Personal
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Oliver G. Selfridge was born in London 10 May 1926. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1942-1945, returning postgraduately from 1946-1950. After 2 years at Signal Corps Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, he joined Lincoln Laboratories in Group 34, Communication Techniques, of which he is now Group Leader. INTRODUCTION WE are proposing here a model of a process which we claim can adaptively improve itself to handle certain pattern recognition problems Which cannot be adequately specified in advance. Such problems are usual when trying' to build a machine to Imitate any one of a very large class of human data processing techniques. A speech typewriter is a good example of something that very many people have been trying unsuccessfully to build for some time. We do not suggest that we have proposed a model which can learn to typewrite from merely hearing speech. Pandemonium does not, however, seem on paper to have the same kinds of inherent restrictions or inflexibility that many previous proposals have had. The basic motif behind our model is the Inn of parallel processing.
SESSION 2 PAPER 5 TIGRIS AND EUPHRATES - A COMPARISON BETWEEN HUMAN AND MACHINE TRANSLATION
An unsophisticated translation of such a sentence will therefore not be a good translation. Again, contrary to Mr. Richensi opinion, I believe that the problem involved is serious. There is no simple procedure to find out which, and in what way, the words of the English language are context-dependent. And I don't think that the issue can be belittled for tae reason that contextdependent words do not occur in scientific discussions and writings. They might not be too abundant in ordinary scientific papers on matters physical or chemical, but there would surely be plenty of them in discussions of matters linguistic, for instance. This might be one reason why so far hardly anybody has tried to machine translate papers in linguistics. As soon as this is attempted, the seriousness of the problem will become immediately evident.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York on 9th August, 1927. He received his B.A from Harvard in 1950 and Ph.D in Mathematics from Princeton in 1954. For the next three years he was a member of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and in 1957-58 was staff member of the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratories. At present he is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at M.I.T. where he is giving a course in Automata and Artificial Intelligence and is also staff member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. SUMMARY THIS paper is an attempt to discuss and partially organize a number of ideas concerning the design or programming of machines to work on problems for which the designer does not have, in advance, practical methods of solution. Particular attention is given to processes involving pattern recognition, learning, planning ahead, and the use of analogies or?models!. Also considered is the question of designing "administrative" procedures to manage the use of these other devices.
Mechanisation of Thought Processes
Biology seems to be a science in its own right, or set of sciences having common aims, and so it should have its own language and explanatory concepts; yet when any specifically biological concept is suggested and used as an explanatory concept it seems to be unsatisfactory and even mystical. There are many biological concepts of this kind: Purpose, Drive, elan vital, Entelechy, Gestalten.* Physicists and engineers seem, on the other hand, to have clearly defined concepts having great power within biology.
PROCEEDINGS AU ToMA T
Where the accountants have fallen down, however, is in their reluctance and sometimes inability to make intensive studies of different equipment and to specify their requirements for equipment. As one authority in the field of electronic data processing has pointed out, "Accountants, unlike engineers, take the equipment as given without bothering to specify their own particular needs." But after all things are taken into consideration, it is of primary importance that the personnel who are handling the details of the investigation have a good knowledge of the particular application to be studied. Executives in many companies have been dissatisfied with the help received from outsiders who are expert programmers and who know a lot about equipment, but who are unfamiliar with business systems. In some companies executives have found that their own personnel, who know the firm's particular data processing system, after three or four months of experience in which to grasp the logics of the computer and the intricacies of programming, are much more valuable than such outside experts.