Kenneth Mark Colby, 1920 - 2001 Kenneth Colby was born in Waterbury, Connecticut and graduated from Yale in 1941. Two years later he graduated from Yale's School of Medicine. Colby started his career as a professor of computer science at Stanford, and also did some research for the National Institute of Mental Health. It was there that he created Parry in the university's Artificial Intelligence Library. Parry was a chatterbot, and able to have conversations with people.

At the present stage of research in artificial intelligence , machines are stil l remote from achieving a level of intelligence comparable in complexity to human thought. As computer applications become more sophisticated, however, and thus more influential in human affairs , it becomes increasingly important to understand both the capabilities and limitations of machine Intelligence and its potential impact on society. To this end, the artificial intelligence field was ex­amined in a systematic manner. The study was divided into two parts : (1) Delineation of areas of artificial intelligence, and postulatio " of hypothetical prod­ucts resulting from progress in the field , and (2) A judgmental portion, which involved appli­cations and implications of the products to society . For the latter purpose, a Delphi study was conducted among experts in the artificial intelligence field to solicit their opinion concerning prototype and com­mercial dates for the products, and the possibility and desirability of their applications and implications .In IJCAI-73: THIRD INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 20-23 August 1973, Stanford University Stanford, California.

The design of application of artificia l intelli­gence to a scientific task such as Organic Chemical Synthesis was the topic of a Doctoral Thesis completed in the summer of 197I. Chemical synthesis in practice involves i) the choice of molecule to be synthesized; i i) the formulation and specification of a plan for synthesis (involving a valid reaction pathway leading from commercial or readily available compounds to the target compounds with consideration of feasibility regarding the purposes of synthesis);iii ) the selection of specific individual steps of reaction and their temporal ordering for execution; iv) the exper­imental execution of the synthesis and v) the redesign of syntheses, if necessary, depending upon the exper­imental results. In IJCAI-73: THIRD INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, 20-23 August 1973, Stanford University Stanford, California.

Methods of Information in Medicine, 12: 45-51. Reprinted in Clancey & Shortliffe, Ch.2

The frame problem arises in attempts to formalise problem--solving processes involving interactions with a complex world. It concerns the difficulty of keeping track of the consequences of the performance of an action in, or more generally of the making of some alteration to, a representation of the world. The paper contains a survey of the problem, showing how it arises in several contexts and relating it to some traditional problems in philosophical logic. In the second part of the paper several suggested partial solutions to the problem are outlined and compared. This comparison necessitates an analysis of what is meant by a representation of a robot's environment.

The research reported here concerns the principles used to automatically generate three-dimensional representations from line drawings of scenes. The computer programs involved look at scenes which consist of polyhedra and which may contain shadows and various kinds of coincidentally aligned scene features. Each generated description includes information about edge shape (convex, concave, occluding, shadow, etc.), about the type of illumination for each region (illuminated, projected shadow, or oriented away from the light source), and about the spacial orientation of regions. The methods used are based on the labeling schemes of Huffman and Clowes; this research provides a considerable extension to their work and also gives theoretical explanations to the heuristic scene analysis work of Guzman, Winston, and others. A condensed version appears in Patrick Winston (ed.), The Psychology of Computer Vision, pp. 19{91, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. Direct link to . MIT AI Lab Technical Report No AITR-271, November 1

See also: Robert Kowalski. 1975. A Proof Procedure Using Connection Graphs. J. ACM 22, 4 (October 1975), 572-595.In B. Meltzer and D. Michie (Eds.), Machine intelligence 7. New York: Wiley, 167-194

Selected quotes:"The Science Research Council has been receiving an increasing number of applications for research support in the rather broad field with mathematical engineering and biological aspects which often goes under the general description Articial Intelligence (Al). The research support applied for is sufficient in volume, and in variety of discipline involved, to demand that a general view of the field be taken by the Council itself.""To supplement the important mass of specialist and detailed information available to the Science Research Council its Chairman decided to commission an independent report by someone outside the Al field but with substantial general experience of research work in multidisciplinary fields including fields with mathematical, engineering and biological aspects."-----"Most workers in Al research and in related elds confess to a pro nounced feeling of disappointment in what has been achieved in the past twenty-five years. Workers entered the feld around 1950, and even around 1960, with high hopes that are very far from having been realised in 1972. In no part of the field have the discoveries made so far produced the major impact that was then promised.""In the meantime, claims and predictions regarding the potential results of Al research had been publicised which went even farther than the expectations of the majority of workers in the field whose embarrassments have been added to by the lamentable failure of such inflated predictions.""These general statements are expanded in a little more detail in the rest of section 3, which has been influenced by the views of large numbers of people listed in section 1 but which like the whole of this report represents in the last analysis only the personal view of the author. Before going into such detail he is inclined, as a mathematician, to single out one rather general cause for the disappointments that have been experienced: failure to recognise the implications of the 'combinatorial explosion'."See also: BBC TV - June 1973 - Lighthill Controversy Debate at the Royal Institution with Professor Sir James Lighthill, Professor Donald Michie, Professor Richard Gregory and Professor John McCarthy.Also in Lighthill, J., Sutherland, N. S., Needham, R. M., Longuet-Higgins, H. C., and Michie, D. (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence: A Paper Symposium. Science Research Council of Great Britain.

"In this paper we describe some major new additions to the STRIPS robot problem-solving system. The first addition is a process for generalizing a plan produced by STRIPS so that problem-specific constants appearing in the plan are replaced by problem-independent parameters.The generalized plan, stored in a convenient format called a triangle table, has two important functions. The more obvious function is as a single macro action that can be used by STRIPS—either in whole or in part—during the solution of a subsequent problem. Perhaps less obviously, the generalized plan also plays a central part in the process that monitors the real-world execution of a plan, and allows the robot to react "intelligently" to unexpected consequences of actions.We conclude with a discussion of experiments with the system on several example problems."Artificial Intelligence 3:251-288