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AIList Digest Volume 5 Issue 288
AIList Digest Wednesday, 30 Dec 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 288
Today's Topics:
Queries - Symbolics Bitmaps & ELIZA & ALVIN & Survey Announcement &
Text-to-Voice Convertor & PD Expert System,
Linguistics - Online Dictionary,
Planning - STRIPS References,
Simulation - List Address Change,
Law - Can You Sue an Expert System?,
Philosophy - The Role of Biological Models in AI
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 12:50:21 1987
From: prem%research.att.com@RELAY.CS.NET
Subject: Symbolics Bitmap question.
Does someone have a Zetalisp package that will take a symbolics
bitmap and dump it (Postscript format) into a unix file ?
thanks.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 87 22:52:41 GMT
From: Wolf-Dieter Batz <L12%DHDURZ1.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Subject: ELIZA ???
Hello ppl on AIlist,
I'm in need of help from some of you cracks who have a broader perspective
than me, 'cause I did not read this list for several months now. Question:
Is there any form of some intelligent interviewing software out on the net?
We would apprecciate any source in any language you like. Best would be some
Prog combining the features from ELIZA and STORYTELLER. Please send it to my
address directly, 'cause I do not read this list (no time, believe me...)!
If there's any substantial response, I will post it as a large package to
the list next spring, ok?
thanxalot *** Wodibatz (L12@DHDURZ1.bitnet)
------------------------------
Date: 20 Dec 87 15:17:02 GMT
From: portal!cup.portal.com!Barry_A_Stevens@uunet.uu.net
Subject: trying to find ALVIN
I'm trying to find the author of ALVIN, a neural-net based system that
can be "taught" areas of knowledge. The author was originally distributing
through the UCLA PC users group. I would like to either find the author, and/or
get a copy of ALVIN. Can anyone help?
Reply by email or to
Barry Stevens
Applied AI Systems
PO Box 2747
Del Mar, CA 92014
619-755-7231
--
Thanks in advance for your help.
------------------------------
Date: Tue 22 Dec 87 11:40:35-PST
From: ELIOT@ECLA.USC.EDU
Subject: Survey Announcement
* NOTICE *
Request for Survey Participation
I am conducting a survey of university faculty doing expert
systems research with a business emphasis, and hope to obtain a
widespread level of participation (note: I am a faculty member
doing this survey as part of my research efforts and in
conjunction with another professor, Benn Konsynski who is
visiting at Harvard this year and is normally with the University
of Arizona).
We are particularly interested in business oriented research
topics, including the application of expert systems to business
domains (e.g., finance, marketing, accounting, and so on) and the
management of expert systems projects. A questionnaire is
available from me and can be obtained by email or regular mail.
To obtain a questionnaire, send a request to:
On the arpanet:
ELIOT@ECLA.USC.EDU
Via regular mail:
Dr. Eliot, Director
Expert Systems Laboratory
Systems Science Department
University of Southern California
P.O. Box 30041
Long Beach, Ca. 90853-0041
The results of our survey will be summarized and made available
in a brief technical report. We anticipate making presentations
at selected AI conferences regarding the survey results and have
been in contact with several interested AI journals.
We hope to distribute the survey and obtain the completed forms
back within the month of January. So send for your survey today!
Dr. Lance B. Eliot
USC
------------------------------
Date: 20 Dec 87 23:50:11 GMT
From: ihnp4!islenet!jds@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (James Steppling)
Subject: Text-to-Voice Convertor
I am in the process of developing an OEM voice menu system requiring a high
quality Text-to-Voice Pheripheral Board for a IBM compatible PC.
I have tested the board recently displayed a COMDEX and fount it to be just
bearly accepatable.
If any one has or is working on or is knows of a good non-computer sounding
digital or synthisized Text-to-Voice processor please let me know.
Thanks
Jim
------------------------------
Date: 22 Dec 87 17:22:47 GMT
From: grc!don@csd1.milw.wisc.edu (Donald D. Woelz)
Subject: PD expert system
I am looking for a simple PD expert system that would be used
to assist a user in configuring a computer system. I envision
that the system will ask the user simple yes or no questions
about what he wants to have in the system, and then display
the complete configuration when done.
If anyone has such software or knows where I might obtain it,
please send me email with the information. I am running
System V Release 2 and would prefer something that runs in
that environment.
