Donald Michie Volumes 1 --7 are published by Edinburgh University Press and in the United States by Halsted Press (a subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) Volumes 8 -- 9 are published by Ellis Horwood Ltd., Publishers, Chichester and in the United States by Halsted Press (a subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) MACHINE INTELLIGENCE 9 New York - Chichester - Brisbane - Toronto First published in 1979 by ELLIS HORWOOD LIMITED Market Cross House, Cooper Street, Chichester, West Sussex, P019 lEB, England The publisher's colophon is reproduced from James Gillison's drawing of the ancient Market Cross, Chichester No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form of by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission. One intelligent approach to prefaces -- is to have the empty preface. The well prepared reader will form a good idea of the technical programme just from looking at the table of contents; together with the names of the authors, this gives him a good idea of what happened at the symposium. I could try to assess the tallcs and direct the reader's attention to the more interesting communications. But I fear this would be too subjective and unfair to the remaining authors -- all of them equally represented in this book. However, recalling that Spring week in Repino, a resort 20 kilometres from Leningrad on the Bay of Finland and unpopulated at that time of year, I have come to the definite conclusion that the scientific meeting was in its own way unique.

For the past ten years we have been working on the problem of getting a computer to understand natural language.

A model for adaptive problem solving applied to natural language acquisition.

J. Do RAN 433 22 Chromosome classification and segmentation as exercises in knowing what to expect.

The junction categories and link planting rules of SEE lyzed. That, however, is not the main point; it is merely typical of the way in which the program developed by a process of finding counter-examples that both invalidated old rules and hinted at new ones (Winston, 1973). The need to add and modify rules almost continuously to handle exceptions suggests that there is a basic flaw in the design. The flaw seems to be that Guzman used locally computed picture predicates as evidence for global scene-based properties. To avoid this one must ask what do the lines in the picture depict?

Many of the problems of recognition and interpretation encountered in archaeology have close parallels with classic artificial intelligence problems, notably those of scene analysis.

B.RANDELL 3 PROGRAM PROOF AND MANIPULATION 2 Some techniques for proving correctness of programs which alter data structures.

The frame problem in representing natural-language information is discussed. It is argued that the problem is not restricted to problem-solving-type situations, in which it has mostly been studied so far, but also has a broader significance. A new solution to the frame problem, which arose within a larger system for representing natural-language information, is described. The basic idea is to extend the predicate calculus notation with a special operator, Unless, with peculiar properties. Some difficulties with Unless are described. THE FRAME PROBLEM This paper proposes a method for handling the frame problem in representing conceptual, or natural-language-type information.

This paper documents an investigation into the role that the late Alan Turing played in the development of electronic computers. Evidence is presented that during the war he was associated with a group that designed and built a series of special purpose electronic computers, which were in at least a limited sense'program controlled', and that the origins of several post-war general purpose computer projects in Britain can be traced back to these wartime computers. INTRODUCTION During my amateur investigations into computer history, I grew intrigued by the lack of information concerning the role played by the late Alan Turing.