I will remain Ion8 and deeply indebted to Herb Simon, H. T. Kung, AI Newell, Jay

The Sphinx once challenged a particularly tasty-looking student of language to solve the riddle: "How is saying'My toc is turning blue,' as a request to get off my toe, similar to slamming a door in someone's face?" The poor student stammered that in both cases, when the agents are trying to communicate something, they have analogous intentions. "Yes indeed" countered the Sphinx, "but what are those intentions?" Hearing no reply, the monster promptly devoured the poor student and sat back smugly to wait for the next oral exam. The research described herein was supported primarily by the National Research Council of Canada, and also by the National Institute of Education under Contract US-N1E-C-400-76-0116, the Department of Computer Science of the University of Tor3nto, and by a summer graduate student associateship (1975) to Cohen from the International Business Machines Corporation.

In C. W. Savage (Ed.), Perception and cognition: Issues in the foundations of psychology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

In A. Hanson and E. Riseman (Eds.), Computer vision systems. New York: Academic Press, 335-352.

Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition in Computer Aided Design. New York: North Holland: 250-257

—A class of LISP programs that is analogous to the finite-state automata is defined, and an algorithm is given for constructing such programs from examples of their input-output behavior. It is shown that the algorithm has robust performance for a wide variety of inputs and that it converges to a solution on the basis of minimum input information.IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS, VOL. SMC-8, NO. 8,

"Rule-based inference systems allow judgmental knowledge about a specific problem domain to be represented as a collection of discrete rules. Each rule states that if certain premises are known, then certain conclusions can be inferred. An important design issue concerns the representational form for the premises and conclusions of the rules. We describe a rule-based system that uses a partitioned semantic network representation for the premises and conclusions." In D. A. Waterman and Frederick Hayes-Roth. 1978. Pattern-Directed Inference Systems. Academic Press, Inc., Orlando, FL, USA. pp. 203-221.

W'e present a formal syntax and semantics for the SNePS Semantic Network P recessing System (Shapiro 1979), based on a \leinongian theory of the intensional objects of thought (Rapaport 198Sa). Such a theory avoids possible worlds and is appropriate t or AI considered as "computational philosophy"-AI as the study of how intelligence is possible-or "computational psychology"- .ql

This language must satisfy minimal criteria, as follows.

" The author wishes to thank Eileen Fitzpatrick for her helpful suggestions.