Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
AIList Digest Volume 4 Issue 259
AIList Digest Wednesday, 12 Nov 1986 Volume 4 : Issue 259
Today's Topics:
Administrivia - Splitting the List,
Literature - Sentient-Computer Novels,
Query - Knowledge-Base Portability,
Logic Programming - Non-Monotonic Reasoning and Truth Maintenance,
Application - Robotic Snooker,
AI Tools - Franz Object-Oriented Packages &
TCP from Xerox to UNIX System V,
Ethics - Mathematics and Humanity & Why Train Machines &
AI and the Arms Race
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue 11 Nov 86 09:18:24-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA>
Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI.ARPA
Subject: Splitting the List
I recently received this request from an AIList reader:
If there is a way to -just- get the seminar announcements periodically
distributed to AIList, then I would like to be placed in that category.
If this is not possible, then I wish to be removed from AIList completely.
I have previously suggested that seminar and conference notices should be
split out as a separate list (at least as long as other traffic remains
so high), but no one has stepped forward to do the remailing. I haven't
the energy to maintain two distribution lists. Volunteers are welcome.
I'm sure there is still plenty of interest in other list topics. The
NL-KR@Rochester list is doing fine, forwarding a great many natural-language
messages that would not have appeared in AIList. IRList%VPI.CSNet has
likewise been successful with information-retrieval topics. AI-Ed@SUMEX
is alive and well. So is the Prolog Digest, which predates AIList.
One reason for splitting the AIList is to reduce Arpanet traffic, which has
been rather high lately, and to reduce costs for those who have to pay
for the transmissions. Another is to reduce the difficulty for the next
AIList moderator if I have to drop out. The best reason, though, is to
boost discussion of the topics that most interest you.
-- Ken Laws
------------------------------
Date: 7 Nov 86 20:57:17 GMT
From: gknight@ngp.utexas.edu (Gary Knight)
Subject: Canonical list of sentient computer novels
Clarification of earlier posting, which is repeated below:
1) No robot novels, please; just non-ambulatory computers; and
2) No short works, just novels.
---
I am trying to compile a canonical list of SF *novels* dealing with (1)
sentient computers, and (2) human mental access to computers or computer
networks. Examples of the two categories (and my particular favorites as well)
are:
A) SENTIENT COMPUTERS
The Adolescence of P-1, by Thomas J. Ryan
Valentina: Soul in Sapphire, by Joseph H. Delaney and Marc Stiegler
Cybernetic Samurai, by (I forget)
Coils, by Roger Zelazny
B) HUMAN ACCESS
True Names, by Vernor Vinge
Neuromancer and Count Zero, by William Gibson
Please send your lists to me by e-mail
and I'll compile and post the ultimate canonical version.
--
Gary Knight, 3604 Pinnacle Road, Austin, TX 78746 (512/328-2480).
Biopsychology Program, Univ. of Texas at Austin. "There is nothing better
in life than to have a goal and be working toward it." -- Goethe.
------------------------------
Date: 11 Nov 86 00:38:00 GMT
From: u1100a!toh@bellcore.com (Tom O. Huleatt)
Subject: Request for knowledge base portability info
[Sorry if you see this twice -- postnews gagged on comp.ai, so I resubmitted.]
Does anyone out there have experience with (or knowledge of)
Knowledge Base portability issues?
We have been using a home-grown rule-based system, and we
are concerned about protecting our knowledge engineering
investment as we move to other (more versatile) expert
system shells. (These new systems will probably be rule-based,
too.)
I only have experience with our current system, so I'm not sure
how much work is required to port one of our knowledge bases.
I'd also be interested to hear any tips about what we could be
doing with our knowledge bases now to increase their portability.
Please send me email with suggestions (or pointers to ref. material).
Thank you, Tom Huleatt [bellcore, ihnp4, pyuxww, allegra]!u1100a!toh
Bell Communications Research
Piscataway, NJ 08854 (201) 699-4506
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 86 18:41:39 PST
From: Tom Dietterich <tgd%oregon-state.csnet@RELAY.CS.NET>
Subject: Non-monotonic reasoning and truth maintenance systems
"These systems don't usually have any deductive power at all,
they are merely constraint satisfaction devices."
