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AIList Digest Volume 5 Issue 248
AIList Digest Monday, 26 Oct 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 248
Today's Topics:
Query - Character Recognition,
Tools - OCR & Character Recognition,
Education - Introductory Prolog,
Comments - Flawed Minds & Goal of AI
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Date: 16 Oct 87 12:47:55 GMT
From: mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!zen!vic@uunet.uu.net (Victor Gavin)
Subject: Character recognition
I have been puttering about for the past few weeks with an HP ScanJet (one
of those 300dpi digitizers). I have been asked to write some software which
can (given an image produced by the scanner) reproduce the original text of
the paper in a machine readable form.
The text will normally be numbers and the image will initially be a bit
pattern.
If someone can point me to some introductory texts on character recognition
I would be grateful.
If someone has already tackled this problem, any help I can get will be much
appreciated.
vic
--
Victor Gavin Zengrange Limited
vic@zen.co.uk Greenfield Road
..!mcvax!ukc!zen.co.uk!vic Leeds LS9 8DB
+44 532 489048 England
------------------------------
Date: 24 Oct 87 21:14:14 GMT
From: phri!roy@NYU.EDU (Roy Smith)
Subject: Re: Character recognition
In article <641@zen.UUCP> vic@zen.UUCP (Victor Gavin) writes:
> I have been asked to write some software which can (given an image
> produced by the scanner) reproduce the original text of the paper in a
> machine readable form.
I don't know much about it, but a company called DEST markets a
300-dpi scanner for the Macintosh (and, I think, IBM-PC) for about $2k,
including character recognition software. Unless your application has some
special requirements, I would imagine getting one of these jobs would be a
lot more cost-effective than writing your own software.
I've added comp.sys.mac to the Newsgroups line to see if anybody
there has any experience with the DEST they could share. While I'm at it,
can somebody compare and contrast the O($2k) scanners with the el-cheapo
Thunderscan for me. What to the "real" scanners have going for them that I
can't do with a Thunderscan?
--
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
------------------------------
Date: 25 Oct 87 00:51:32 GMT
From: dewey.soe.berkeley.edu!oster@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (David
Phillip Oster)
Subject: Re: Character recognition
In article <2984@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
>In article <641@zen.UUCP> vic@zen.UUCP (Victor Gavin) writes:
>> from a scanner image reproduce the original text of the paper in a
>> machine readable form.
>can somebody compare and contrast the O($2k) scanners with the el-cheapo
>Thunderscan for me. What to the "real" scanners have going for them that I
>can't do with a Thunderscan?
Thunderscan offers very high quality scanning, at resolutions up to
300 dpi, and up to 5 bits per pixel. (32 grays.) It can handle
originals up to 15" wide (in a wide carriage imagewriter) and at least
32767 scan lines long. (I haven't actually tried anything longer than
11", but when it finishes, the "continue scan" button is still waiting
to be presssed.) However, it is slow, (5 to 40 minutes, depending on
resolution and size of original.) and only works on single sheet,
thin, bendable material. (The material has to fit in the imagewriter
printer.) That means you'd do well to have a xerographic copier handy.
The expensive scanners are flat bed, copier style machines, and do
their work faster (can't be too much faster, though. It takes
15minutes to send an 8"x10" page at 1-bit per pixel 300dpi, over a
9600 baud line if you do not use a compressing transfer protocol.)
Olduvai Software makes a line of software that parses scanned pages
back into text. Either the current issue of MacUser has a review, or I
saw it in a recent copy of MacWeek, but for < $200.00 you get a
software package to do syntactic pattern recognition of letter
features, to determine the ASCII for the scanned page.
It is still cheaper to hire a human typist, but soon the cost balance
will flip the other way. (I expect that copy shops will offer a
service: bring in your books and blank disks, and for a few cents a
page, get them digitized to ASCII. (And won't that boost our needs for
on-line storage (What, only 300Gigabytes! How do your get by with such
a small library?)))
(note, I've directed followups to just comp.misc. If people want to continue
this discussion, they can read it there.)
--- David Phillip Oster --A Sun 3/60 makes a poor Macintosh II.
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --A Macintosh II makes a poor Sun 3/60.
Uucp: {uwvax,decvax,ihnp4}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu
------------------------------
Date: 24 Oct 87 16:42:23 GMT
From: unc!bts@mcnc.org (Bruce Smith)
Subject: Re: Suggestions for Course
Turbo Prolog for an AI course? Why not FORTRAN, for that matter?
Quoting (without permission) from Alan Bundy's Catalog of AI Tools:
FORTRAN is the programming language considered by many to
be the natural successor of LISP and Prolog for AI research.
