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Programs with common sense
This is the first clear call for the separation of knowledge and inference procedure in AI. In this paper McCarthy advocates using predicate logic as a declarative representation of knowledge and first-order logic as the inference procedure.Additional notes on this landmark paper at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcc59/mcc59.html.Bar-Hilel's comments in the discussion section from the conference are also interesting:"PROF. Y. BAR-HILLEL: Dr. McCarthy's paper belongs in the Journal of Half-Baked Ideas, the creation of which was recently proposed by Dr. I. J. Good. Dr. McCarthy will probably be the first to admit this. Before he goes on to bake his ideas fully, it might be well to give him some advice and raise some objections. He himself mentions some possible objections, but I do not think that he treats them with the full consideration they deserve; there are others he does not mention.For lack of time, I shall not go into the first part of his paper, although I think that it contains a lot of highly unclear philosophical, or pseudo-philosophical assumptions. I shall rather spend my time in commenting on the example he works out in his paper at some length. Before I start, let me voice my protest against the general assumption of Dr. McCarthy -- slightly caricatured -- that a machine, if only its program is specified with a sufficient degree of carelessness, will be able to carry out satisfactory even rather difficult tasks."In Proceedings of the Symposium on the Mechanization of Thought Processes, National Physical Laboratory 1:77-84
Pattern Recognition and Reading by Machine
"MANY EFFORTS have been made to discriminate, categorize, and quantitate patterns, and to reduce them into a usable machine language. The results have ordinarily been methods or devices with a high degree of specificity. For example, some devices require a special type font; others can read only one type font; still others require magnetic ink. We have an interest in decision-making circuits with the following qualities: (1) measurable high reliability in decision making, (2) either a high or a low reliability input, and (3) possibly low reliability components. The high specificity of the devices and methods mentioned above was felt to be a drawback for our purposes. All of these approaches prove upon inspection to center upon analysis of the specific characteristics of patterns into parts, followed by a synthesis of the whole from the parts. In these studies, pattern recognition of the whole, that is, Gestalt recognition, was chosen as a more fruitful avenue of approach and as a satisfactory problem for the initial phases of the over-all study." Proceedings of the Eastern Joint Computer Conference, pp. 225-232, New York: Association for Computing Machinery
Some studies in machine learning using the game of checkers
The studies reported here have been concerned with the programming of a digital computer to behave in a way which, if done by human beings oranimals, would be described as involving the process of learning. Whilethis is not the place to dwell on the importance of machine-learning procedures,or to discourse on the philosophical aspects,1 there is obviously avery large amount of work, now done by people, which is quite trivial inits demands on the intellect but does, nevertheless, involve some learning.Also in Computers and Thought. Feigenbaum, Edward A. and Julian Feldman (Editors) 1963.See also:IEEE XploreSome Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of Checkers, II - Recent ProgressIBM Journal of Research and Development, 3:211-229