R. L. GREGORY, Psychological Laboratory, Cambridge Discussion on paper 5 683 6 Some questions concerning the explanation of learning 691 in animals MR. A. J. WATS01,4 Psychological Laboratory, Cambridge Discussion on paper 6 721 7 Information, redundancy and decay of the memory trace 729 DR. Y. BAR-HILLEL, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem Discussion on paper 2 801 3 To what extent can administration be mechanized?

APPENDIX I Attendance List *An asterisk indicates either that the person was a part--time deputy for a delegate, or that their attendance was restricted to particular Sessions by accomodation difficulties.

I am quite ready to subscribe to the already mentioned slogan that "whatever a human being can do,an appropriate machine can do, too"; but I do this only because.I regard the slogan as utterly trivial. At the moment, I am not talking about what maohines could do in principle but only about what actually existing or blueprinted machines could do, and it Is with regard to these that I utter my definite opinions. If someone wishes to write sciencefiction about information-processing centres of the (undetermined) future, let him do so and I shall discuss it with him over a glass of beer and even offer some startling suggestions of my own. If he is interested in improving the literature search process today, I would strongly advise him to forget about mechanizing abstracting or indexing. May I add that it is with a good amount of sorrow that I have come to this conclusion which is quite counter, to my temperament and my convictions (never published) of a few years ago.

Dr. Lucien Mehl, born 1919 in Paris, studied at the University, Paris where he obtained his degrees in Philosophy and Law, and a Diploma of Advanced Studies in Political Economy and at the National School of Administration. He is now'Maitre des Requetesi to the Council of State and Director of external training at the National School of Administration. He is a member of the International Fiscal Association, the International Cybernetics Association and the French Operational Research Society. He has published a number of articles on administrative science, law, cybernetics and operational research. INTRODUCTION I. It may seem an ambitious step to try to apply mechanization or automation to the legal sciences. However, a machine for processing information can be an effective aid in searching for sources of legal information, in developing legal argument, in preparing the decision of the administrator or judge, and finally in checking the coherence of solutions arrived at.

Dr. Francois Paycha, born at Narbonne, studied medicine at the University of Montpellier. His first researches were concerned with the embryology of the eye, later using the distribution of radioactive phosphorus P32 to study the structure of the tissues and for the detection of tumours. He was then appointed to the National Centre of Scientific Research. While in charge of a hospital clinic, he noted the considerable differences in the diagnoses of conscientious and knowledgeable practitioners and those advanced by the hospital. In view of the special need for exact diagnosis in medicine he made a study of the causes of these differences. After theoretical research, he made the first "Medical Memory' in 1953 with the help of Bull and later of I.B.M. He studied the structure of a three-symbol logic which is applicable to medical' problems and in general. After a year in the service of Prof. G. E. Jayle, he abandoned pure research and entered industry. SUMMARY I am going to analyse ...

His psychiatric training was at Rockland State Hospital (N.Y.), 1932-4. Until 1941 he held several fellowships at Yale University, Laboratory of Neurophysiology, on activity of the central nervous system, becoming Assistant Professor 1940-1. From 1941 to 1952 he was Professor of Psychiatry and Physiology and Neurophysiologist at the University of Illinois. Since 1952 he has been staff member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of numerous articles on functional organization of the brain, and on facilitation, extinction and functional organisation of the cerebral cortex. SUMMARY VENN diagrams, with a jot in every space for all cases in which given logical functions are true, picture their truth tables. These symbols serve as arguments in similar expressions that use similar symbols for functions of functions. When jots appear fortuitously with given probabilities or frequencies, the Venn diagram can be written with l's for fixed jots, O's for fixed absence, and p's for fortuitous jots. Any function is realizable by many synaptic diagrams of formal neurons of specified threshold, and the fortuitous jots of their symbols can be made to signify a perturbation of threshold in an appropriate synaptic diagram. Nets of these neurons with common inputs embody hierarchies of functions, each of which can be reduced to input-output functions pictured in their truth tables.

Oliver G. Selfridge was born in London 10 May 1926. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1942-1945, returning postgraduately from 1946-1950. After 2 years at Signal Corps Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, he joined Lincoln Laboratories in Group 34, Communication Techniques, of which he is now Group Leader. INTRODUCTION WE are proposing here a model of a process which we claim can adaptively improve itself to handle certain pattern recognition problems Which cannot be adequately specified in advance. Such problems are usual when trying' to build a machine to Imitate any one of a very large class of human data processing techniques. A speech typewriter is a good example of something that very many people have been trying unsuccessfully to build for some time. We do not suggest that we have proposed a model which can learn to typewrite from merely hearing speech. Pandemonium does not, however, seem on paper to have the same kinds of inherent restrictions or inflexibility that many previous proposals have had. The basic motif behind our model is the Inn of parallel processing.

Frank Rosenblatt, born in New Rochelle, New York, U.S.A., July 11, 1928, graduated from Cornell University in 1950, and received a PhD degree in psychology, from the same university, in 1956. He was engaged in research on schizophrenia, as a Fellow of the U.S. Public Health Service, 1951-1953. He has made contributions to techniques of multivariate analysis, psychopathology, information processing and control systems, and physiological brain models. He is currently a Research Psychologist at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Inc., in Buffalo, New York, where he Is Project Engineer responsible for Project PARA (Perceiving and Recognizing Automaton). SUMMARY A THEORETICAL brain model, the perceptron, has been developed at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, In Buffalo, New York. The perceptron is a probabilistic system, capable of learning to recognize and differentiate stimuli in its environment. Previous reports have covered the theory of a class of perceptrons based on ...

An unsophisticated translation of such a sentence will therefore not be a good translation. Again, contrary to Mr. Richensi opinion, I believe that the problem involved is serious. There is no simple procedure to find out which, and in what way, the words of the English language are context-dependent. And I don't think that the issue can be belittled for tae reason that contextdependent words do not occur in scientific discussions and writings. They might not be too abundant in ordinary scientific papers on matters physical or chemical, but there would surely be plenty of them in discussions of matters linguistic, for instance. This might be one reason why so far hardly anybody has tried to machine translate papers in linguistics. As soon as this is attempted, the seriousness of the problem will become immediately evident.

Known in behaviour as "habituation" and in perception as "adaptation", it has been recognised from time immemorial yet still lacks explanation. Only recently Sharpless and Jasper (1956, ref. 10) could say "Habituaticn... has yet to be explained by any known neurophysiological principles". A review of the subject need not be given here as it has been well reviewed by Humphrey (1933, ref.6), Harris (1943, ref. 5), and Thorpe (1956, ref. 11). On one important matter they are agreed: habituation of typical form occurs in almost every form of life; in particular it appears as readily in forms having no neural apparatus as in the forms having a well developed brain. Amoeba shows it as freely as does the cat. The phenomenon evidently does not depend on specifically neurophysiological details. Its origin must lie in some property of much wider occurrence. The possibility of "fatigue" as an explanation must be rejected.