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AIList Digest Volume 5 Issue 056
AIList Digest Wednesday, 25 Feb 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 56
Today's Topics:
Query - Parallel Alpha-Beta Search,
Logic - Automated Deduction References,
News - IJCAI-87 Computers and Thought Award,
Discussion - Programming Metaphors & Logic in AI & Intelligence
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Date: Tue, 24 Feb 87 17:11:03 EST
From: "Neil B. Cohen" <ncohen@cc-washington.bbn.com>
Subject: Parallel alpha-beta search
I was told to contact you about a paper that has been recently written
in the subject of parallel alpha-beta tree searching. Can you tell me
if such a paper was recently published, and if so, where I can get
a copy of it? I am very interested in trying to apply such a technique
on the BBN Butterfly computer.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.
Neil B. Cohen (nbc@bbn.com)
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Date: Tue, 24 Feb 87 13:16:45 pst
From: ladkin@kestrel.ARPA (Peter Ladkin)
Subject: automated deduction references
Some of the best sources for Automated Theorem Proving are
conference proceedings and journal articles.
Springer publishes the proceedings of the Conference on
Automated Deduction, held in even years. The last is
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 230, CADE-8 (ed. Siekmann).
Also LNCS 232, Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence, (ed. Bibel
and Jorrand) has good material on Automated Deduction.
LNCS 202 is Rewriting Techniques and Applications (ed. Jouannaud),
another European conference on theorem proving by algebraic
term rewriting systems.
The Journal of Automated Reasoning and the Journal of Symbolic
Computation have been started in the last couple of years.
This is by no means a complete list. Taking the transitive closure
of the `referenced' relation on this material will probably lead
to a complete list.
peter ladkin
ladkin@kestrel.arpa
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Date: Tue, 24 Feb 87 10:29:40 GMT
From: Alan Bundy <bundy%aiva.edinburgh.ac.uk@Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>
Subject: IJCAI-87 Computers and Thought Award
THE 1987 COMPUTERS AND THOUGHT AWARD
It is my great pleasure to announce that the winner of the
1987 Computers and Thought Award is Johan de Kleer of Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center. The Award is in recognition of his fundamental
contributions to artificial intelligence research in the areas of:
qualitative reasoning, truth maintenance, constraint propagation and
explicit control of reasoning.
The Computers and Thought Lecture is given at each
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence by an
outstanding young scientist in the field of artificial intelligence.
The Award carries with it a certificate and the sum of $2,000 plus
travel and subsistence expenses for the IJCAI. The Lecture is one
evening during the Conference, and the public is invited to attend.
The Lecturer is invited to publish the Lecture in the conference
proceedings. The Lectureship was established with royalties received
from the book Computers and Thought, edited by Feigenbaum and Feldman;
it is currently supported by income from IJCAI funds.
Nominations for The 1987 Computers and Thought Award were invited
from all in the artificial intelligence international community. The
award selection committee was the union of the Programme, Conference
and Advisory Committees of IJCAI-87 and the Board of Trustees of
IJCAII, with nominees excluded.
Past recipients of this honour have been Terry Winograd
(1971), Patrick Winston (1973), Chuck Rieger (1975), Douglas Lenat
(1977), David Marr (1979), Gerald Sussman (1981), Tom Mitchell (1983)
and Hector Levesque (1985).
Alan Bundy
IJCAI-87 Conference Chair
------------------------------
Date: 23 Feb 87 20:00:41 EST
From: Raul.Valdes-Perez@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Prog. Lang. Metaphors
[Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-STRIPE.]
This posting is the result of the query for metaphors that underlie
programming languages. Everything onward from (14) was compiled from
suggestions. The items upto (13) were the original ideas.
METAPHOR LANGUAGE
1. function application (lambda calculus) Pure Lisp
2. variable assignment Fortran
3. message-passing Smalltalk
4. set manipulation SETL, relational databases
5. modus ponens Prolog
6. array manipulation APL
7. constraints spreadsheets
8. rewriting production systems
9. window manipulation window managers
10. algorithm manipulation (?!) Lenat's dissertation (AI)
11. resolution resolution theorem provers
12. string manipulation SNOBOL
13. states (and transitions)? graphs?