Thanks.
--
Don Woelz {ames, rutgers, harvard}!uwvax!uwmcsd1!grc!don
GENROCO, Inc. Phone: 414-644-8700
205 Kettle Moraine Drive North Fax: 414-644-6667
Slinger, WI 53086 Telex: 6717062
------------------------------
Date: 25 Dec 87 23:54:40 GMT
From: ucsdhub!hp-sdd!ncr-sd!ncrcae!gollum!rolandi@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu
(rolandi)
Subject: online dictionary needed
*************************** WANTED *******************************
I am trying to locate an online dictionary or any large collection
of English words in electromic form that includes a pronunciation
key. Not to be picky, but the pronunciation key would ideally
employ regular ascii characters to represent the word's phonetic
qualities. Does a "shareware" version of such a resource exist?
Thanks in advance...
w.rolandi
u.s.carolina dept. of psychology and linguistics
ncr advanced development
------------------------------
Date: 27 Dec 87 00:47:18 GMT
From: glacier!jbn@labrea.stanford.edu (John B. Nagle)
Subject: Re: online dictionary needed
The entire American Heritage Dictionary, definitions and pronunciation
as well as the words themselves, is available, along with various other
reference works, in CD-ROM format from Microsoft. See your local Microsoft
dealer for details.
John Nagle
------------------------------
Date: 18 Dec 87 21:20:14 GMT
From: steve@hubcap.clemson.edu ("Steve" Stevenson)
Subject: STRIPS references query answered.
Some time ago I posted a query for the state of the STRIPS model.
Several people took time to reply. Thanks to you all. Here's
the references.
Happy Holidays!!!
-------
Wilkins, D., ``Domain-independent Planning:
Representation and Plan Generation",
{\it Artificial Intelligence 22}, April 1984, pp. 269-301.
Wilkins, D., ``Recovering from Execution Errors in SIPE",
{\it Computation Intelligence 1}, February 1985, pp. 33-45.
-------
The PRODIGY system here at CMU is a recent derivative of STRIPS.
Its mostly used as a testbed for machine learning research by
various people (e.g. see my article in IJCAI87),
but the problem solver itself has some
advances that are interesting. We've just about finished a manual
for the system, and will be releasing it for external use within
the next month or two. Let me know if you are interested.
- Steve Minton
-------
A recent paper by David Chapman (AIJ v32 #3 July 87) gives a good
overview of planning research.
-------
McCarty, (mccarty@red.rutgers.edu), suggested by a student at Rutgers.
-------
Steve (really "D. E.") Stevenson steve@hubcap.clemson.edu
Department of Computer Science, (803)656-5880.mabell
Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-1906
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 87 11:53:30 EST
From: Paul Fishwick <fishwick@fish.cis.ufl.edu>
Subject: simulation list address change
Ken,
If you could possible make a change to the addresses in my last
message before posting it would be great! The addresses in that
mail message are:
simulation@fish.cis.ufl.edu
simulation-request@fish.cis.ufl.edu
and should be changed to:
simulation@ufl.edu
simulation-request@ufl.edu
Thanks a bunch. It turns out that many nameservers have not been changed
so that they can access the 'fish' machine so I decided to operate the
mailing list from our front end mailer machine. Have you had problems
from individuals not being able to get to your 'kl' machine? I suppose
that if everyone's name server had the same "intelligence" then we
wouldn't have a problem.
-paul
------------------------------
Date: 20 Dec 87 15:20:02 GMT
From: portal!cup.portal.com!Barry_A_Stevens@uunet.uu.net
Subject: re: can you sue an expert system?
I have received many replies to my original posting on the legal aspects
of using expert systems. Many were useful, a few thought the scenario
was trivial and, therefore, so was the discussion. I'll be summarizing
the result and posting shortly. Thanks for your help.
--
Barry Stevens
------------------------------
Date: 17 Dec 87 13:42:54 GMT
From: mcvax!inria!imag!bondono@uunet.uu.net (Philippe Bondono)
Subject: Re: Can you sue an expert system?
In article <1788@cup.portal.com> Barry_A_Stevens@cup.portal.com writes:
>
>Consider, and please comment on, this scenario.
