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Experiments with a pleasure seeking automaton
Attempts to write'intelligent' computer programs have commonly involved the choice for attack of some particular aspect of intelligent behaviour, together with the choice of some relevant task, or range of tasks, which the program must perform. The emphasis is sometimes on the generality of the program's ability, sometimes on the importance of the particular task which it can perform. Well-known examples of such programs are Newell, Shaw, and Simon's General Problem Solver (1959; see also Ernst and Newell, 1967), which is applicable to a wide range of simple problems, Samuel's checker (draughts) playing program (1959, 1967), and the program written by Evans (1964), which solves geometric analogy problems. However, there is another approach to the goal of machine intelligence which stresses the relationship of an organism to its environment and which sets out from the start to understand what is involved in this relationship. Long ago Grey Walter (1953) experimented with mechanical'tortoises' which could range over the floor in a lifelike manner. Toda (1962), in a whimsical and illuminating paper, has discussed the problems facing an automaton in a simple artificial environment. Friedman (1967), a psychologist, has described a computer simulation of instinctive behaviour involving an automaton equipped with sensory and motor systems.
The generalized resolution principle
The generalized resolution principle is a single inference principle which provides, by itself, a complete formulation of the quantifier-free first-order predicate calculus with equality. It is a natural generalization of the various versions and extensions of the resolution principle, each of which it includes as special cases; but in addition it supplies all of the inferential machinery which is needed in order to be able to treat the intended interpretation of the equality symbol as'built in', and obviates the need to include special axioms of equality in the formulation of every theorem-proving problem which makes use of that notion. The completeness theory of the generalized resolution principle exploits the very intuitive and natural idea of attempting to construct counterexamples to the theorems for which proofs are wanted, and makes this the central concept. It is shown how a proof of a theorem is generated automatically by the breakdown of a sustained attempt to construct a counterexample for it. The kind of proof one gets depends entirely on the way in which the attempt to construct a counterexample is organized, and the theory places virtually no restrictions on how this shall be done. Consequently there is a very wide freedom in the form which proofs may take: the individual inferences in a proof may be very'small' or very'large' (in a scale of measurement which, roughly speaking, weighs the amount of computing necessary to check that the inference is correct). It is even correct to infer the truth of a true proposition in just one step, but, presumably, to offer such a proof to someone who wishes to be convinced of the proposition's truth would not be helpful epistemologically. His conviction would come, not from contemplating the proof itself, but rather from examining the computation which shows the correctness of its single inference step.
The Syntactic Analysis of English by Machine
Department of Computer Science University of Edinburgh 1. INTRODUCTION In this paper we describe a program which will assign deep and surface structure analyses to an infinite number of English sentences.1 The design of this program differs in several respects from that of other automatic parsers presently in existence. All these differences are a consequence of the particular aim we have pursued in writing the program, which represents an attempt to construct a device that will not only assign a syntactic analysis to any English sentence-that is, a record of the syntactic structure that the native speaker Perceives in any English sentence-but which also, to some extent, simulates the way in which he perceives this structure. This is not to say that the analyzer differs from others because we have based its design upon the findings of psycholinguistic experiments. For one thing very few experiments on the perception of syntactic structure have been carried out and for the most part the results have been fairly inconclusive. But it is the case that we have, as far as possible, treated the task of constructing an automatic parser as being itself a psycholinguistic experiment. That is to say, any proposal regarding the possible operation of the program has been judged (mainly as the result of introspection) according to whether or not it seemed to be consistent with human behaviour. And this has led to our incorporating certain features which are absent from other automatic parsing systems.
A survey of formal grammars and algorithms for recognition and transformation in mechanical translation
This paper is a survey of the current machine translation research in the US, Europe and Japan. A short history of machine translation is presented first, followed by an overview of the current research work. Representative examples of a wide range of different approaches adopted by machine translation researchers are presented. These are described in detail along with a discussion of the practicalities of scaling up these approaches for operational environments. In support of this discussion, issues in, and techniques for, evaluating machine translation systems are addressed.
On Representations of Problems of Reasoning about Actions
"The purpose of this paper is to clarify some basic issues of choice of representation for problems of reasoning about actions. The general problem of re- Presentation is concerned with the relationship between different ways of formulating a problem to a problem solving system and the efficiency with which the system can be expected to find a solution to the problem. An understanding of the relationship between problem formulation and problem solving efficiency is a prerequisite for the design of procedures that can automatically choose the most `appropriate' representation of a problem ( they can find a `point of view' of the problem that maximally simplifies the process of finding a solution).Many problems of practical importance are problems of reasoning about actions. In these problems, a course of action has to be found that satisfies a number of specified conditions. A formal definition of this class of problems is given in the next section, in the context of a general conceptual framework for formulating these problems for computers. Everyday examples of reasoning about actions include planning an airplane trip, organizing a dinner party, etc. There are many examples of industrial and military problems in this category, such as scheduling assembly and transportation processes, designing a program for a computer, planning a military operation, etc."In D.Michie (Ed.), Machine intelligence 3. New York: American Elsevier,131-171
Some theorem-proving strategies based on the resolution principle
The formulation of the resolution principle by J. A. Robinson (1965a) has provided the impetus for a number of recent efforts in automatic theoremproving. These programs have generated proofs of some interesting propositions of number theory, in addition to theorems of first-order functional logic and group theory. A'literal' is an n-place predicate expression or its negation F(xi, x2,.-.., x) F(xi, x2,., x „) whose arguments are individual variables, individual constants, or functional expressions. Quantifiers do not occur in these formulae, since existentially quantified variables have been replaced by functions of universally quantified ones, and the remaining variables may therefore be taken as universally quantified. For example, the number-theoretic proposition'For all x and y, if x is a divisor of y then there exists some z such that x times z equals y' may be symbolised as D(x, y)v T(x, f(x, y), y) in which D(x, y)' stands for x is a divisor of y' and 7(x, y, z)' stands for'x times y equals z'.
POP-1: an on-line language
Lisp, etc.) are designed for off-line use. With the above examples in mind, certain principles seem obvious. The online user can make best use of such a system by building up complex entities in small units. For example, when calculating a large expression, it is better to work out parts of it and store these parts in variables, rather than try to do the whole thing at once. In the above examples pop-1 has appeared as a language with a fixed vocabulary.