Its advantages include
1. It is very efficient for numerical computation (many AI
programs rely heavily on number crunching techniques).
2. AI programs tend to be very poorly constructed, meaning
that control needs to move frequently from one part of a
program to another. FORTRAN provides a special mechanism
for achieving this, the so-called GOTO statement.
3. FORTRAN provides a very efficient data structure, the
array, which is particularly useful if, for example, one
wishes to process a collection of English sentences each
of which has the same length.
______________________
Bruce T. Smith, UNC-CH
bts@unc.edu
------------------------------
Date: 24 Oct 87 21:09:34 GMT
From: rocky!wagner@labrea.stanford.edu (Juergen Wagner)
Subject: Re: Suggestions for Course
Great! I believe, Bruce hit the right point. Teaching a programming
language whose conceptual structure is that different from what most
people think of programming languages, should not be done using almost a
counterexample of that paradigm. Some people are convinced that
TurboP#$@$ is a real Prolog (which might be true in their understanding
of AI languages), and there might be applications where sliding away
from PASCAL over TurboProlog to (REAL) Prolog (just to introduce changes
step by step), but it is definitively no good choice for teaching
typical AI programming techniques which (by their nature) require symbol
crunching rather than number crunching. And if I first have to write a
bundle of declarations before I find out that this highly nested and
flexible data structure I have in mind cannot be implemented that way,
this is not what I expect of such a programming language.
Sure, TurboP#$@$ is available on IBM/PCs. But there are also other nice
Prologs around, even a Public Domain one (SBProlog, mentioned in this
newsgroup some time ago). So, why not take a real Prolog even if it is
only line-oriented, and even if you have to write the main parts of your
programs outside Prolog with a conventional text editor? The idea of an
AI course should be to convey to basic principles and the special way of
thinking and reasoning about (so-called) AI problems. Exploring and
experimenting with programs gives a good impression of that.
Ok. No more flames about TurboP#$@$.
Juergen Wagner, (USENET) gandalf@portia.stanford.edu
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford CA
------------------------------
Date: 25 Oct 87 03:50:08 GMT
From: violet.berkeley.edu!ed298-ak@jade.Berkeley.EDU (Edouard
Lagache)
Subject: Re: Suggestions for Course (Getting a PROLOG cheap or free)
I think that PROLOG is a much better choice for an intro course
on A.I. (someday maybe I will write a paper on why). As to getting
a PROLOG to use on IBM PCs, there are a number of Public Domain
PROLOGs around. One that I think would be fine for this use is
put out by Automata Design Associates and can be found in
various software libraries or contact them at:
A.D.A.
1570 Arran Way
Dresher, PA, 19025
(215) 646-4894
I think they charge $10 for a copy of their PD PROLOG, but that
would be a one time investment.
Edouard Lagache
lagache@violet.berkeley.edu
------------------------------
Date: 25 Oct 87 15:44:48 GMT
From: duke!gleicher@mcnc.org (Michael Gleicher)
Subject: Re: Suggestions for Course
(Couldn't bear it any longer - I have to put my two cents in)
(I am not a teacher - I am a student who has gone through the courses in
question)
An excellent point has been brought up - What is the real reason for wanting
to teach Prolog in an AI course? (by the way, replace prolog with lisp in
most cases in this article)
1) Because you want to foster the belief that Prolog and AI go
together -
This is downright BAD and wrong!
2) Because in order to read much of the literature, you must
understand Lisp/Prolog because it gets refered to alot -
This one I agree with
3) Because it is the IN thing to do -
I'm not even going to comment
4) Because it allows rapid prototyping so a small system that really
solves problems can be built in a short amount of time -
If this is your real goal, be sure not to get sidetracked.
In the AI course that I took, we were taught prolog, and
wrote programs to solve non-ai problems. I neither learned
about how to write AI programs nor how to rapidly build
a system in Prolog. I did learn some bad Prolog habits
because I was trying to program prolog the same way that
I would have coded in C - because there wasn't enough time
for someone to show me to think otherwise.
On the upside, We did have an assignment with DCG's that
was interesting (only that had any notion of an
AI problem to solve (natural language) or that showed me
a place where I couldn't use conventional programming tactics)
What using AI in a class DID do for me was allow me to get a summer job where
I really learned prolog, doing things that were NOT AI.
The best part of my AI class was when we looked briefly at many areas of
interest in the current research (expert systems, natural language, planning,
connectionism, ...). Unfortunately, this was at the end of the course. Maybe a
more effective way to teach AI would be to show the applications and use them
to justify why you need to study logic and predicate calculus and frames and
...
