript of a
conversational opening as completely as possible within the
framework which takes conversational behaviour as defined by the
operation of a sohisticated planning mechanism. It is argued
that a critical role is played by the satifaction, for each
participant, of three strategic goals relating to attention,
identification, and greeting. Additional tactics for gaining
information are also described as necessary to account for this
transcript.
No. 47 (1983)
F di Primio & Th Christaller
A Poor Man's Flavor System
This paper is the result of an attempt to understand 'flavors',
the object oriented programming system in Lispmachine Lisp. The
authors argue that the basic principles of such systems are not
easily accessible to the programming public, because papers on
the subject rarely discuss concrete details. Accordingly, the
authors' approach is pedagogical, and takes the form of a
description of the evolution of their own flavor system. An
appendix contains programming examples that are sufficienly
detailed to enable an average Lisp programmer to build a flavor
system, and experiment with the essential concepts of
object-oriented programming.
No. 48 (1984)
Eric Wehrli
A Government-Binding Parser for French
This paper describes a parser for French based on an adaptation
of Chomsky's Government and Binding theory. Reflecting the
modular conception of GB-grammars, the parser consists of
several modules corresponding to some of the subtheories of the
grammar, such as X bar, binding, etc. Making an extensive use of
lexical information and following strategies which attempt to
take advantage of the basic properties of natural languages,
this parser is powerful enough to produce all of the grammatical
structures of sentences for a fairly substantial subset of
French. At the same time, it is restricted enough to avoid a
proliferation of alternative analyses, even with highly complex
constructions. Particular attention has been paid to the problem
of the grammatical interpretation of wh-phrases, to clitic
constructions, as well as to the organisation and management of
the lexicon.
No 49 (1985)
Patrick Shann
AI Approaches to Machine Translation
This paper examines some experimental AI systems that were
specifically developed for machine translation (Wilks'
Preference Semantics, the Yale projects, Salat and CONTRA). It
concentrates on the different types of meaning representation
used, and the nature of the knowledge used for the solution of
difficult problems in MT. To explore particular AI approaches,
the resolution of several types of ambiguity is discussed from
the point of view of different systems.
No. 50 (1985)
Beat Buchmann & Susan Warwick
Machine Translation: Pre-ALPAC history, Post-ALPAC overview
This paper gives a historical overview of the field of Machine
Translation (MT). The ALPAC report, the now well-known landmark
in the history of MT, serves to delimit the two sections of this
paper. The first section, Pre-ALPAC history, looks in some
detail at the hopeful beginnings, the first euphoric
developments, and the onsetting disillusionment in MT. The
second section, Post-ALPAC overview, describes more recent
developments on the basis of current prototype and commercial
systems. It also reviews some of the basic theoretical and
practical issues in the field.
No 51 (1985)
Rod Johnson & Mike Rosner
Software Engineering for Machine Translation
In this paper we discuss the desirable properties of a software
environment for MT development, starting from the position that
succesful MT depends on a coherent theory of translation. We
maintain that such an environment should not just provide for
the construction of instances of MT systems within some
preconceived (and probably weak) theoretical framework, but
should also offer tools for rapid implementation and evaluation
of a variety of experimental theories. A discussion of some
potentially interesting properties of theories of language and
translation is followed by a description of a prototype software
system which is designed to facilitate practical experimentation
with such theories.
Requests for these papers should be addressed to
ISSCO working papers
54 route des Acacias
1227 Geneva Switzerland
The price per paper, including air mail, is SFr 10 (or
equivalent). Cheques should be made payable to "Institut Dalle
Molle"
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End of AIList Digest
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