Stephen Grossberg The expanded edition of Perceptrons (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1988, 292 pp, $12.50) by Marvin L. Minsky and Seymour A. Papert comes at a time of unprecedented interest in the biological and technological modeling of neural networks. The one-year-old International Neural Network Society (INNS) already has over 3500 members from 38 countries and 49 U.S. states, with members joining at the rate of more than 200 per month. The American Association for Artificial Intelligence was, in fact, a cooperating society at the INNS First Annual Meeting in Boston on 6-10 September 1988. Hardly a week goes by in which a scientific meeting or special journal issue does not feature recent neural network research. Thus, substantive technical reviews or informed general assessments of the broad sweep of neural network research are most welcome to help interested scientists find their way into this rapidly evolving technology.

You are cordially invited to become a member of the AI Community's principal scientific society: Both these facts run counter to other connectionist models but easily fit SDM. Sparse Distributed Memory will be of interest to anyone doing research in neural models or brain physiology. As the theory is refined, the book will also be of interest to those trying to find applications for neural models. Finally, it will be fascinating to anyone who is even slightly curious about human intelligence and how it might arise from the brain. Terry Rooker is a graduate student at the Oregon Graduate Institute.

The two-volume set entitled Knowledge-Based Systems (Volume 1, Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Systems, 355 pp., and Volume 2, Knowledge Acquisition Tools for Expert Systems, 343 pp., Academic Press, San Diego, California, 1988), edited by B. R. Gaines and J. H. Boose, is an excellent collection of papers useful to both commercial practitioners of knowledge-based-systems development and research-oriented scientists at specialized centers or academic institutions. The set is the result of a call for papers to support the first American Association for Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Systems Workshop, held 3-7 November 1986 in Banff, Canada. Although the conference was held three years ago, these volumes are still timely and sorely needed. Few books dedicated to knowledge acquisition exist. The first volume, Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Systems, begins with a paper whose title sounds appropriate: "An Overview of Knowledge Acquisition and Transfer" by the editor B. R. Gaines.

Gul A. Agha's Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1987, 144 pages, $25.00, ISBN O-262 010925) is part of the MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence. This volume is edited by Patrick Winston, Michael Brady, and Daniel Bobrow. In the actor formalism, pioneered by Carl Hewitt (1977), one perceives abstract computational agents, called actors, that are distributed in space. Each actor has a mailbox (and a mail address) and associated with each actor is a behavior. One actor can influence the actions of another actor only by sending it a communication.

To read the book Automated Reasoning: Thirty-Three Basic Research Problems (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1987, 300 pp., $11.00) by Larry Wos "it is not necessary to be an expert in mathematics or logic or computer science" (from the preface). However, even if you are such an expert, you will read it with interest, and likely, with enjoyment. The book is outstanding for its presentation of the theme. Following the introductory chapter, Wos discusses some obstacles to the automation of reasoning in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, he lists the research problems (with short descriptions) in nine groups: six problems on strategy, five on inference rules, six on demodulation, one on subsumption, three on knowledge representation, two on global approach, one on logic programming, two on self-analysis, and six on other areas. After a short review of automated reasoning (AR) in Chapter 4, these problems are discussed in detail in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 gives some sets of test problems, all concerning a mathematical discipline.

To fully appreciate Professor Pearl's book, begin with a careful reading of the title. It is a book about "..Intelligent- ..Strategies.." for the discovery and use of "Heuristics.. " to allow computers to solve ".. Search.. ' ' problems. Search is a critical component in AI programs (Nilsson 1980, Barr and Feigenbaum 1982), and in this sense Pearl's book is a strong contribution to the field of AI. It serves as an excellent reference for the researcher/practitioner and is useful as a textbook as well. As a book about search, it is thorough, at the state of the art, and contains expositions that will delight the expert with their clarity and depth.

Stephen Grossberg The expanded edition of Perceptrons (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1988, 292 pp, $12.50) by Marvin L. Minsky and Seymour A. Papert comes at a time of unprecedented interest in the biological and technological modeling of neural networks. The one-year-old International Neural Network Society (INNS) already has over 3500 members from 38 countries and 49 U.S. states, with members joining at the rate of more than 200 per month. The American Association for Artificial Intelligence was, in fact, a cooperating society at the INNS First Annual Meeting in Boston on 6-10 September 1988. Hardly a week goes by in which a scientific meeting or special journal issue does not feature recent neural network research. Thus, substantive technical reviews or informed general assessments of the broad sweep of neural network research are most welcome to help interested scientists find their way into this rapidly evolving technology.

To read the book Automated Reasoning: Thirty-Three Basic Research Problems (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1987, 300 pp., $11.00) by Larry Wos "it is not necessary to be an expert in mathematics or logic or computer science" (from the preface). However, even if you are such an expert, you will read it with interest, and likely, with enjoyment. The book is outstanding for its presentation of the theme. Following the introductory chapter, Wos discusses some obstacles to the automation of reasoning in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, he lists the research problems (with short descriptions) in nine groups: six problems on strategy, five on inference rules, six on demodulation, one on subsumption, three on knowledge representation, two on global approach, one on logic programming, two on self-analysis, and six on other areas. After a short review of automated reasoning (AR) in Chapter 4, these problems are discussed in detail in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 gives some sets of test problems, all concerning a mathematical discipline.

To read the book Automated Reasoning: Thirty-Three Basic Research Problems (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1987, 300 pp., $11.00) by Larry Wos "it is not necessary to be an expert in mathematics or logic or computer science" (from the preface). However, even if you are such an expert, you will read it with interest, and likely, with enjoyment. The book is outstanding for its presentation of the theme. Following the introductory chapter, Wos discusses some obstacles to the automation of reasoning in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, he lists the research problems (with short descriptions) in nine groups: six problems on strategy, five on inference rules, six on demodulation, one on subsumption, three on knowledge representation, two on global approach, one on logic programming, two on self-analysis, and six on other areas. After a short review of automated reasoning (AR) in Chapter 4, these problems are discussed in detail in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 gives some sets of test problems, all concerning a mathematical discipline.

Philip Swarm Images and Understanding: Thoughts about Images, Ideas about Understanding, H. Barlow, C. Blakemore, and M. Weston-Smith, eds., A collection of essays based on a Rank Prize Fund's International Symposium, organized with the help of Jonathan Miller and held at the Royal Society in October 1986, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1990, 401 pp., ISBN O-521-34177-9 (cloth), ISBN O-521-36944-4 (paper). This volume is a well-written, informative, and thought-provoking collection of essays that should interest anyone concerned with the psychology of vision and visual communication. The aim of the original symposium was to bring together people from the arts and sciences who could present different perspectives on the subject of images and understanding. The result is an informal tour conducted by leading specialists (predominantly British) that visits both famous scientific battlefields and quaint artistic backwaters. Numerous striking pictures enliven the book: Here you can find the sensory somatic cortex of a bat, the British miners' leader Arthur Scargill in full rant, a notation for ballet, a mole used to advertise British Gas, instructions for righting a caravan, and many others.