Using Turbo prolog could only accomplish #1 and #3 on the list above, but
other people have already said this.
Again, I am not a teacher, just a student who has taken these courses, and is
still interested in the subject DESPITE the courses.
And -
PROLOG IS NOT JUST FOR ``AI''
Mike
------------------------------
Date: 25 Oct 87 02:50:37 GMT
From: kludge@pyr.gatech.edu (Scott Dorsey)
Reply-to: kludge@pyr.gatech.edu (Scott Dorsey)
Subject: Humor - Flawed Minds
In article <8710240608.AA19274@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
RCSMPA::HAMILTON@gmr.COM ("William E. Hamilton, Jr.") writes:
>Of course the human mind is flawed. The proof is quite straightforward.
Fred the Football Player says, "I don't get no A's in none of my
classes. Dis is either cause da professirs what give de tests is
flawed, or cause I is flawed. If eider one of dese tings is true,
den I can state catigorikly dat dere is at least won person what
got a flawed mind. If one person got a flawed mind, then he isn't
no good at judgin' if udder people also got flawed minds. Den, since
no person can tell if deir mind is flawed (cause if you mind is
flawed, it might be flawed in way dat make you tink it aint flawed.
If it aint flawed, den you no it aint flawed, but eider way you tink
da same ting, so ya gotta assume dat it's flawed), dey gotta assume
dat it is, so dey aint able to be sure dat dey can tell if anyone
else got one flawed mind. Derefore ya gotta assume dat everybody got
a flawed mind."
--
Scott Dorsey Kaptain_Kludge
SnailMail: ICS Programming Lab, Georgia Tech, Box 36681, Atlanta, Georgia 30332
Internet: kludge@pyr.gatech.edu
uucp: ...!{decvax,hplabs,ihnp4,linus,rutgers,seismo}!gatech!gitpyr!kludge
------------------------------
Date: 22 Oct 87 16:29:25 GMT
From: mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!hci!gilbert@uunet.uu.net (Gilbert
Cockton)
Subject: Re: What the hell does flawed mean, anyway?
In article <1373@houdi.UUCP> marty1@houdi.UUCP (M.BRILLIANT) writes:
>
>I claim that with respect to any referent the mind is flawed.
>If any reader can define any referent with respect to which the
>mind is perfect, I will admit my argument is flawed.
Imperfection?
Pointing to one's belly button
Making excuses
...
...
...
...
...
--
Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN
JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.hci ARPA: gilbert%hci.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
UUCP: ..{backbone}!mcvax!ukc!hwcs!hci!gilbert
------------------------------
Date: 22 Oct 87 16:20:09 GMT
From: mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!hci!gilbert@uunet.uu.net (Gilbert
Cockton)
Subject: Re: Goal of AI: where are we going?
In article <1368@houdi.UUCP> marty1@houdi.UUCP (M.BRILLIANT) writes:
>Factually, we know the mind is flawed because we observe that it does
>not do what we expect of it.
I expect my car to fetch my shoes
I observe that my car does not fetch my shoes
My car is flawed.
I expect my dog to not move from the fire when I come to put more coal on
I observe that my dog is moving when I come to put more coal on
My dog is flawed
I expect the word foliage to mean any "leaves" on trees shrubs
I observe that people in New England use the word to mean Autumn leaves
People in New England are flawed
Wow! This must be logic we're seeing :-)
Now for an argument based only on my understanding of what it is to
convince: We can expect nothing untoward from something we do not
fully understand at the level of a predictive model. I understand my
car, I do not understand dogs or New Englanders.
--
Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN
JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.hci ARPA: gilbert%hci.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
UUCP: ..{backbone}!mcvax!ukc!hwcs!hci!gilbert
------------------------------
Date: 23 Oct 87 15:00:25 GMT
From: mcvax!ukc!stc!idec!camcon!ijd@uunet.uu.net (Ian Dickinson)
Subject: Re: Is the human mind flawed?
in article <2809@sdsu.UUCP>, caasi@sdsu.UUCP (Richard Caasi) says:
>
> If the human mind was flawless we wouldn't be debating this issue.
> To determine how flawed the human mind is we need to first define the
> characteristics of a flawless or perfect mind. Any suggestions?
My mind does exactly what I want it to do. I like to be emotive, to be
able to intuit, guess, make mistakes and learn from them, do silly
things to let off steam, laugh at obscure jokes etc. All of these
abilities could be regarded as flaws in a device which aspired to
mechanistic perfection. But I like my mind - for me it _is_ perfect
(although maybe not so to another person).