14. List processing is a metaphor for Lisp & IPL-V
15. Does LOGO have a metaphor? [A metaphor for the graphical part of LOGO
is a moving turtle. - RVP]
16. "... metaphors involved in user interactions and the influence they
have on system design. (There is a session on metaphors at the
SIGCHI in April)"
Desktop metaphor
Electronic Book metaphor
Rooms metaphor (a method of organizing windows dealing with a
particular application into a class of windows. e.g. mailroom)
Overlay or transparency metaphor
Hierarchical metaphor
Network metaphor (Zog or Notecards are systems that use this
metaphor)
17. File [stream?] manipulation is a metaphor in UNIX.
18. Patterns in Snobol-4.
19. Type inference ML
Dataflow ID (Arvind)
Concurrent programming CSP, Linda, Multilisp
Structured programming (iffy) Pascal
20. Couple of relevant papers: "The Scientific Community Metaphor" by
Kornfeld & Hewitt, IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, & Cybernetics Jan 81;
"Metaphor and the Cognitive Representation of Computing Systems" by
Carroll & Thomas, same journal, Mar/Apr 82.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 87 13:47:23 pst
From: ladkin@kestrel.ARPA (Peter Ladkin)
Subject: logic in ai
david sher said:
>Note: I am not a logician but I use a lot of logic in my everyday
>work which is probabilistic analysis of computer vision problems
john rager replied:
>When you say you use a lot of logic, do you really mean it? Recursive
>function theory? Saturated model theory?
Rager asks whether Sher uses infinitary methods in what seems to
be a finitary context. The answer is obviously no, and I wonder
why he would ask the question? Maybe he thinks that all logic
is infinitary? Meanwhile, he seems to have forgotten that inference
is the basis of logic, and most of us use that in one form or another.
peter ladkin
ladkin@kestrel.arpa
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 87 10:19 EST
From: Seth Steinberg <sas@bfly-vax.bbn.com>
Subject: A defense of the vulgar tongue.
I am going to ignore the "Is mathematics a science?" argument and get
right down to why I think mathematical and logical notation are
overused in computer science presentations. The problem has very
little to do with precision and a lot to do with class, clarity, and
vulgarity. By class, I am refering to a set of societal distinctions
which have been handed down in our society and are quite extant in our
modern academic community. By clarity, I am refering to the ability to
communicate ideas both within and outside the community. By vulgarity,
I am refering to the use of the vulgar tongue - which in this case is
not English but the programming language of choice.
Class: Much as a restaurant will have a menu written in French to
impress the diner, many authors feel obligated to use logical notation
to make their paper seem more "scientific". Walt Kelley once had a
character ask "I wonder what language the Romans used for the old 24
karat bamboozle." They used Greek, and a lot of our prejudices come
from the Greeks. Somehow or another, arguing at a high level of
abstraction makes the argument more precise, general, cogent, powerful
or what not. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it isn't. Abstraction
is often a major obstacle in the search for the truth.
Clarity: Chemists use chemical notation and scratchy looking stereo
diagrams. Philologists use cryptic phonetic notation. Geneticists use
long lists of upper case letters and funny three letter combinations.
Vintners use a full set of common adjectives with very precise but not
always obvious meanings. It is quite possible to be clear, precise and
understood without resorting to mathematical or logical notation.
Each of these notations was chosen because it concisely describes
commonly discussed phenomena. Architects do not express buildings in
mathematical notation when they talk to contractors but the latter can
usually come up with a cost estimate anyway.
Vulgarity: Programmers spend a lot of time discussing the behavior of
computers. Specialized terms like "barf" and "lossage", while
evocative, are not particularly precise. Whenever two programmers get
into an argument about what a program does, they don't sit down and
write up a proof, they look at the code. They might prove something
about the problem domain. What they usually do is "desk check" the
code, or maybe even go into the debugger and make the stupid computer
"desk check" the code for them. Programs are the common language of
programmers. They are precise; they can be used as a reasoning aid;
they are widely understood.
I have read too many papers in which mathematical notation is
gratuitously introduced. I have seen this reaching for abstraction
hide obvious inferences from the author. With certain notable
exceptions, too many authors reach for the wrong tools too soon.
Seth Steinberg
------------------------------
Date: 23 Feb 87 12:12:02 GMT
From: mcvax!ukc!warwick!gordon@seismo.css.gov (Gordon Joly)
Subject: What is this "INtelliGenT"?
"Intelligent" and "intelligence" are somewhat overused I fell. Consider
the browser which was described as "semi-intelligent" and the "intelligent
terminal". No wonder there is some confusion as to the possible meaning of
the term A.I.
Gordon Joly -- {seismo,ucbvax,decvax}!mcvax!ukc!warwick!gordon
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End of AIList Digest
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