--David Etherington
I am confused by this last sentence. Isn't constraint satisfaction
a kind of inference? deKleer's ATMS and McAllester's RUP handle
large portions (maybe all?) of propositional logic.
--Tom Dietterich
Department of Computer Science
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331
tgd%oregon-state.csnet
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 86 09:36:46 GMT
From: Tony Conway <tc%vax-d.rutherford.ac.uk@Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>
Subject: Robotic Snooker
In article <861020-061334-1337@Xerox> MJackson.Wbst@XEROX.COM writes:
>
>Over the weekend I caught part of a brief report on this on Cable News
>Headlines. They showed a large robot arm making a number of impressive
>shots, and indicated that the software did shot selection as well.
>Apparently this work was done somewhere in Great Britain. Can someone
>provide more detail?
>
>Mark
Think that work was probably project by Richard Gregory (Brain & Perception
Laboratory, Medical School, University of Bristol, Bristol, England)
in conjunction with people in School of Engineering, Information Technology
Research Centre, University of Bristol.
Not sure if it has been written up anywhere yet.
Richard Gregory is also active in starting up an interactive science
centre (Bristol Exploratory): loosely based on the San Francisco
Exploratorium.
Cheers - 'Tony Conway ( @ucl-cs.arpa:tc@vd.rl.ac.uk )
Informatics, SERC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory,
Chilton, Didcot, Oxon. OX11 0QX, England.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 86 13:03:12 PST
From: franz!fray!cox@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Charles A. Cox)
Subject: Franz Object-Oriented Packages
> Date: Wed, 5 Nov 86 13:08:28 EST
> From: weltyc%cieunix@CSV.RPI.EDU (Christopher A. Welty)
> Subject: Looking for Franz OO packages
>
> I am looking for information on Object Oriented extensions to
> Franz Lisp. I know that someone (U of Maryland?) came out with a flavors
> package for Franz, if someone can point me in the right direction there
> it would be appreciated, as well as any info on other packages...
Franz Inc. has a symbolics-compatible flavors package included in its
versions of Franz Lisp (after Opus 42.0).
I don't know much about the U of Maryland's system, but I believe they
ship an entire Franz Lisp system (Opus 38) which includes their flavors
package. The contact used to be Liz Allen (liz@tove.umd.edu).
Other extensions to UC Berkeley's Franz Lisp put in by Franz Inc.
include a common lisp compatible package system, multiple value returns,
keywords, and hash tables.
------------------------------
Date: Mon 10 Nov 86 14:57:20-PST
From: Christopher Schmidt <SCHMIDT@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: TCP from Xerox to UNIX System V
The TCP/IP package for Interlisp-D works for the most part, but
usually requires a bit of fiddling to make work with any particular partner.
Telnet generally works quite well with almost any host. I've used it
to talk to unix 4.2, 4.3, System V, TOPS-20, and LispM telnet servers.
FTP is a bit tricker and I usually have to run with the
FTPDEBUG window on to figure out what to do. Logical pathname
transformations are sometimes non-obvious and not all servers support
the same set of commands. Since you ask about System V, I'll note
that I've tested FTP against our Silicon Graphics Iris (System V,
Excellan ethernet board) and found it to work OK.
I don't use any TCPFTP server regularly, so I'm not the ideal
reviewer. For nitty-gritty workstation questions, I recommend
querying one of the workstation mailing lists rather than AIList. Eg.
Bug-1100@SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.edu for Xerox d-machines (of which I am the
moderator) SLUG@R20.UTexas.edu for Symbolics machines, or WorkS@Rutgers
for workstations without their own mailing lists.
--Christopher
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 7 Nov 86 14:54:26 EST
From: "Col. G. L. Sicherman" <colonel%buffalo.csnet@RELAY.CS.NET>
Subject: Re: Mathematics and humanity
In <8611050753.AA24198@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, WADLISP7@CARLETON.BITNET writes:
> The inhumanity of *most* mathematics? I would think that from the rest of
> your message, what you would really claim is the inhumanity of *all*
> mathematics -- for *all* of mathematics is entirely deviod of the questions
> of what is morally right or morally wrong, entirely missing all matters of
> human relationships. Mathematical theorems start by listing the assumptions,
> and then indicating how those assumptions imply a result.