> Drawing an analogy with ideal operational amplifiers
> in electronics, ....
Hum. I can't think of a machine that I would like to use as an
analogy here. One problem is that we know that the individual components
of the brain (perhaps more analogous to an electronic device) have
pretty awful performance characteristics, but the *mind* as a whole
has characteristics that no machine in existence today can begin to
match. So, whilst I have no doubt that we can create technology
that does improve on the metrics listed in the posting (indeed I am
actively involved in helping to do so), I *do* doubt that this will
get us much nearer to a mindful machine.
> Question: Does such a mind exist or is nothing perfect in the real
> world?
Ultimately, reality is all we have. End of problem.
--
Ian Dickinson Cambridge Consultants Ltd, AI group (0223) 358855 [U.K.]
uucp: ...!seismo!mcvax!ukc!camcon!ijd or: ijd%camcon.uucp
>> Disclaimer: All opinions expressed are my own (surprise!). <<
>> To dance is to live, but the dance of life requires many strange steps <<
------------------------------
Date: 22 Oct 87 15:51:10 GMT
From: mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!hci!gilbert@uunet.uu.net (Gilbert
Cockton)
Subject: Re: Goal of AI: where are we going?
In article <15196@topaz.rutgers.edu> josh@topaz.rutgers.edu
(J Storrs Hall) writes:
>In Western thought it has been realized at long and arduous last that
>the appeal to authority is fallacious.
Tell that to the judge. This understanding of Western social
practices seems weak given its confusion of intellectual idealism with
social reality. Authority counts for far more than rationality or science.
>Experiment works; the real world exists;
Not true all the time - scientific method is flawed, as any sophomore
who's studied epistemology can tell you. The modern command over nature
is due, not to a slavish and unimagintive application of statistical
inference and hypothetico-deductive reasoning, but to an engagement
which combines rigour, rationality (self-critical candour) and
imagination. This view of reality and experiment is very dated and it's
time some of us ignored the off-the-cuff dogma of our chemistry and
physics teachers (rarely real people :-) ) and caught up with modern
Western thinking (and eternal practice).
> objective standards can be applied. Even to people.
They must be proved objective first though, so this argument is empty.
What is an objective standard? I admit the value of the idea,
otherwise our concepts of morality would be weakened. But the term is
not to be used lightly. "flawed" is not an objective standard, though
it can be defined idiosyncratically and after the fact to correspond
to standards which are. Calling the human mind "flawed" in essence
could be being motivated by a lack of fit with an AI model - now
shouldn't this lack of fit suggest the model is flawed and not the
human mind? Note that at the end of the day, the unimaginative
application of any method is less important than the people who are
convinced, and remain convinced over the rest of their life. Science
and convincement are not one and the same, and it is the latter which
guides human life.
>It is true that most AI researchers "believe that
>the mind is a machine", but it seems that the alternative is to
>suggest that human intelligence has a supernatural mechanism.
No, Mind is extra/para-natural - we cannot observe it as we do nature,
and thus the values of science do not apply. More spiritual and
humanist approaches do. By the way, as a historan originally, I would
hold that humanist and spiritual views of human nature have dominated,
and continue to dominate, the public thinking on Man. Reductionist
mechanical scientists appear to be an ugly minority who have little
*respectful* social contact outside their own self-congratulating cliques.
>The anti-scientific mentality is an emotional
>excuse used to avoid thinking clearly. It would be much more honest
>to say "I don't want to think, it's too hard work."
There are other interpretations of this. I wouldn't use, for example,
predicate logic (and thus Frames, semantic nets, etc),
to describe the design process, not because it is too hard, but
because it becomes a cretinous tool when describing such a rich
human phenomenum. Thus I am not avoiding hard work; I am avoiding
*fruitless* work. Many workers in AI would do better if they stopped
trying to cram the world into an impoverished computational
representation and actually explored the rich range of non-computable
knowledge representations (e.g. the Novel, the painting, psalms, the
monographs of the liberal arts). If this is all too inaccessible to their
critical abilities, they could at least read some of the established
works of scholarship on semantics (e.g. Lyons' 2 volumes).
>The champions of irrationality, mysticism, and superstition have
>emotional problems which bias their cognitive processes. Their minds are flawed
This is very sad. I think the author is missing something, somewhere.
I cannot believe that those who share a same higher view of humanity
are misleading themselves. What does the author's friends think?
--
Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN
JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.hci ARPA: gilbert%hci.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
UUCP: ..{backbone}!mcvax!ukc!hwcs!hci!gilbert
------------------------------
End of AIList Digest
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