A 25-year-old book about science has some explaining to do. Machines Who Think was conceived as a history of artificial intelligence, beginning with the first dreams of the classical Greek poets (and the nightmares of the Hebrew prophets), up through its realization as twentieth-century science. The interviews with AI's pioneer scientists took place when the field was young and generally unknown. They were nearly all in robust middle age, with a few decades of fertile research behind them, and luckily, more to come. Thus their explanations of what they thought they were doing were spontaneous, provisional, and often full of glorious fun.

Get Citation Alerts New Citation Alert added! You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited. To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below. Aided Design 8, 1 (Jan. An experimental system for computer controlled mechanical assembly.

This approach leads to an infinite sequence of algorithms I. Surface Models

This report describes a knowledge-base system in which the information is stored in a network of small parallel processing elements??de and link units??ich are controlled by an external serial computer. This network is similar to the semantic network system of Quillian, but is much more tightly controlled. Such a network can perform certain critical deductions and searches very quickly; it avoids many of the problems of current systems, which must use complex heuristics to limit and guided their searches. It is argued (with examples) that the key operation in a knowledge-base system is the intersection of large explicit and semi-explicit sets. The parallel network system does this in a small, essentially constant number of cycles; a serial machine takes time proportional to the size of the sets, except in special cases.

Artificial Intelligence, 12 (1), 23-40.

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

In J. E. Hayes, D. Michie, and L. I. Mikulich (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 9. Chichester, England: Ellis Horwood Ltd., 149-195

IJCAI 6, 1-3

... we began to program a computer understanding system thatwould attempt to process input texts. An item crucial to our ability to accomplishthis task was what we called a script. A script is a frequently repeated causalchain of events that describes a standard situation. In understanding, when it ispossible to notice that one of these standard event chains has been initiated,then it is possible to understand predictively. That is, if we know we are in arestaurant then we can understand where an "order" fits with what we justheard, who might be ordering what from whom, what preconditions (menu,sitting down) might have preceded the "order", and what is likely to happennext. All this information comes from the restaurant script.Hayes, J.E., D. Michie, and L. I. Mikulich (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 9, Ellis Horwood.

In Metzing, D. (Ed.), Frame Conceptions and Text Understanding, pp. 46–61. de Gruyter.