Asia
Rule-Based Expert Systems: The MYCIN Experiments of the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project
Buchanan, Bruce G., Shortliffe, Edward H.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is largely an experimental science—at least as much progress has been made by building and analyzing programs as by examining theoretical questions. MYCIN is one of several well-known programs that embody some intelligence and provide data on the extent to which intelligent behavior can be programmed. As with other AI programs, its development was slow and not always in a forward direction. But we feel we learned some useful lessons in the course of nearly a decade of work on MYCIN and related programs. In this book we share the results of many experiments performed in that time, and we try to paint a coherent picture of the work. The book is intended to be a critical analysis of several pieces of related research, performed by a large number of scientists. We believe that the whole field of AI will benefit from such attempts to take a detailed retrospective look at experiments, for in this way the scientific foundations of the field will gradually be defined. It is for all these reasons that we have prepared this analysis of the MYCIN experiments.
The complete book in a single file.
Artificial Intelligence Needs More Emphasis on Basic Research: President's Quarterly Message
AI NEEDS MORE EMF'HASIS ON BASIC RESEARCH Too few people are doing basic research in AT rela-language processing seems misguided to me. There is too tive to the number working on applications The ratio of much emphasis on syntax and not enough on the semantics. This is unfortunate, between existing AI formalisms and English miss the point. Even the applied goals press in English what we already know how to express in proposed by various groups in the U.S., Europe and Japan computerese. Rather we must study those ideas expressible for the next ten years are not just engineering extrapolations in natural language that no-one knows how to represent at from the present state of science.
Introduction to the COMTEX Microfiche Edition of Memos from the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project, later known as the Stanford AI Lab or SAIL, was created by Prof. John McCarthy shortly after his arrival at Stanford on 1962. As a faculty member in the Computer Science Division of the Mathematics Department, McCarthy began supervising research in artificial intelligence and timesharing systems with a few students. From this small start, McCarthy built a large and active research organization involving many other faculty and research projects as well as his own. There is no single theme to the SAIL memos. They cannot be easily categorized because they show a diversity of interests, resulting from the diversity of investigators and projects. Nevertheless, there are some important dimensions to the research that took place in the AI Lab that will try to put in historical context in this brief introduction.
Artificial Intelligence Prepares for 2001
Artificial Intelligence, as a maturing scientific/engineering discipline, is beginning to find its niche among the variety of subjects that are relevant to intelligent, perceptive behavior. A view of AI is presented that is based on a declarative representation of knowledge with semantic attachments to problem-specific procedures and data structures. Several important challenges to this view are briefly discussed. It is argued that research in the field would be stimulated by a project to develop a computer individual that would have a continuing existence in time.
Knowledge Programming in Loops
Stefik, Mark, Bobrow, Daniel G., Mittal, Sanjay
Early this year fifty people took an experimental course at Xerox PARC on knowledge programming in Loops. During the course, they extended and debugged small knowledge systems in a simulated economics domain called Truckin. Everyone learned how to use the environment Loops, formulated the knowledge for their own program, and represented it in Loops. At the end of the course a knowledge competition was run so that the strategies used in the different systems could be compared. The punchline to this story is that almost everyone learned enough about Loops to complete a small knowledge system in only three days. Although one must exercise caution in extrapolating from small experiments, the results suggest that there is substantial power in integrating multiple programming paradigms.
Artificial Intelligence: Some Legal Approaches and Implications
Various groups of ascertainable individuals have been granted the status of "persons" under American law, while that status has been denied to other groups. This article examines various analogies that might be drawn by courts in deciding whether to extend "person" status to intelligent machines, and the limitations that might be placed upon such recognition. As an alternative analysis, this article questions the legal status of various human/machine interfaces, and notes the difficulty in establishing an absolute point beyond which legal recognition will not extend.
Towards a Taxonomy of Problem Solving Types
Our group's work in medical decision making has led us to formulate a framework for expert system design, in particular about how the domain knowledge may be decomposed into substructures. We propose that there exist different problem-solving types, i.e., uses of knowledge, and corresponding to each is a separate substructure specializing in that type of problem-solving. Each substructure is in turn further decomposed into a hierarchy of specialist which differ from each other not in the type of problem-solving, but in the conceptual content of their knowledge; e.g.; one of them may specialize in "heart disease," while another may do so in "liver," though both of them are doing the same type of problem solving. Thus ultimately all the knowledge in the system is distributed among problem-solvers which know how to use that knowledge. This is in contrast to the currently dominant expert system paradigm which proposes a common knowledge base accessed by knowledge-free problem-solvers of various kinds. In our framework there is no distinction between knowledge bases and problem-solvers: each knowledge source is a problem-solver. We have so far had occasion to deal with three generic problem-solving types in expert clinical reasoning: diagnosis (classification), data retrieval and organization, and reasoning about consequences of actions. In novice, these expert structures are often incomplete, and other knowledge structures and learning processes are needed to construct and complete them.