Such methods can effectively and efficiently induce good descriptions from a given set of examples and, optionally, induce counter-examples (for example Michalski, 1975, 1980a; Quinlan, 1979; Langley et al., 1983). These methods cannot modify concept descriptions which are contradicted by new examples, but must re-learn the descriptions from scratch. In contrast, incremental learning methods modify concept descriptions to accommodate new learning events (Winston, 1975; Michalski and Larson, 1978). When we observe human learning we clearly see that it is incremental.

It is a rich source of difficult and challenging problems which involve issues of knowledge representation, the analysis of natural language, and the automation of practical and common-sense reasoning.

This paper describes some work on automatically generating finite counterexamples in topology, and the use of counterexamples to speed up proof discovery in intermediate analysis, and gives some examples theorems where human provers are aided in proof discovery by the use of examples.

Intelligent Systems: Practice and Perspective Machine Intelligence, Editor-in-Chief: Donald Michie Volumes 1-7 are published by Edinburgh University Press and in the United States by Halsted Press (a subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) Volumes 8-10 are published by Ellis Horwood Ltd., Publishers, Chichester and in the United State by Halsted Press (a subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) ELLIS HORWOOD LIMITED Publishers - Chichester Halsted Press: a division of JOHN WILEY & SONS New York - Brisbane - Chichester - Toronto First published in 1982 by ELLIS HORWOOD LIMITED Market Cross House, Cooper Street, Chichester, West Sussex, P019 lEB, England The publisher's colophon is reproduced from James Gillison's drawing of the ancient Market Cross, Chichester. Q335 The Library of Congress cataloged this serial as follows -67-13648 ISBN 0-85312-431-0 (Ellis Horwood Limited) ISSN 0076-2032 ISBN 0-470-27323-2 (Halsted Press) Typeset in Press Roman by Ellis Horwood Limited. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the permission of Ellis Horwood Limited, Market Cross House, Cooper Street, Chichester, West Sussex, England. The year of the first MI Workshop, 1965, was a milestone for more reasons than one, not least for the appearance of a paper entitled "A machine-oriented logic based on the resoluton principle". It was appropriate and a cause for pleasure that the author of that paper, J. A. Robinson, was the opening contributor to the scientific proceedings of MI-10, held in November 1981 at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, USA.

The notion of an ethical machine can be interpreted in more than one way. Perhaps the most important interpretation is a machine that can generalize from existing literature to infer one or more consistent ethical systems and can work out their consequences. An ultra-intelligent machine should be able to do this, and that is one reason for not fearing it. INTRODUCTION There is fear that'the machine will become the master', especially compounded by the possibility that the machine will go wrong. There is, for example, a play by E. M. Foster based on this theme.

A knowledge-based programming system can utilize a very-high-level self description to rewrite and improve itself. This paper presents a specification, in the very-high-level language V, of the rule compiler component of the CIII knowledgebased programming system. From this specification of part of itself, CIII produces an efficient program satisfying the specification. This represents a modest application of a machine intelligence system to a real programming problem, namely improving one of the programming environment's tools -- the rule compiler. The high-level description and the use of a programming knowledge base provide potential for system performance to improve with added knowledge.

R1, a knowledge-based configurer of VAX-11 computer systems, began to be used over a year ago by Digital Equipment Corporation's manufacturing organization. The success of this program and the existence at DEC of a newly formed group capable of supporting knowledge-based programs has led other groups at DEC to support the development of programs that can be used in conjunction with RI. This paper describes XSEL, a program being developed at Carnegie-Mellon University that will assist salespeople in tailoring computer systems to fit the needs of customers. XSEL will have two kinds of expertise: it will know how to select hardware and software components that fulfil the requirements of particular sets of applications, and it will know how to provide satisfying explanations in the computer system sales domain.

This paper describes an evaluation and several applications of a knowledge-based system, the PROSPECTOR consultant for mineral exploration. PROSPECTOR is a rule-based judgmental reasoning system that evaluates the mineral potential of a site or region with respect to inference network models of specific classes of ore deposits. Knowledge about a particular type of ore deposit is encoded in a computational model representing observable geological features and the relative significance thereof.

A programming language based on sets; motivation and examples.

K.A.PATON 411 24 Centromere finding: some shape descriptors for small chromosome outlines.