The Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Herbert Simon in 1978. At Carnegie-Mellon University he holds the title of Professor of Computer Science and Psychology. These two facts together delineate the range and uniqueness of his contributions in creating meaningful interactions among fields that developed in isolation but that are all concerned with human decision-making and problem-solving processes. In particular, Simon has brought the insights of decision theory, organization theory (especially as it applies to the business firm), behavior modeling, cognitive psychology, and the study of artificial intelligence to bear on economic questions. This has led not only to new conceptual dimensions for theoretical constructions, but also to a new humanizing realism in economics, a way of taking into account and dealing with human behavior and interactions that lie at the root of all economic activity.

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.In Hayes, J. E., Michie, D., and Pao, Y.-H. (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 10. Ellis Horwood.

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.In Hayes, J. E., Michie, D., and Pao, Y.-H. (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 10. Ellis Horwood.

Practitioners of ethnography, in seeking to discover and describe complex patterns of behavior, face a number of serious problems.

"An introductory chapter describes the historical and technical foundations of the work .... subsequent chapters describe five prototype computer programs that tackle difficult clinical problems in a manner similar to that of an expert physician. The programs presented are INTERNIST, a diagnostic aid that combines a large database of disease/manifestation associations with techniques for problem formulation; EXPERT and the Glaucoma Program which use physiological models for the diagnosis and treatment of eye disease; MYCIN, a rule-based program for diagnosis and therapy selection for infectious diseases; the Digitalis Therapy Advisor, which aids the physician in prescribing the right dose of the drug digitalis and also explains its actions; and ABEL, a program that uses multi-level pathophysiologic models for diagnosis of acid-base and electrolyte disorders."AAAS Selected Symposia Series, Volume 51. Available from MIT.

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.

Frogs and toads provide interesting parallels to the way in which humans can see the world about them, and use what they see in determining their actions. What they lack in subtlety of visually-guided behaviour, they make up for in the amenability of their behaviour and the underlying neural circuitry to experimental analysis. This paper presents three specific models of neural circuitry underlying visually-guided behaviour in frog and toad. They form an 'evolutionary sequence' in that each model incorporates its predecessor as a subsystem in such a way as to explain a wider range of behaviour data in a manner consistent with current neurophysiology and anatomy. The models thus form stages in the evolution of Rana computatrix, an increasingly sophisticated model of neural circuitry underlying the behaviour of the frog.In Hayes, J. E., Michie, D., and Pao, Y.-H. (Eds.), Machine Intelligence 10. Ellis Horwood.

Sussman (Sussman 1975) has explored how debugging a plan can lead to a problem solution. Most work on planning has been research done for its own sake.

Motor control systems are complex systems that process information. Orientation behaviour, posture control, and the manipulation of objects are examples of motor control systems which involve one or more sensory modality and various central neural processes, as well as effector systems and their immediate neuronal control mechanisms. Like all complex information processing systems, they must be analysed and understood at several different levels (see, e.g., Marr & Poggio 1977). At the lowest level there is the analysis of basic components and circuits, the neurons, their synapses, etc. At the other extreme, there is the study of the computations performed by the system -- the problems it solves and the ways that it solves them -- and the analysis of its logical organization in terms of its primary modules. Each of these levels of description, and those in-between, has its place in the eventual understanding of motor control by the nervous system. None is sufficient, nor is there any simple translation from one to another. A purely biophysical investigation, however exhaustive, can say nothing by itself about the information processing performed by the system, nor, on the other hand, can an understanding of the computational problem which the system solves lead directly to an understanding of the properties of the hardware. Two examples of motor control theories belonging to different levels will illustrate this point.

In every professional field there are large bodies of information acquired through study and experience by practitioners. In many fields, individuals can be identified whose performance consistently approaches the best. The goal of expert systems technology is to embody the experts' knowledge in some field within a computer. Then, the computer can act as an expert consultant for non-expert professionals or laymen. Existing systems, such as MYCIN [2], for diagnosing blood infections, or PROSPECTOR [3], for evaluating field sites for minable mineral deposits, can perform at a level exceeding that of the average practitioner in the field. These systems typically run on large, time-shared computers. There are two components to an expert system: the expert knowledge itself, and a'core' system for manipulating that knowledge and interacting with the user. General methodologies have been developed for encoding expert knowledge; the encoding is typically done by a computer scientist in close collaboration with an expert or experts from the field of specialization.