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MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 13

AI Classics

The two outstanding figures in the history of computer science are Alan Turing and John von Neumann, and they shared the view that logic was the key to understanding and automating computation. In particular, it was Turing who gave us in the mid-1930s the fundamental analysis, and the logical definition, of the concept of'computability by machine' and who discovered the surprising and beautiful basic fact that there exist universal machines which by suitable programming can be made to t This essay is an expanded and revised version of one entitled The Role of Logic in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, which was completed in January 1992 (and was later published in the Proceedings of the Fifth Generation computer Systems 1992 Conference). Since completing that essay I have had the benefit of extremely helpful discussions on many of the details with Professor Donald Michie and Professor I. J. Good, both of whom knew Turing well during the war years at Bletchley Park. Professor J. A. N. Lee, whose knowledge of the literature and archives of the history of computing is encyclopedic, also provided additional information, some of which is still unpublished. Further light has very recently been shed on the von Neumann side of the story by Norman Macrae's excellent biography John von Neumann (Macrae 1992). Accordingly, it seemed appropriate to undertake a more complete and thorough version of the FGCS'92 essay, focussing somewhat more on the interesting historical and biographical issues. I am grateful to Donald Michie and Stephen Muggleton for inviting me to contribute such a'second edition' to the present volume, and I would also like to thank the Institute for New Computer Technology (ICOT) for kind permission to make use of the FGCS'92 essay in this way. 1 LOGIC, COMPUTERS, TURING, AND VON NEUMANN


MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 13

AI Classics

OXFORD 1994 Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin lbadan Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York 0 E. K. Furukawa, D. Michie, and S. Muggleton, 1994 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. The founder of modern computational logic, J.A. Robinson, opens this volume with a chapter on the field's great forefathers John von Neumann and Alan Turing.



MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 12 MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

AI Classics

Machine Intelligence 1 (1967) (eds N. Collins and D. Michie) Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh Machine Intelligence 2 (1968) (eds E. Dale and D. Michie) Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh (1 and 2 published as one volume in 1971 by Edinburgh University Press) (eds N. Collins, E. Dale, and D. Michie) Machine Intelligence 3 (1968) (ed. CLARENDON PRESS - OXFORD 1991 Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin lbadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, New York C J. E. Hayes, D. Michie, and E. Tyugu, 1991 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Machine intelligence. ISBN 0-19-853823-5 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Machine intelligence 12: towards an automated logic of human thought /edited by J. E. Hayes, D. Michie, and It is a pleasure to contribute an introduction to this twelfth volume of the international Machine Intelligence series. My own work has, at times, cast me in the scientific roles of experimenter, instrumentation designer, and administrator.


MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 11

AI Classics

In this paper we will be concerned with such reasoning in its most general form, that is, in inferences that are defeasible: given more information, we may retract them. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a form of non-monotonic inference based on the notion of a partial model of the world. We take partial models to reflect our partial knowledge of the true state of affairs. We then define non-monotonic inference as the process of filling in unknown parts of the model with conjectures: statements that could turn out to be false, given more complete knowledge. To take a standard example from default reasoning: since most birds can fly, if Tweety is a bird it is reasonable to assume that she can fly, at least in the absence of any information to the contrary. We thus have some justification for filling in our partial picture of the world with this conjecture. If our knowledge includes the fact that Tweety is an ostrich, then no such justification exists, and the conjecture must be retracted.


MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 11

AI Classics

Machine Intelligence 1 (1967) (eds N. Collins and D. Michie) Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh Machine Intelligence 2 (1968) (eds E. Dale and D. Michie) Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh (1 and 2 published as one volume in 1971 by Edinburgh University Press) (eds N. Collins, E. Dale, and D. Michie). CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD 1988 Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin lbadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, New York J. E. Hayes, D. Michie, and J. Richards 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Machine Intelligence. Richard J. 006.3 ISBN 0-19-853718-2 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset and printed in Northern Ireland at The Universities Press (Belfast) Ltd. Held at intervals in Scotland, the first seven International Machine Intelligence Workshops spanning the period of 1965-71 were involved in developing the new subject internationally--in those early days mainly as a mid-Atlantic phenomenon.


Z.til

AI Classics

This paper describes some work on automatically generating finite counterexamples in topology, and the use of counterexamples to speed up proof discovery in intermediate analysis, and gives some examples theorems where human provers are aided in proof discovery by the use of examples.


LOGLISP: an alternative to PROLOG

AI Classics

Seven years or so after it was first proposed (Kowalski 1974), the technique of'logic programming' today has an enthusiastic band of users and an increasingly impressive record of applications. For most of these people, logic progamming means PROLOG, the system defined and originally implemented by the Marseille group (Roussel 1975). PROLOG has since been implemented in several other places, most notably at Edinburgh (Warren et al. 1977). Much of the rapid success of logic progamming is due to these implementations of PROLOG (as well as to the inspired missionary work of Kowalski, van Emden, Clark and others). The Edinburgh PROLOG system is in particular a superb piece of software engineering which allows the logic progammer to compile assertions into DEC-10 machine code and thus run logic programs with an efficiency which compares favourably with that of compiled LISP. All other implementations of logic programming (including our own, which we describe in this paper) are based on interpreters.


New research on expert systems

AI Classics

All Al programs are essentially reasoning programs. And, to the extent that they reason well about a problem area, all exhibit some expertise at problem solving. Programs that solve the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, for example, reason about the goal state and the initial state in order to find'expert-level' solutions. Unlike other programs, however, the claims about expert systems are related to questions of usefulness and understandability as well as performance. We can distinguish expert systems from other Al programs in the following respects: Utility Performance Transparency Designers of expert systems are motivated to build useful tools in addition to constructing programs that serve as vehicles for AI research.