This is the specialized mathematician's view of mathematics. The point is
obviously sound, because mathematicians study mathematics as a thing apart.
On the other hand, the mathematics that a herdsman uses to count sheep be-
longs to the herdsman's life. It's not formally axiomatized, but it
is human, because it is bound up with the natural human activity of
growing food.
To reinforce the point, many unlettered herdsmen have special numbers
that they use _only_ for counting sheep. One can feel that to use
those numbers for counting other things would be to endow those things
with an inappropriate character of sheepliness. Modern mathematics
rests on ignoring such "human" distinctions. The equals sign is the
sine qua non of abstract mathematics--but it does not exist in human
lives.
The cry of "art for art's sake" produced generations of starving artists.
What can we foresee from "math for math's sake?"
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 86 21:35:59 EST
From: "Col. G. L. Sicherman" <colonel%buffalo.csnet@RELAY.CS.NET>
Subject: Re: Why train machines
In article <861027-093832-2927@Xerox>, Ghenis.pasa@XEROX.COM writes:
>
> Why do we record music instead of teaching everyone how to sing? To
> preserve what we consider top performance and make it easily available
> for others to enjoy, even if the performer himself cannot be present and
> others are not inclined to or capable of duplicating his work, but
> simply wish to benefit from it.
While I appreciate the point, it raises more questions....
1. Why do we preserve top "performance?" The process of recording music
redefines it as something perfectly repeatable--an effect that began
with the invention of musical notation; jazz, and afterwards composers
like Cage, tried to overturn this definition. But "performance" is also a
social phenomenon, as it distinguishes between producers and consumers.
The consequence of specialization is to retard progress by leaving the
production of music to relatively few people.
2. Has not recorded music become a separate medium in its own right?
Even a "faithful" recording involves a lot of electronic klugery.
Most popular recordings no longer sound like, or can be performed as,
live music.
The second point has implications for A.I.! If you had a robot slave,
how would you treat it? What would you become?
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1986 13:38 EST
From: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
Subject: AI and the Arms Race
[I posted a message from AILIST on ARMS-D, and got back this reply.]
Date: Saturday, 8 November 1986 12:55-EST
From: ihnp4!utzoo!henry at ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
To: Arms-Discussion
Re: Professionals and Social Responsibility for the Arms Race
> ... This year, Dr. Weizenbaum of MIT was the chosen speaker...
> The important points of the second talk can be summarized as :
> 1) not all problems can be reduced to computation, for
> example how could you conceive of coding the human
> emotion loneliness.
I don't want to get into an argument about it, but it should be pointed
out that this is debatable. Coding the emotion of loneliness is difficult
to conceive of at least in part because we don't have a precise definition
of what the "emotion of loneliness" is. Define it in terms of observable
behavior, and the observable behavior can most certainly be coded.
> 2) AI will never duplicate or replace human intelligence
> since every organism is a function of its history.
This just says that we can't exactly duplicate (say) human intelligence
without duplicating the history as well. The impossibility of exact
duplication has nothing to do with inability to duplicate the important
characteristics. It's impossible to duplicate Dr. Weizenbaum too, but
if he were to die, I presume MIT *would* replace him. I think Dr. W. is
on very thin ice here.
> 5) technical education that neglects language, culture,
> and history, may need to be rethought.
Just to play devil's advocate, it would also be worthwhile to rethink
non-technical education that covers language, culture, and history while
completely neglecting the technological basis of our civilization.
> 8) every researcher should assess the possible end use of
> their own research, and if they are not morally comfortable
> with this end use, they should stop their research...
> He specifically referred to research in machine vision, which he
> felt would be used directly and immediately by the military for
> improving their killing machines...
I'm afraid this is muddy thinking again. *All* technology has military
applications. Mass-production of penicillin, a development of massive
humanitarian significance, came about because of massive military funding
in World War II, funding justified by the tremendous military significance
of effective antibiotics. (WW2 was the first major war in which casualties
from disease were fewer in number than those from bullets etc.) It's hard
to conceive of a field of research which doesn't have some kind of military
application.
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry
------------------------------
End of AIList Digest
********************
