In IJCAI-81, pp. 67–69.

In IJCAI-81, p. 1064.

Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley

We have introduced the notion of the closed world assumption for deductive question-answering. This says, in effect, "Every positive statement that you don't know to be true may be assumed false". We have then shown how query evaluation under the closed world assumption reduces to the usual first order proof theoretic approach to query evaluation as applied to atomic queries. Finally, we have shown that consistent Horn data bases remain consistent under the closed world assumption and that definite data bases are consistent with the closed world assumption. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This paper was written with the financial support of the National Research Council of Canada under grant A7642. Much of this research was done while the author was visiting at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc., Cambridge, Mass. I wish to thank Craig Bishop for his careful criticism of an earlier draft of this paper.

Massachusetts Institute Technology Press

This chapter from the Mycin book is a brief overview of van Melle's Ph.D. dissertation (Stanford, Computer Science), and is a shortened and edited version of a paper appearing in Pergamon-lnfotech state of the art report on machine intelligence, pp. 249-263. Maidenhead, Berkshire, U.K.: Infotech Ltd., 1981. Mycin Book (1984)

Artificial Intelligence

Summary of PhD thesis, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, January, 1980,Stanford Rep. Nos. HPP-80-2, STAN-CS-80-784

Births are always interesting affairs. According to some, births are always traumatic — a shock to come from the womb to the new world. The birth we give witness to here is that of a new society, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence — AAAI. It has not seemed to me traumatic, but rather almost wholly benign. In a world where not much is benign at the moment, such an event is devoutly to be cherished. The proper topic for this initial message is talk about beginnings and circumstances, goals and aims, character and style. My premier duty as president of AAAI, it appears, will be to give a presidential address at the upcoming annual meeting. Specific precedents being absent, I need to give thought to what belongs in an AAAI presidential address. But one thing I already know: That talk should be devoted to our science, not our society. It should be substantive , not procedural. It should look inward at the state of what we know about intelligence and computers, not outward at our place in the larger society. It is in this message that earthly matters belong.

Over the past two years we have started a program of On the theoretical side, Professor Randall Davis has research into the development of VLSI systems. They have introduced a descriptive formalism called OMEGA, which contributes to many of the issues of Traditional automated synthesis techniques for circuit current concern in knowlege representation, and they have design are restricted to small classes of circuit functions for applied it to describe the various structured entities such as which mathematical methods exist. Sussman and his group have developed computer-aided design tools that can be of much broader assistance. Guy L. Steele developed a language to support such programming, Johan de Kleer studied causal and Professor Marvin Minsky has worked on a theory of human teleological reasoning in the recognition of circuit function thinking, which likens the mind to a society of agents and from schematics, and Howie Shrobe has worked on constraint attempts to combine a number of insights from satisfaction and the development of an interactive knowledgebased psychoanalytic, developmental, and cognitive theories of system for substantially supporting VLSI design. Further work by Richard Greenblatt and Dr. Lucia Doyle has studied belief revision via truth maintenance and Vaina develops the idea of thread memory.