>
> * * * * * * * * * * *
>
>A well-respected, well-established expert systems(ES) company constructs
>an expert financial advisory system. The firm employs the top ES
>applications specialists in the country. The system is constructed with
>help from the top domain experts in the financial services industry. It
>is exhaustively tested, including verification of rules, verification of
>reasoning, and further analyses to establish the system's overall value.
>All results are excellent, and the system is offered for sale.
No comment on this point: I am very trustful in expert systems (I must be so,
in fact, since I am working in that field), nevertheless, I think that the two
most important features of expert systems are:
1) their capacity to verify the consistency of their database(s), and
2) the domain they are concerned with.
>By now, you know the outcome. On the Friday morning before Black Monday,
>the expert system tells Joe to "sell everything he has and go into the
>stock market." ESs can usually explain their actions, and Joe asks for
>an explanation. The ES replies "because ... it's only been going UP for
>the past five years and there are NO PROBLEMS IN SIGHT."
The expert system was right: it made a deduction from the knowledge it was fed
on with!
But the real problem is the domain of expertise, more precisely the suitability
of an expert system in a particular field.
It seems to me quite unreasonable to build an expert system for financial
advice, since this field is continuously in evolution. Moreover, for the
particular problem of stock market, it is neither a question of months, nor of
days: it is a question of hours!
Everybody knows that stock market is particularly precarious, since it can
easily go up or down, depending on "abstract" parameters, such as feelings, or
interpretations of official people's declarations (remember the effect of
Reagan's declarations!), or even the fact that one is tense!
This kind of knowledge cannot be modeled, at least till now, in an expert system
database.
This was to say that the problem is not whether or not to start a discussion on
qualities/drawbacks of expert systems, but rather on what kind of field is
suitable for building expert systems.
______________________________________________________________________________
Meryem MARZOUKI
Laboratoire TIM3/IMAG INPG - 46 avenue Felix VIALLET
38031 Grenoble Cedex - FRANCE
e-mail marzouki@archi.uucp
"my tailor is rich, but my english is poor!"
______________________________________________________________________________
------------------------------
Date: 18 Dec 87 12:42:48 GMT
From: mcvax!varol@uunet.uu.net (Varol Akman)
Subject: Re: Can you sue an expert system?
Meryem Marzouki writes:
>
> ... material deleted
>
>No comment on this point: I am very trustful in expert systems (I must be so,
>in fact, since I am working in that field), nevertheless, I think that the two
>most important features of expert systems are:
>1) their capacity to verify the consistency of their database(s), and
>2) the domain they are concerned with.
>
> ... material deleted
>
>The expert system was right: it made a deduction from the knowledge it was fed
>on with!
>But the real problem is the domain of expertise, more precisely the
>suitability
>of an expert system in a particular field.
>It seems to me quite unreasonable to build an expert system for financial
>advice, since this field is continuously in evolution. Moreover, for the
>particular problem of stock market, it is neither a question of months, nor of
>days: it is a question of hours!
>Everybody knows that stock market is particularly precarious, since it can
>easily go up or down, depending on "abstract" parameters, such as feelings, or
>interpretations of official people's declarations (remember the effect of
>Reagan's declarations!), or even the fact that one is tense!
>This kind of knowledge cannot be modeled, at least till now, in an expert
system
>database.
>This was to say that the problem is not whether or not to start a discussion
on
>qualities/drawbacks of expert systems, but rather on what kind of field is
>suitable for building expert systems.
Expert systems, at this stage of their evolution, are tools for
modeling surface knowledge in an area. They have no ability
whatsoever to reason about the underlying mechanisms of the domain
that they try to model. Thus they lack deep knowledge.
Human beings have deep knowledge. There is also a lot of high quality
work in the area of modeling deep knowledge but this is very much
experimental. In fact, if we're successful (to an extent) in
modeling deep knowledge, then AI will prove that it is a discipline
which can deal with realistic (read non-toy) problems.
Until then, expert systems will serve as advisors whose advice need
close scrutiny (sp?) by human experts. I would never try to sue an
expert system because I KNOW that it can't be trusted, given their
level of sophistication at this time.
I can't trust something if it is the subject matter of my field of
research because my field of research is very much in its infancy.
To me that kind of trust is probably the worst thing that I may have.
