Early this year fifty people took an experimental course at Xerox PARC on knowledge programming in Loops. During the course, they extended and debugged small knowledge systems in a simulated economics domain called Truckin. Everyone learned how to use the environment Loops, formulated the knowledge for their own program, and represented it in Loops. At the end of the course a knowledge competition was run so that the strategies used in the different systems could be compared. The punchline to this story is that almost everyone learned enough about Loops to complete a small knowledge system in only three days. Although one must exercise caution in extrapolating from small experiments, the results suggest that there is substantial power in integrating multiple programming paradigms.

Distinguished Service Award: IJCAI 1983

Various groups of ascertainable individuals have been granted the status of "persons" under American law, while that status has been denied to other groups. This article examines various analogies that might be drawn by courts in deciding whether to extend "person" status to intelligent machines, and the limitations that might be placed upon such recognition. As an alternative analysis, this article questions the legal status of various human/machine interfaces, and notes the difficulty in establishing an absolute point beyond which legal recognition will not extend.

I am pleased to announce that Arthur Samuel has been selected as the recipient of the IJCAI Distinguished Service Award for 1983. I am pleased to announce that Arthur Samuel has been selected as the recipient of the IJCAI Distinguished Service Award for 1983.

Among the difficulties in evaluating AI-type medical diagnosis systems are: the intermediate conclusions of the AI system need to be looked at in addition to the "final " answer ; the "superhuman human" fallacy must be guarded against ; and methods for estimating how the approach will scale upwards to larger domains are needed. We propose to measure both the accuracy of diagnosis and the structure of reasoning, the latter with a view to gauging how well the system will scale up.

Editors' Note: Many expert systems require some means criticisms of this approach from those steeped in the practical of handling heuristic rules whose conclusions are less than certain issues of constructing large rule-based expert systems. Abstract the expert system draws inferences in solving different problems. Doyle's paper argues that it is difficult for a human expert "certainty factors," and in spite of the experimentally observed insensitivity of system performance to perturbations of the chosen values Recent successes of "expert systems" stem from much Research Projects Agency (DOD), ARPA Order No. 3597, monitored In the following, we explain the modified approach together with its practical and theoretical attractions. The client's income bracket is 50%, can be found (Minsky, 1975; Shortliffe & Buchanan, 1975; and 2. The client carefully studies market trends, Duda, Hart, & Nilsson, 1976; Szolovits, 1978; Szolovits & THEN: 3. There is evidence (0.8) that the investment Pauker, 1978). Reasoned Assumptions (from Davis, 1979) and would use the rule to draw conclusions whose "certainty factors" depend on the observed certainty Although our approach usually approximates that of Bayesian probabilities, accommodates representational systems based on "frames" namely as subjective degrees of belief.

The award will be presented at the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, to be held in Karlsruhe, West Germany, from 8 to 12 August, 1983. The IJCAI Distinguished Service Award was established in 1979 by the IJCAI Trustees to honor senior scientists in artificial intelligence for contributions and service to the field during their careers. The Award carries a stipend of $1,000 and covers expenses of the recipient's attendance at IJCAI. This will be the second IJCAI Distinguished Service Award; the first was presented to Bernard Meltzer in 1979. Arthur Samuel is one of the pioneeers in AI.

The basic thesis put forth in this article is that a problem solver is essentially an interpreter that carries out computations implicit in the problem formulation. A good problem formulation gives rise to what is conventionally called a strong problem solver; poor formulations correspond to weak problem solvers. Knowledge-based systems are discussed in the context of this thesis. We also make observations about the relationship between search strategy and problem formulation.

Various groups of ascertainable individuals have been granted the status of "persons" under American law, while that status has been denied to other groups. This article examines various analogies that might be drawn by courts in deciding whether to extend "person" status to intelligent machines, and the limitations that might be placed upon such recognition. As an alternative analysis, this article questions the legal status of various human/machine interfaces, and notes the difficulty in establishing an absolute point beyond which legal recognition will not extend.

The third national conference promotes research in the field of AI by bringing together individuals from government, industry, and academia and by providing a published record of the conference as proceedings.