Emphasizing theory and implementation issues more than specific applications and Prolog programming techniques, this book by David Maier and Davis S. Warren, respected researchers in logic programming, is a superb book.

Yoav Shoham's revised doctoral dissertation is not fully comprehensible to all readers, but it provides a good introduction to reasoning about change; the references are sometimes incomplete, however.

A workshop on high-level connectionist models was held in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on 9-11 April 1988 with support from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Office of Naval Research. John Barnden and Jordan Pollack organized and hosted the workshop and will edit a book containing the proceedings and commentary. The book will be published by Ablex as the first volume in a series entitled Advances in Connectionist and Neural Computation Theory.

In this article, I discuss the emerging field of artificial intelligence and legal reasoning and review the new book by Anne v.d.L. Gardner, An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Legal Reasoning, published by Bradford/MIT Press (1987, 225 pp., $22.50) as the first book in its new series on the subject.

The following is a synopsis of the findings of the first AAAI Workshop on AI Applications to Battle Management held at the University of Washington, 16 July 1987. The workshop organizer, Pete Bonasso, sent a point paper to a number of invited presenters giving his opinion of what AI could and could not do for battle management. This paper served as a focus for the workshop presentations and discussions and was augmented by the workshop presentations; it can also serve as a roadmap of topics for future workshops. AI can provide battle management with such capabilities as sensor data fusion and adaptive simulations. Also, several key needs in battle management will be AI research topics for years to come, such as understanding free text and inferencing in real time. Finally, there are several areas -- cooperating systems and terrain reasoning, for example -- where, given some impetus, AI might be able to provide help in the near future.

Empirical evidence suggests that searching deeper in game trees using the minimax propagation rule usually improves the quality of decisions significantly. However, despite many recent theoretical analyses of the effects of minimax look ahead, however, this phenomenon has still not been convincingly explained. Instead, much attention has been given to so-called pathological behavior, which occurs under certain assumptions. This article supports the view that pathology is a direct result of these underlying theoretical assumptions. Pathology does not occur in practice, because these assumptions do not apply in realistic domains. The article presents several arguments in favor of minimaxing and focuses attention on the gap between their analytical formulation and their practical meaning. A new model is presented based on the strict separation of static and dynamic aspects in practical programs. finally, certain methods of improving minimax look-ahead are discussed, drawing on insights gained from this research.

This is Part 2 of a two-part article and discusses issues of tort liability and the use of computers in the courtroom. [The legal dimensions of topics covered in this part are given comprehensive attention by the author in Tort Adjudication and the Emergence of Artificial Intelligence Software, 21 Suffolk University Law Review 623 (1987)]. Part 1 of this article, which appeared in the Spring 1988 issue of AI Magazine, discussed steps that developers of AI systems can take to protect their efforts, and the attendant legal ambiguities that must eventually be addressed in order to clarify the scope of such protection. Part 2 explores the prospect of AI systems as subjects of litigation.

In this article, principles involving the intrinsic, deictic, and extrinsic use of spatial prepositions are examined from linguistic, psychological, and AI approaches. First, I define some important terms. Second, those prepositions which permit intrinsic, deictic, and extrinsic use are specified. Third, I examine how the frame of reference is determined for all three cases. Fourth, I look at ambiguities in the use of prepositions and how they can be resolved. Finally, I introduce the natural language dialog system CITYTOUR, which can cope with the intrinsic, deictic, and extrinsic use of spatial prepositions, and compare it with the approaches dealt with in the previous sections as well as to some other AI systems.

Real-time domains present a new and challenging environment for the application of knowledge-based problem-solving techniques. However, a substantial amount of research is still needed to solve many difficult problems before real-time expert systems can enhance current monitoring and control systems. In this article, we examine how the real-time problem domain is significantly different from those domains which have traditionally been solved by expert systems. We conduct a survey on the current state of the art in applying knowledge-based systems to real-time problems and describe the key issues that are pertinent in a real-time domain. The survey is divided into three areas: applications, tools, and theoretic issues. From the results of the survey, we identify a set of real-time research issues that have yet to be solved and point out limitations of current tools for real-time problems. Finally, we propose a set of requirements that a real-time knowledge-based system must satisfy.

Letters to the editor on the lack of a central index to the field's published works and the fact that many original works are not published in journals; praise for Letovsky article -- stimulating and amusing. felt subsequent letters to editors were full of bombastic indignation; criticism of Kasday letter about it and Bob Engelmore's weak support of the article; dualism in regards to Letovsky letter; and a reply to criticism by Letovsky, acknowledging diaristic form.