Programs should be trusted not because we feel a parental warm affinity
towards them. They should be trusted if they are worth our trust.
The road to that trust is not a path of roses; it is a path full of
hard work, correctness proofs, wide and general field tests, etc.
Until then let's just work and hope that everythings turns out
to be allright at the end.
-Varol Akman
CWI, Amsterdam
------------------------------
Date: 18 Dec 87 01:15:16 GMT
From: tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!msellers@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Mike
Sellers)
Subject: Re: the role of biological models in ai
>In article <23@gollum.Columbia.NCR.COM> rolandi@gollum.UUCP () writes:
>>
>> According to some AI theorists, (see Schank,
>>R.C., (1984) The Cognitive Computer. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley)
>>AI is "an investigation into human understanding through which we learn
>>...about the complexities of our own intelligence." Thus, at least for
>>some AI researchers, the automation of intelligent behavior is secondary
>>to the expansion and formalization of our self-understanding.
>From what I've seen of AI research, this may not be true (in most cases).
I think most AI researchers are not so concerned with self-understanding as
they are with creating a program that interacts with humans in a seemingly
intelligent way. It makes no difference if the methods or structures used
bear any resemblance to the human way of doing things. I believe the problem
for most active researchers is one of scale: you cannot possibly hope to
create a program that models human cognitive processing, and you have to get
*something* running, so you set your sights a little lower and brush aside
questions of how well the program corresponds to humans. This is not meant
to sound demeaning or even cynical, just realistic.
>>This is
>>assumed to be the result of creating computational "accounts" of (typically
>>intellectual) behavior. Researchers write programs which display the
>>performance characteristics of humans within some given domain. The
>>efficacy of a program is a function of the similarity of its performance
>>to the human performance after which it was modeled. Thus AI programs are
>>(often) created in order to "explain" the processes that they model.
The last three statements are, I believe, rarely (if ever, in "classical"
AI research) true. In the vast majority of cases, we do not even know what
the "performance characteristics of humans" are! For a task of any real
complexity, modeling a human's performance (when it can be measured) is
still a matter of theory and conjecture rather than programming (see the
scale problem I mentioned above). For example, even for all their hype
and worth, knowledge-based (expert) systems do not even begin to approximate
the actions of a human expert. The most advanced projects in this area have
some explanatory capabilities, and some skill at incorporating new or
conflicting facts in their decision making process, but this is just
scratching the surface of how human experts operate. Lastly, current
AI programs are like the stork-story of human birth as far as explaining
human behavior or cognitive processing goes; they may provide something
that we can learn from later on, but they do not really get us any closer
to knowing what is really going on.
In article <2590@gryphon.CTS.COM>, sarima@gryphon.CTS.COM (Stan Friesen) writes:
>My problem with this class of AI research is that I question it
>validity/usefulness. Why should there be only *one* algorithm for a
>particular 'behavior'? What evidence do we have that the algorithms that
>we are writing into our programs are in fact related in any way th the
>ones used by the human brain? Mere parallel behavior is NOT sufficient
>evidence to claim increased understanding of a human behavior, some
>evidence from neurology and psychology is necessary to at least
>demonstrate applicibility. In particular, I find most current AI
>algorithms to be far too analytical to be realistic models of human,
>or even animal, cognition.
Most AI algorithms have little if any resemblance to how humans function.
How important this fact is depends on who you talk to. Of those people
doing research in PDP (parallel distributed processing, or artificial
neural networks, or connectionist nets, etc), many are convinced that some
correspondence with the functioning of the human brain is important (possibly
vital). This is not to say that this way of operating is the "only way".
It is, however, the only way that we know of. Later, when we have all the
principles behind cognition down pat, we can begin to branch out in different
directions. Interestingly, many of the people doing this research are
psychologists and neurologists, so there is (hopefully) an increasing amount
of knowledge and techniques from these fields being used in this research.
For the time being, however, the level of cognition we will be seeing arising
from PDP research will be more reminisicent of a flatworm or a sea slug
than a dog or a human (I predict, however, that this is more than we will
see from more "classical" AI methods, which will continue to be more concerned
with outward function than with inward correspondence).
--
Mike Sellers
...!tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!msellers
Mentor Graphics Corp.
Electronic Packaging and Analysis Division
------------------------------
End of AIList Digest
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